Is Compassion Innate?
Is Compassion An Innate Quality?
Recently I was in a meditation training and someone asked me if compassion was innate. I emphatically answered, “Yes! Yes it is.” Without question. It actually took me by surprise how blunted in force the words came up through my vocal cords, and out of my great chasmal mouth. And, without question.
The woman then responded softly and curiously, “How do you know?”
I answered exactly how I had been trained to teach compassion, which is a canned phrasing now after my years of teaching, “We couldn’t survive without it.” And then I grossly inflated my knowing by quoting, “It is not a luxury, it is essential for human survival” — Dalai Lama. Blerg!
She then processed calmly, “So by deductive reasoning, because we survived, we must then be compassionate.”
“Well, yes…..but it is much more complex than that,” I answered.
After the exchange, I had to find my hip sockets, re-insert myself back into my chest cavity, and then I sank like Charlie Brown back into my pelvic bones. I felt like I needed a seatbelt on for the rest of the training, to be sure I wouldn’t eject suddenly back out of my body.
The brain, such a grotesque kamakazi hijacker, that has to prove everything.
Sitting in silence for the remainder of the day, I pondered the question. And, I have been pondering it ever since.
Children at the Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children in Sighetu Marmaţiei, Romania, in September 1992 (Thomas Szalay)Credit to this article in The Atlantic
Of course compassion is innate. Right?
It is an innate quality of birth. Merely being born a human life, as infants, we must endure one of the longest stages of dependency. We rely on caretakers for our food, shelter, and clothing. We know from strong and devastating empirical data that if we do not connect through touch, with other humans, we die. In Romania, in the 1980s, decreased health and vitality was apparent in orphaned infants who suffered severe neglect and lack of touch. In Steve Haines newest book, Touch is Really Strange (©2021) he quotes two research studies:
• “Children without touch, stimulation and nurturing can literally lose the capacity to form any meaningful relationship for the rest of their lives. The role of touch and sensory input in attachment is paramount and includes holding, rocking, feeding, gazing, and physical proximity” (Courtney and Nolan 2017).
• “An absence of human touch can cause negative physical and emotional effects for older adults. Without human touch, elders are at increased risk of anxiety, feeling isolated, lowered trust in care partners, and decreased awareness of the senses” (Elder Care Alliance 2017).
But compassion isn’t always classified as caring or nurturing, nor is it communicated always through touch. In many cases compassion is fierce and requires a “strong back” to engage in right action, right speech, right effort and upholds a strong commitment to right intention. Sometimes it requires putting others before ourselves, and other times it is the converse of that.
Indeed, compassion is complex. I have an added opinion that compassion is a complex body state…but then again…did you witness the “candlestick in the dining room with Prof. Plum!” righteous knowing and mental malaise of my brain above?….. I have learned to rely on my body by good reasoning. Prof. Plum (the ego-mind carrying the sign: will prove for praise) often gets it wrong.
I do not believe that compassion can solely be cultivated cognitively. It is a balanced, integrated and informed mind-body-soul and that requires a mixture of the qualities of awareness, physical sensation and emotion (credit to Dr. Judith Blackstone’s teachings).
But does compassion have to be innate? If it is innate, we should be able to open up to compassion quite readily. Eating and sleeping are innate. We do those every day. Or fight to do them at least. Our survival definitely, and without question, depends upon eating and sleeping.
In my study with Dr. Judith Blackstone, she uncovered basic qualities that arise naturally when we attune to them. Compassion is not one of them, but when I asked her about it, she responded, “I don’t know if compassion is innate in some ontological actual way. I can only speak from my experience, which is that as I inhabited my body more fully and realized fundamental consciousness, I felt an upwelling of compassion for others which felt a little bit different from love. But it was a feeling, rather than a desire to help or a behavior — it was a particular emotion, akin to empathy. This emotion led, at times, to a desire to help, but that desire or intention was not the compassion itself.”
This is my exact experience as well. When I sit in meditation with compassion as my set intention, sometimes this upwelling is there, and sometimes it is not there. And sometimes I feel this overwhelming surge to help, but that in and of itself is unrealistic. I mean, as much as I admire Wonder Woman, I simply will not achieve that status in my lifetime. So I feel the surge to help people, but I just don’t. Can anyone resonate with that?
Do we need compassion to survive? What if we all sit with this upwelling, but never actually embark out on the sea. We all are feeling it, or feeling something, but we remain still and therefore unhelpful except in our secret hearts and minds. We never actually take someone’s hand and pull them out of the flooding river banks to safety. Or maybe even worse, we never pull ourselves out of our own tsunamis. What if we operate out of a traumatized fog and never quite see that our suffering and lack of doing something, lack of taking action in our own life, actually creates suffering in others who we now have conscripted to witness our amotivational syndrome and paralysis.
In fact, I don’t see anyone who is practicing or even fighting to be compassionate every day. Well, with the exception being, maybe the Dalai Lama himself. I see a lot of stuck people who refuse to change, and often don’t even know where to begin to help, themselves, or others. And often, if they do help, it is out of their own intrusive, Dr. Phil style, I know what is best for you agenda. Which is “Idiot Compassion” according to Pema Chodron.
In the literature, compassion reduces inflammation, decreases stress, and counters the delirious effects of burnout and overwhelm. It cultivates a high heartrate variability (meaning your body is responsive to both inputs of parasympathetic and sympathetic: a balancing of your nervous system). It helps focus your mind alleviating the inner critic. It increases emotional regulation. It strengthens the social engagement system of our vagus nerve. It boosts your immunology helping you fight off disease. And amongst myriad other scientific findings, it makes you feel good.
If we already have the keys to the enlightenment kingdom, why wouldn’t we be compassionate all of the time? Yes, we can be compassionate, but we often don’t choose to be, or we conversely act out against it. Does that sound innate?
Let’s clarify what is meant by innate.
Definition of innate:
1. Existing in, belonging to, or determined by factors present in an individual from birth: NATIVE, INBORN // innate behavior.
2. Belonging to the essential nature of something: INHERENT.
3. Originating in or derived from the mind or the constitution of the intellect rather than from experience.
Anyone having trouble unriddling that? Quite honestly, I don’t know any compassionately innate people –just people who are in the process of learning to become more compassionately healthy.
Let’s dig in a bit deeper here and elucidate “innate” in juxtaposition to a working definition of compassion.
Using a definition derived from the Stanford Medicine Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education compassion is a response to suffering. “Compassion is a multi-textured response to pain, sorrow and anguish. It included kindness, empathy, generosity and acceptance. The strands of courage, tolerance, equanimity are equally woven into the cloth of compassion. Above all compassion is the capacity to open to the reality of suffering and to aspire to its healing.”
It is taught as a motivation to alleviate someone else’s suffering; an action. It is not passive. It is not frozen in fear. It is a non-volitional trembling in ones’ heart struck by pain, and tragedy within someone else. We are bearing witness to suffering and then doing something about it.
The Dalai Lama once said, “If you want to know what compassion is, look into the eyes of a mother or father as they cradle their sick and fevered child” (Feldman & Kuyken, 2011).
Yet, as a therapist in the field of trauma, most of the people I know were deeply traumatized, and starved of love or compassion. Often primarily from their formative caregiver. In fact, they are continuing to slightly keep living out their childhood wounds. The fevered child was left alone with a caregiver on the streets looking for their next score.
Where I grew up, and when I grew up, survivors were built. Even if we had the most loving of all loving mothers, most definitely, we were not compassionate children. We took, we swore, we kicked, we bit, we sling-shotted, we bottled rocketed, we exhibited all kinds of spontaneous pluck that kept us alive. If we weren’t operating out of our amygdala crafted startle response, then the coon capped freckled kid, most certainly was going to take you down.
Is that compassion? A sense of having to feel prepared to face fear and elbowing anyone out of the way if it jeopardized your own escape to safety? Despite that being a survival tactic, it doesn’t feel good. To self, or to Johnny, who’s eye you just punched because he threw a stick in your bicycle wheel as you were heading down the steep driveway.
Compassion feels good. Think about that for a moment. Recall a time when you were on the receiving end of someone’s compassion. When it is true, altruistic compassion, we experience what psychologists call: compassion satisfaction. That is the warm glow that we feel when we know we have really helped someone, or someone has authentically helped us. So, I ponder, if it is innate, and it feels good, and we “derive it from the mind rather than from experience,” at least according to Merriam and Webster, why are we not seeing it everywhere, and practicing it every day, and teaching it to our children, and fighting for it?
A couple of theories:
1. It is not innate. We did not learn it at birth, it wasn’t seen, heard, or experienced, or inherently imprinted in our genetic constitution.
2. Our individual and collective trauma covers it up and makes it scary to now access.
Let’s look at number one, as this one is the easiest to explain. Psycho-biologically, our brains prune and our nervous systems prime shaping and preparing us to enter into the world and life we have been born into, and to ensure our survival. If we were born into a pro-social, securely attached family that set foundationally a sense of safety, security, protection, and care, then our brains pruned away the defensive structuring a little bit, and our nervous systems were not on a high startle and threat response cycle.
If on the other hand, we were born into a more unpredictable environment, needs were met inconsistently, or maybe we had a loving mother, but we were born in the middle of a warzone and we were malnourished without reliable safety or food intake, then our brains pruned away the social engagement system a little bit and our nervous system was primed to be a bit more globally high and remained stuck on watchtower duty.
One of the biggest revelations in science of all time, or as the new research in the Journal of Child Psychiatry is calling it: the most important discovery of the century; the nature vs. nurture debate can finally rest. Empirical data shows that emotional regulation happens by 24 months of age. An infant’s regulatory needs relies on the mother’s/caregiver’s affect. The caregiver’s body-mind-soul operates as a surrogate unified system for the infant’s development. The baby’s brain needs a reciprocal caregiver with the consistent ability to hold the baby’s affect. From tears and large scale upset all the way to joy and excitement. The infant needs a human mirror to learn this, and it is essential to see reflected back in a core-to-core exchange that all of these emotions are okay and allowed. This needs to be experienced. This builds confidence. This grows capacity for emotional regulation.
If the baby won the jackpot and got a mother/caregiver with such capacity and an empathic heart connection then the baby’s brain will pick up on this and be able to self-regulate with age and normal development. And, if that is not done by 24 months, as my teacher, Dr. Bemister says, “We get to spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how to emotionally regulate.”
Beyond what researchers in the past have understood, the acceleration of 0–24 months is a huge deal developmentally. The neurons in our brain and body are not just organizing themselves around intelligence, language, and motor sensory skills, but also around emotional intelligence.
So, we need both nurturing and nature. Duh! But we have finally scientifically proven it!
We can have great genes, but it won’t mean anything if the nurturing isn’t there. You could be the hidden Bionic Man/Woman, but because you were born into a family with a rageful dad and a dissociated or depressed mom, you will have a harder climb.
We can also have bad nature or even bad genes, but if we have good nurturing it can change benevolently.
Definitely this speaks to the fact that we are wired to connect and are social beings. We need positive social interactions, a sense of belonging and people in our lives that give us a sense of meaning.
But, I still ponder, is compassion innate?
The other piece to this is that the mother must avoid modeling negativity, limiting affect or constricting emotions, most readily the ones that provoke discomfort. If an infant grows up with a mother who is depressed/anxious than more likely, that infant is going to learn to be depressed/anxious. The baby could have been born inherently happy, but it was only taught to mirror a narrow and constricted emotional palate. What the baby sees, is how the brain is going to grow. When we are born into two-choice-emotion families, i.e. fine or happy, then regaining the capacity to expand into over-zealous elation and joy is harder to learn. If the child suddenly feels unexplained and uncontained squealing joy, then they might be told to tone it down. “Act appropriately. Don’t be so loud. Don’t be so smart. We don’t wail at funerals, we are stoic.”
We need to really begin to pay attention to our own selves with this kind of inquiry. If you look back and reflect on your own childhood, was it carefree? Happy? Or more of a glass house of perceived perfection with a museum quality living room?
If you have felt depressed, or anxious, are you fighting your primary caregivers suppressed emotional timbre? Is it actually your anxiety? Your depression? Or were you constricted in a squelched two-choice-emotional family? Fine or angry, but no one cries in this house.
There is an enormous amount of literature that demonstrates ad nauseam this concept of mirroring and how our nervous systems are designed to organize around our caregivers who act as our surrogates. Now we know the importance within the first 24 months of life.
So even if we inherently are compassionate, our biology could have pruned, rewired, and primed us in a different fashion towards survival perhaps or some other direction that counters compassion entirely.
We will learn that compassion is actually wired for survival, we are not going to free will ourselves head-first into a tiger’s mouth. But if we only get to this surface survival level of compassion, we are just cycling through the wash again and again without ever drying out. We will never expand from here. So maybe we just sheared away as infants from our emotionally constricted forebearers. And now we are left with an Edward Scissorhands’ survival response, where there is a permanent “No Vacancy” sign for compassion.
A bit dystopian. But could possibly explain why we are not innately witnessing or feeling compassion. Just to be clear, I am not talking about the ones who make the news, or the select few that are actually out here doing the work of compassion. I am pointing out the everyday life for most of us. Where we are not seeing compassion in our friends, our neighbors, or family members, or even towards ourselves.
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Okay, now let’s examine number two. Briefly.
2. Our individual and collective trauma covers it up and makes it scary to now access.
When I teach compassion to frontline workers, at the beginning, my students, almost predictably, have a huge fear of compassion. I have learned to cater to this and almost always kick off teaching compassion by naming the fears and obstacles we actually have of extending ourselves to compassion. To note, compassion towards ourselves is a common obstacle.
The fears are real and can most readily be identified because the first people that we opened our hearts to — our formative caregivers — were wounded themselves — and in turn, they wounded us.
Doesn’t this sound a lot like how we explored number one.
- It is not innate. We did not learn it at birth, it wasn’t seen, heard, or experienced, or inherently imprinted in our genetic constitution.
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Sure, we survived. We developed incredible ego — defense systems and learned to adapt in our early childhood. But compassion, may or may not have been a part of it. Often times there was no loving force aligned with someone out there surviving.
We formed our core relationship with our self and with life in early childhood based on the dysfunction our caregivers mainlined in our minds and bodies. All of their ghosts were present in the room, the emotional trauma they suffered, we now suffered, perhaps knowingly, but more often, unknowingly. And the role modeling of the adults around us caused us to constantly adjust our defenses. “Don’t do that. Don’t touch that. What were you thinking? Tone it down!” And as we kept adjusting, we kept surviving, but our programming became narrower and narrower. Less compassionate.
We tried to protect ourselves and to get our survival needs met. We ended up somewhere on the great spectrum of dissociation. Numbing ourselves out all the way to ejecting ourselves from our own bodies. What continues on from here?
If we don’t expand into a broader and more fluid emotional culture, we are cultivating more dysfunction, more emotional dysregulation which runs against the signature of compassion, a balanced body and mind state primed to help alleviate suffering. The more we remain in a primal state of survival, the more we operate out of a narrow mind.
Compassion conversely grows outwardly, increasingly getting wider and wider. It requires an opening up to comfortably receive and give help. We cannot be open to receiving when we are clinging to pain and hurt.
Effectively these strategies cancel each other out. We are on another space-time continuum, acting as a parallel illusion to the plane of compassion, and doing the opposite work.
Someone is doing, and someone is undoing. Just like parallel play of toddlers, we are adjacent to compassion, but have no idea really, that it is in the same room. We remain on an isolated island with our own pain and believe no one could possible understand, therefore they couldn’t possibly help us. Let me tell you from my personal repertoire, caregivers make the worst patients.
The fear of letting go of these…. Fears, is difficult to tackle. Psychologists to this day, have ineffectively produced a technique to master letting go. Especially of fear. Exposure therapy is still the go to model although the efficacy is capricious, let alone the extended time and cost of such modalities.
And, hardly any scientist has put themselves on the line with the topic of forgiveness. It crosses into an area of the brain that we cannot qualify or quantify. Meaning….it is spiritual in nature.
The catch is, that the letting go as well as forgiveness has to be felt authentically. And most people like the idea of letting go, the idea of forgiveness, but when placed into an emotionally felt arena, they block it, almost innately. Hmmmm.
Why?
Because we like to cling on to our pain? Our hurts? Our betrayals? Or perhaps it’s because we were raised in a two-choice-emotion family. Something felt authentically, like letting go of our pain, might feel so foreign. Almost dangerous. Opening up like that might make us less prepared. Vulnerable to being exposed to danger or risk.
Compassion is fully prepared to face the worst of all suffering. It requires a letting go, to open up to feel what it is like to collide head on with something horrendous. If we cower or flinch, we risk the job getting done. Even though we have some first responders who are trained to do this kind of work, are the majority of us just pretending? Are we pretending to let go, pretending that we are compassionate, pretending that we are caregivers? To know someone else’s pain, wouldn’t it be fair that we know our own? Do we really know our own pain? Or do we just tell ourselves stories and create canyons of cognitive dissonance? Aren’t we just helping from our own restricted, emotionally muted selves?
Many of us, even my colleagues who teach and research compassion, are clamped down emotionally. Although we own up to the fact that we, to some extent, have fears and obstacles that get in the way of altruistic compassion, we are not really doing the hard work at letting go or facing our own suffering. We are not performing the necessary compassionate inquiry on our own selves. My kid is severely anxious and perfectionistic, is it possible that it is mine? Did I plant those seeds?
These are the tough questions that compassion asks of us.
Experiencing the capacity and breadth of compassion is going to take time. It will require us to stop letting our experiences of the past dictate how we respond to life today.
In this way, I believe that compassion cannot be done without revisiting our childhood, and unbounding ourselves from our trauma and our pain. We need to face our hardships, greet our adversaries, and raise our consciousness. This is going to be the hard work of our lifetime, but it provides a platform to be emotionally healthy and create a new level of compassion for ourselves that will then, innately allow us to be compassionate to others.
In conclusion, we hopefully can see our own self stewardship is a factor at play. Our relationship with our self and with life albeit was a little dysfunctional. It was set up for us to survive. Not necessarily aimed in cultivating compassion. But, we crafted a magnificent behavioral defense system and perfected a two-choice-emotional capacity, and we survived. That is something.
But what now? What happens if we keep going in this direction? Our children, and their children, keep inherently adopting our limited emotional platforms. What is at stake?
It becomes primal. Simple minded. Fear based. Spiritually hostile. Not human. And definitely not compassionate.
In asking Roshi Joan Halifax, a leader in this field, if compassion was innate, she answered, “I do not know regarding innate, but it is a powerful question. Some of the big people in the field would say yes. Others not. Who knows what is innate? But at least we can water those seeds of compassion through training!”
Although I make a case here that compassion is not innate, I still don’t have a definitive answer. All I know is that I see a very dystopian outcome if we don’t at least try to fight for it, and we are up against the odds of an increasingly constricted society. Facing our own selves, our own pain, our own biases and prejudices, our own fears of extending compassionately to others, is going to have to be a requirement. But we must answer the call.
What do you think?
