Compassion: for others, too

As I’ve noted before, therapeutic approaches that make use of compassion, loving-kindness etc often focus on kindness to oneself. There are reasonable reasons for this, and I’ll go into them below, but I want to argue that it would be a mistake to neglect kindness to others, because there is an intimate connection between meditation, prosociality, and wellbeing.

Arguably, this doesn’t need arguing for, because no one is denying the importance of kindness to others, least of all the psychologists who have done the noble work of developing interventions such as Mindful Self-Compassion and Compassion-Focussed Therapy. But it’s a question of emphasis: to what extent should self-compassion come first, or take centre stage, and kindness towards others be an afterthought, or a more advanced practice for those who have already got the hang of self-compassion?

The reasons for emphasising self-compassion are, as I say, coherent and plausible. Secular, psychotherapeutic applications of compassion are aimed at people who are seeking help with their distress, and such people might be highly self-critical and hold themselves in low esteem. They do indeed need to learn to be kinder to themselves. They might also (or instead) be habitual self-sacrificers – “helpaholics” – who find it all too easy to put others first, while neglecting their own needs, undermining their physical and mental health. Again, self-compassion is to be recommended: they need to learn to care about themselves as well as others.

And for the self-critic and the helpaholic, we might worry, an emphasis on kindness towards others could be actively harmful: for the self-critic, it could become another stick with which to beat themselves – “I’m not kind enough to others; I’m failing at this, too” – and for the helpaholic, it’s an incitement to do even more of what they’re already doing too much of. Kindness towards others, on this view, is potentially dangerous stuff, to be spoken of only carefully, at the right time.

But can this be right? Can it be that after millennia of major world religions, philosophical systems, and grandmotherly folk wisdom exhorting us to be kind, to do the right thing, this has become too much for modern Westerners to bear? Are we really not able to cope with kindess?

I don’t believe so. While self-compassion is undoubtedly important, kindness towards others is not only the right thing in a moral sense, but also therapeutic.

For one thing, secular approaches to meditation, mindfulness, and compassion have escaped the clinic and are now used by everyone from tennis stars to CEOs to violent offenders. And most of the people using meditation apps and taking meditation courses are not compulsive self-sacrificers; indeed, many of them are probably fairly selfish (because that’s true of people at large, including me). Many of us should be kinder to others; it would be better for everyone.

For another, no matter how depressed and self-critical you are, kindness towards others can help to relieve your distress. It’s rewarding, to see someone else smile because you’ve been kind to them, and rewards are precisely what is lacking in states of despondency. And to focus on someone else’s happiness, and what you can do to promote it, is a way out of the obsessive self-focus that can bedevil the self-critical depressive. The meditative traditions have known this for a long time: we suffer, they say, because we believe ourselves to be separate, enduring selves, which we endlessly seek to gratify and aggrandise, while in fact making ourselves miserable. If we could see beyond this limited view, and see that we don't really exist in quite the way that we think we do, our suffering would cease. And along the way, every moment in which we relax our self-obsession brings relief. So, just as your grandmother could have told you, putting others first can be a path to happiness.

And finally, a proper understanding of kindness towards others need not entail neglecting one’s own needs. If we truly care about others and want what’s best for them, we will take the long view: it’s no kindness to our family or friends to neglect ourselves to the point that we become resentful or unable to continue. So, the truly kind thing will be to balance our efforts on their behalf with care and compassion for ourselves. And in any case, if we care about them, why shouldn’t we care also about ourselves? We are suffering too, and our suffering is as important as theirs, and so we owe ourselves kindness and care, just as we do them.