“Weep with Those Who Weep”: Empathy and Compassion

Romans 12 describes what love looks like in a church: genuine, devoted, patient, and hospitable. Verse 15 asks believers to share each other’s emotional lives. Galatians 6:2 goes further, from feeling to carrying. The Good Samaritan felt compassion, and then he bandaged, lifted, and paid (Luke 10:33–35). The New Testament joins shared feeling to practical care.

Feeling another’s pain. Singer and colleagues (2004) scanned women while either they or their partners, seated in the same room, received mild painful shocks. When a woman knew her partner was in pain, parts of her own pain network became active: the anterior insula and anterior cingulate, which are tied to the emotional unpleasantness of pain. The regions tied to the physical sensation of pain were not. The more empathic a woman rated herself, the stronger this shared response.

Empathy alone can wear you down. Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, and Singer (2014) trained one group of volunteers in empathy, sharing in others’ suffering, and then in compassion, which means feeling warmth and concern toward the sufferer. Empathy training alone increased negative feelings and activity in the brain’s pain-related regions when people watched videos of suffering. Compassion training reversed the rise in negative feeling, increased positive feeling, and engaged a different network that included reward and affiliation regions such as the ventral striatum. The authors suggest compassion may protect against the burnout that comes from sharing too much distress.

What the studies cannot tell us. These are small imaging studies, and the training study used a specific meditation-based program. Brain regions do many things, so these findings should not be read as “proof” of a feeling. The convergence is with the New Testament’s movement from weeping with to carrying for. Empathy that turns into active care may be both more helpful to others and more sustainable for the helper.

Practice

Living it out

Five practices drawn from this passage. Each says how strong the research behind it is. What the labels mean.

1. 1

   Show up when someone is grieving

   Go to the funeral, sit at the hospital, or bring a meal. Presence matters more than words.

   ObedienceObedience. Commended by Scripture (Rom. 12:15). The paper’s research on social support (Sections 7 and 11) is related.
2. 2

   Turn feeling into a concrete act

   When someone’s pain moves you, do one practical thing within a day, such as a call, a ride, or a meal.

   EarlyCompassion engaged reward and affiliation networks rather than distress networks in a training study (Klimecki et al., 2014). Specific helping acts were not tested.
3. 3

   Pray for the sufferer with warmth, not just worry

   When you pray for someone in pain, ask for their good, and picture it, instead of rehearsing their distress.

   EarlyCompassion training reduced negative affect compared with empathy training alone (Klimecki et al., 2014; small sample).
4. 4

   Watch for empathic burnout

   If you are a caregiver, pastor, or first responder and feel drained by others’ pain, take it seriously. Rest, and get support.

   EarlyEmpathy training alone increased negative feelings (Klimecki et al., 2014).
5. 5

   Rejoice with those who rejoice, too

   When a brother gets good news, celebrate it with him, out loud, without comparing.

   ObedienceObedience. Commended by Scripture (Rom. 12:15). Untested.

Studies cited on this page2

1. ↗ Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060
2. ↗ Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Kaube, H., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2004). Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science, 303(5661), 1157–1162. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1093535