By recognizing our shared humanity—flaws and all—we can find common ground that enables healing. It involves not only hearing what someone says but also striving to understand their underlying emotions and thoughts. In conflict scenarios, practicing active listening can prevent misunderstandings that often lead to further discord. Compassion goes beyond sympathy or pity; it involves recognizing the suffering or difficulties someone else is experiencing and feeling motivated to alleviate that distress.
The Human Cost Of Terrorism
How can such institutions endorse harsh or punitive actions and still claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, or Allah? Each of these faith traditions calls upon its followers to love, to show mercy, to treat others as they themselves wish to be treated, and to welcome the stranger. Some are called to travel far from home, to stand beside others in their darkest hours, to listen, to share ideas and skills that may help them heal. Others, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of human sorrow, turn away, believing that distant tragedies are not their problem. When children go hungry or communities are destroyed — whether in Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, or our own neighborhoods — our interconnectedness can be challenged and can lead to psychological distress. One of the core values of the organization I founded, the Trauma Resource Institute, is the belief that compassion can transcend boundaries.
Why The Repatriation Of Extremist-linked Individuals Must Be Rethought
Instead, it means staying connected to empathy, respect, and curiosity—even when things get messy. Let’s explore some concrete ways to approach conflict with compassion and create deeper connection in the process. As a Seattle based couples therapist, I offer the following insights to help you handle conflict with compassion. Empathy doesn’t just resolve the immediate conflict—it lays the foundation for sustainable, long-term solutions. When individuals approach conflict with empathy, they are more likely to focus on the long-term health of the relationship rather than on short-term victories or losses. By showing empathy, we signal to others that we value their perspectives, creating an environment where everyone feels safe to express their thoughts and feelings.
Care Of The Mother And Alloparenting
This third cognitive process is known as the prominence effect and occurs when we use a simplified rule to choose between options. By using this we feel more comfortable because if someone questions our decision we have chosen the option that is easier to defend. This is evident in how politicians currently frame the refugee crisis by claiming the solution is to “stop the boats” or implement a “Muslim ban”. Moshe Ratson, MBA, MFT, is a psychotherapist and executive coach in NYC. He specializes in personal and professional development, anger management, emotional intelligence, infidelity issues, and couples and marriage therapy.
Conflicts often escalate because emotions run high, leading to a breakdown in communication and an increase in negative behaviors such as yelling, blaming, or withdrawing. Empathy has the power to diffuse these intense emotions by allowing individuals to feel understood and validated. Strangers—and sometimes former enemies from rival ethnic or political groups—risked their lives to bury the dead with dignity during the Ebola epidemic. In a climate of fear, misinformation, and stigma, these teams defied deep-rooted divisions. Their actions showed that even in the face of deadly risk, compassion can override distrust and long-standing conflict.
The first step is always to get centered—only from there can you truly show up for each other,” I say before leading them in a self-compassion practice. Mike and Nancy have been married for seven years and have lived together for nearly ten. Their home is understandably chaotic, but one issue has become a particularly sore spot, namely Mike’s messiness.
Tragically World War II reminded us what a vicious and dangerous species we are with the Holocaust, the (fire) bombing of cities and the dropping of nuclear weapons along with the typical viciousness of local killings, tortures, and mass rapes (Glover, 2012). Differentiating biopsychosocial processes according to evolved resource regulation strategies Distinguishing minds. While individuals can be trained for compassion and cultivate compassion, social and global compassion involves the recognition that human behaviour also needs to be regulated through social contexts and sanctions.
We can also consider that for 1000 years Chinese mothers broke the feet of their young daughters sentencing them to a life of pain. Still today, genital circumcision continues within communities around the world. What, one wonders, has the history of wars done to our phenotypes given that so many with gentler temperaments, suited for hunter gatherer groups, were frequently slaughtered by invading armies. As just one example, for hundreds of years, the Romans regularly engaged in genocide wiping out many peaceful groups. Does this increase the frequency of potentially ruthless ambitious phenotypes getting control of power and then causing havoc, which they have throughout history and are now still doing (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996)?
Interviews with the scientists suggest that they are working from the sadness of the suffering, joy of being successful and the excitement and personal satisfaction of success; and of course status within that field. Volunteers who are subjecting themselves to vaccine research are not seeking material resources, but simply to be of value and to feel a sense of pride because of what they have contributed. Hence, individuals who can “stand on their own feet” and make money are regarded as higher status than those who cannot. We are only going to do that if we create the cultures, including the childcare and education and resource distribution strategies accordingly. If we look at humanity as a whole, there are billions of brains in the world right now who could become wonderful doctors, scientists, composers and world changers who will never know they had such latent talents. They will not get a chance to develop their potential because they are locked into poverty and lack of opportunity.
This is where we begin to separate the event itself from the story we are telling about the event. This is where we examine our triggers, assumptions, fears, and unmet needs. When people are emotionally flooded, they do not think clearly, listen well, or communicate effectively. This is because their nervous system has taken over their rational mind. This is why the first step in any healthy conflict is not problem-solving but rather emotional regulation. They want the tension to end, the argument to be over, and the other person to finally understand their need and point of view.
- A great deal has been written about the fact that when spouses feel compelled to win their arguments with each other, they end up losing their relationship.
- Moshe Ratson, MBA, MFT, is a psychotherapist and executive coach in NYC.
- One of the mental processes of control and hold is to change our relationship with nature, other species and each other.
- Once the emotional intensity begins to settle, the rational mind is activated.
The Bayesian active inference framework has been applied to several domains, e.g., self-reference (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010), interoception (Barrett and Simmons, 2015), visuo-motor mirror-neuron system (Kilner et al., 2007), and post-conflict well-being (Connolly, 2018). We wish to underscore that identity-grasping beliefs are not “innately” built-in features of any Bayesian Engines. As demonstrated by the success of artificial intelligence programs, these artificial Bayesian Engines are impersonal and free of any identity-grasping, as they never refuse to update any prior models (Silver et al., 2017a,b). Thus, it is clear that identity-grasping beliefs are adventitious not only to the nature of mind, but also to the operations of Bayesian Engines. Thus, it is relatively straightforward to create potential mappings between Buddhist concepts and the Bayesian framework. Because of this, we are encouraged to use the Bayesian framework to explicate Buddhist concepts in the process related to conflicts and compassion meditation.
Collectively these competencies give rise to what we can call knowing intentionality (Gilbert, 2018, 2020a). It is doubtful whether any other species can engage motives knowingly in this way. Lions clearly intend to hunt and kill their prey, but not with self-aware knowing awareness.
To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” Compassion is not just a virtue; it is a form of emotional and spiritual intelligence. And nowhere is it more impactful than in our most intimate relationships. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We point to the following ingenious animal study as a model to illustrate the three types of suffering. In this thewingtalks.com study, the rats were implanted with electric stimulation in the lateral hypothalamus and they were placed in a shuttle box, with a lever on either end of the box. Pressing the lever in one end could turn on electric stimulation and the lever in the other end could turn it off.
Furthermore, if we have an opportunity to save our own children or 40 children down the road, who are we going to save? Also if we have opportunities to lavish vast resources on our own children at Christmas or send that money to children who are starving or lack clean water, who are we going to choose? It is not impossible for us to overrule these evolutionary preferences, but we need to understand them and what we need to do if we want to overcome them (Geary, 2000). In addition, priming people with memories of caring others or seeing caring behavior can impact on physiological systems involved with stress and the way people cope with stressful events (Norman et al., 2015).
Many anthropologists believe that hunter-gatherers were averse to physically punishing or threatening children (Music, 2014; Narvaez, 2017, 2020; Ryan, 2019). Yet in post hunter-gatherer societies, and not very long ago, slave, wife and child-beating were allowed and legitimized and even promoted as a method for control (Gilbert, 2018). Tragically when these important brain nutrients of care, compassion, and love are not received, and children are on the receiving end of low warmth, neglect, or abuse, it has devastating impacts on the brain, epigenetics, and subsequent development (Lippard and Nemeroff, 2020). The suffering of the Romanian children in orphanages tragically brought home just how important affectionate caring was to the development of the brain (Chugani et al., 2001). In fact, there is now considerable evidence that our basic strategic orientation (particularly on the dimensions of “helping and concern for others” versus “lack of concern for others”) is partly set in our life histories (Del Giudice, 2016). Show that you understand the other person’s feelings without taking them on as your own.
Groups that adopt control and hold strategies and competition for control are ideal breeding grounds for psychopathic tendencies (Black, 2016). We need to come to terms with the fact that there have been many leaders in history that have changed the world (and us) for the worst and still are. With these insights and concepts on compassion we can see how compassion is profoundly important to so many aspects of our lives; texturing epigenetic profiles, multiple physiological systems and psychological values plus how we relate to each other. Consider the passions of people engaged in charity work all over the world, building wells for freshwater, making medicines available to the poor, or in international peace efforts trying to end the conflict and release perhaps millions of people from the intense suffering of the conflict. Consider a recent movement of “compassion in politics” which seeks to stop politicians passing laws that are known to cause suffering to the least able to cope (see below). Note too that some people can be very impassioned for some domains of caring and compassion but not all; motives can be specific.