Compassion Collapse — Understand and Cope With Your Lack of Compassion
What you’re experiencing is normal
Q: I’ve been around a lot of suffering. Of course, there are people that have it worse (something I try to keep in mind) but there hasn’t been more than a year or two my whole life that something drastic hasn’t happened to me or somebody I care about. I’m writing to you because I think I’ve gotten a little too good at dealing, and that scares me in a new way. Especially since COVID, it’s harder and harder to mourn and sympathize. Can someone be broken like this? It’s hard to think that I shouldn’t feel worse than I do.
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A: My sincerest condolences for what you’ve described as ongoing trouble for you both now and up to this point. The good news, though, is that you are not broken. You’re not stuck like this. You’re not an outsider.
What you perceive as an inability to feel or sympathize is more unnerving to you than it would be to most because you’ve had more opportunities to mourn than most of us, and can better grasp the true nature of loss. But what you’re experiencing is normal. It’s an odd theory in how it works, but it’s normal nonetheless. This is what has been coined as “compassion collapse.”
Compassion collapse is a psychological theory basically stating that the more suffering humans hear about or are exposed to, the less they care. I’m not sure if there’s a specific turning point (it’d probably be impossible to calculate and entirely dependent on each individual), but the idea is that after being exposed to a certain amount of pain or suffering, numbness increases, and thus sympathy decreases for each person. If one person that you care about dies this week, it will consume you.
But if next week twenty others die, you’ll be thrown into a fog, a numbness. You’ll be sad, but incapable of feeling the same amount of sympathy twenty times over that you did the previous week when the first person died. It’s no surprise that these feelings have become especially concerning to you during, and in the wake of, the pandemic. The numbers were just unfathomably high. Was it devastating? Of course. But the rise in cases became normal and far too high to truly conceptualize.
And compassion collapse exists in many forms. It’s the impatience we have for a teenager who’s tired after a 20-hour workweek after we’ve been working full-time for years. It’s the college freshman writing 15-page papers that laughs at their friend in high school who can barely write a 5-page paper. It all stems from our ability to accommodate new challenges. If the stress of that accommodation hasn’t been sufficiently acknowledged or sympathized with, our defenses lead us to shame others who haven’t had the experiences or don’t have the tools to accommodate to the same degree.
But I like to think everyone has compassion languages the same way they have love languages. We all know that many people have a hard time expressing their love to others because they have had a troubled history with love and affection themselves. Or perhaps they grew up in a culture in which outward, jovial expressions of love didn’t happen.
The same goes for those who have had a lifetime of having to dole out an atypical amount of compassion. The result is that their expression of compassion will be different or challenging because the history behind it has been different or challenging. Given what you’ve endured, your trouble summoning compassion the way you maybe did in the past is normal. And again, it was particularly challenged throughout the pandemic with all the outrageous statistics in the air that reflect numbers simply too large to grasp.
Right now, you want to be more compassionate, but have a hard time doing so. You need to realize that that in itself is compassion, even if it’s not the typical tears and hugs. So let that be the case. You’re still making an effort. You’re still stepping into the shoes of others and wanting to support them as much as you can. That’s just your version of compassion at this moment, and it’s not wrong.
I encourage you to reflect on that foundation because it’s real. And I think you can use it to rebuild one block at a time. You seem to be thinking of compassion on a very worldly scale, as if being compassionate, by definition, requires mass quantities of compassion to be offered from you to everyone who is suffering. Instead of bringing compassion into the world like this, as if you’re some kind of symbol of compassion, maybe it’s time to focus instead on being a world of compassion for one person at a time.
I suggest you try some volunteer work or generally making an effort to build relationships with specific people and stick with them. And your efforts alone will speak volumes to them, even if you’re not breaking down in tears and being as gushy as some others might. You can still express compassion in your own way. You’ll have an outlet for it, you’ll change the world for a select few, and you’ll be able to directly bask in the results.
The other noise will always be there, but it’ll be at least somewhat deafened by the differences you’ll be absolutely sure that you’re making. You’ll be able to put all of the compassion in you and your wishes to release it into a much more realistic vehicle — setting the example and making changes within your community rather than trying to save the world, giving yourself something to do with all this tension you’ve built up rather than sit and ruminate with it.
