Finding the right mindset to help other people
I contemplated about this topic for a whole day till I found the article below that helps to align how I should think about it.
People can sometimes be really very kind to me when they are feeling sympathetic, and I appreciate that. I can see they do want me to feel better. But that warm feeling only lasts as long as I don’t do something to upset them- like shout at them or start arguing and tell them to go away. They can lose all sympathy for me then, because they really can’t feel very positive about the new angry version of me- and you need to feel ‘good’ about a person to have that warm glow of sympathy for them.
So I fear unless you can truly make an empathic connection with a person rather than simply feel sympathy for them, the extent of your compassion will be limited. It will disappear as soon as they disappoint you. I’ve seen this happen to so many people with ‘troublesome’ behaviour with whom caring professionals have not made that important attempt to understand a life from a different perspective than their own. I have felt it from colleagues when my own behaviour was no longer within ‘acceptable’ limits for ‘depression’.
For context, earlier in the day I was reading a fictional story about a character that has a broken childhood. She’s hurt and carry a lot of pains. And I can’t help but to hope that people like her can have their well-deserved happy ending. But the moment I thought of this I caught myself asking: “do I want this for their sake or is it for my personal satisfaction instead?”
In the first place, what I considered to be good from my limited perspective is unlikely to be something that they actually need. I’m enforcing my own version of happiness to them, and this is unhealthy because good intention does not always equal good outcome.
I continued to struggle with the objective definition of ‘goodness’ until I tried approaching it with the model where:
- There are people out there who want to change something about themselves or their environment but can’t. There’s a state that they want to reach that’s slightly different from where they are now, but they lacked the means or catalyst for it.
- There are people out there who actively don’t want to change something about themselves or their environment. They are aware of the state that could be better for them personally, but they actively take steps to hinder themselves from it.
It’s arguable that this is a very naive view, as those in the first group might as well be the same people in the second one (just from a different angle). But this helped me to break down the problem where limited assistance should be offered to the first group if the problem is indeed something that’s beyond their control and we’re somehow able to help alleviate it by a bit (e.g. typically via scholarship for education, connecting them to other people who is a better subject matter expert, or enabling access). While we should strive to at least emphatize and understand the folks in the second group and (most importantly) not enforce our own version of happiness to them, as the only thing that will break the status quo for them need to come from within.
This all makes me think a lot about how we can be kind without pity — to have a kindness without sympathy.
That we’re not singling somebody out because they look like they need help (like picking up an abandoned puppy) and thus we’re offering our pity because it feels good to us morally. That given different circumstances, we will still be kind, because we choose to lend our ear no matter who or what their situation are.
I’m unsure whether this is a correct perspective after all, I’m still learning and trying to find a better way to approach it. But I hope I can be a person who have an ounce of these type of kindness.
