Shift from feeling someone’s pain to caring about it

When you start to feel another’s pain as your own, deliberately turn toward warmth and the wish to help.

Warum es wirkt

Singer and Klimecki distinguish empathy — sharing another’s feeling, while knowing it is theirs — from compassion, which is feeling for the person with warmth and concern. When shared pain becomes overwhelming it turns into empathic distress. In their training studies, empathy training increased negative feeling and activity in brain regions linked to empathy for pain, while compassion training increased positive feeling even while watching others suffer and engaged a different network associated with affiliation and reward. The practical implication is that compassion is not a stronger dose of empathy but a different response one can turn toward.

So gehst du vor

1. When you encounter someone’s pain — in person, in a call, in the news — notice the first wave: the tightening, the sinking, the echo of their feeling in you.
2. Acknowledge it: “I am feeling some of what they feel.”
3. Then turn deliberately toward warmth for them: bring up the sense of caring, perhaps a hand on your chest, and the wish “may you be free of this.”
4. Notice whether the quality changes — from being pulled into their pain to being alongside it.
5. If you cannot find the warmth, it is enough to recognise you are in shared distress; that recognition is the first step.

Evidenz

Klimecki and colleagues ran controlled laboratory training studies comparing compassion training with a memory-training control. Compassion training increased positive affect even when participants watched videos of human suffering, and in a second study, compassion training after empathy training reversed the increase in negative affect that the empathy training had produced. Singer and Klimecki’s primer sets out the conceptual distinction. (mechanistic)

These are small laboratory studies with short trainings and video-based tasks; they show a plausible mechanism rather than lasting real-world effects. The training used in them drew on Buddhist-derived methods but is not identical to the Visuddhimagga sequence.

Quellen

• Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878.
• Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Lamm, C., & Singer, T. (2013). Functional neural plasticity and associated changes in positive affect after compassion training. Cerebral Cortex, 23(7), 1552–1561.
• 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.

Häufiger Fehler

Trying to stop feeling the other person’s pain altogether — the shared feeling is the doorway; the shift is to add warmth and concern on top of it, not to shut it out.