Compassion in Your Love Relationship
by Rebekkah Alexander
What is Compassion?
The Mindfulness community defines compassion as acknowledging the distress or suffering in one’s own life, and in the world . . . and having the desire to move toward the suffering to reduce it or alleviate it. Compassion involves awareness, caring and action.
Compassion is an experience involving the “care system” that humans inherently have–the biological and behavioral responses that facilitate care and nurturing. As we humans are often in our fight-or-flight system or our drive-to-produce system, we rely on awareness of our own distress or the distress of another in order to make a shift to our care system where we can respond with caring attentiveness and action.
How Does Compassion Help Create a Safe Space?
Healthy partnerships depend on a safe space within which to relate to one another. A safe space for relating includes respect and regard for each other, an appreciation for differences, and an atmosphere of care and awareness.
With conscious awareness of our partner’s distress, we can acknowledge the difficulty of our partner’s experience and respond with patience, attentiveness, and support.
Without acknowledging our partner’s distress, and by not stepping into compassionate ability to understand suffering, we might react with sarcasm, blaming, or negative defensive statements. These patterns of communication do not contribute to a safe space. They impair the quality and intimacy of the relationship.
Compassion strengthens the safety, quality, and joy of the relationship.
What About Self-Compassion?
With clear awareness of our own distress, when our partner is not present or able to communicate care, we can tend to our own distress with compassion. Compassion toward ourselves is as important in a relationship as compassion towards our partner.
When you can practice self-compassion, you can soothe yourself when your partner is not available or not able to be understanding.
Also, knowing how to be compassionate with yourself may support more ability to be available for your partner’s need for understanding or patience, simply because you know what that feels like.
Does Compassion Help Understanding?
Thriving relationships are built on understanding. Truly understanding ourselves or our partner depends on the ability to relate to distress and discomfort.
If distress and discomfort are seen as messengers of something needing our attention, then we will likely need a new level of understanding to address the challenge in a healthy way. Stepping into compassion will strengthen your ability to understand what is happening for yourself and your partner.
Creating a safe space for you and your partner to share, be honest, grow and enjoy each other will be well supported by cultivating compassion.