Reaching out with compassion

Or how kindness can draw us out of ourselves

Being compassionate isn’t always easy. If you’re like me, there’s a deep need to be compassionate, but also a barrier that I’ve put up to protect my heart from further pain. These two contradictory states of being introduce a lot of conflict.

For those of you who find yourself in this situation, I’m going to throw a bit of advice your way that might help. You can try it if you like. Or not. All I’ll ask is that you consider it and be present with the idea.

Take a look around where you are and listen, and find a way that you can reach out and be there for someone else.

If we project out this willingness to help, this compassion, people will inevitably meet us at that level. They’ll bring their suffering to us because, those profound experiences that they’ve been through or are going through. Opening up and becoming vulnerable in this space of compassion that we’ve created.

As a therapist, I find this an extremely important practise. Clients need to be able to come to me and be comfortable to open up about what they’re feeling and experiencing.

They’ll sit in front of me and tell me about their anxieties and their feelings of “not being good enough” and the self doubt that’s racking them. All of the pain and suffering that they are experiencing.

Now as a human being, I will be sitting there filled with my own stuff. All those inadequacies and doubts that I have, a splash of arrogance, some insecurity. But the realness of their demand on my compassion requires that I let go of all of that.

It pulls me out of my self.

The hardest part of this process is that I know that I can’t take away any of their suffering. That’s another thing I have to be really mindful of as a therapist. I mustn’t solutionise their experience, as much as I might want to. My job is to be present with them, to create a space where they can let all of this suffering out into the world. Suffering that they’ll have invariably held onto for some time.

To sit and behold and respond to the raw pain of another human being melts away all of the shit that we generally hold to be so important. Suddenly, those things that were an issue for me during that day or that week lose their relevance.

We have to acknowledge in these moments that we can only do what we can do. That the boundaries of control end firmly at the gates of us. We cannot meet the suffering of others with our own frustrations that there’s nothing we can do, but with a quietness. A still lake as they express what they’re going through.

There’s no rule book for how to do this. You just have to trust your instinct and be willing to open yourself up to compassion. Tearing down those armours that we wear to keep us from suffering, and recognising that the armour is nothing more than a paper hat in the rain.

They don’t keep us from suffering. They just make us think that we’re safe from it.

Much love
David

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