I’ve started taking a year-long course on compassion. I find there’s a shortage of compassion in the world and, you know, be the change you want to see.
It’s got me reflecting on the nature of judgment, and what happens with unmet needs. They don’t stop being needs just because they’re unmet. I think they just take on additional dimensions, like trauma and dissociation and resentment and shame.
It seems obvious to me that compassion is a healthier response to human needs – our own and others’ – than scorn, dismissal, indifference, etc. But, the course points out, judgment is itself a response to a need, and understanding what that need is can lead to connection and growth.
I will admit that I reach the limits of my compassion when the question is, for example, billionaires and employers and politicians who exploit desperate people and destroy the environment because they personally expect to be fine. I would find it difficult not to throw scare quotes around the word “needs” when it comes to the motivations of capitalists and narcissists and fascists.
I also have trouble maintaining a compassionate patience with people who are causing obvious harm and seem unwilling to adapt to an approach that causes less. I draw a pretty strong line at pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. My need for truth is too strong.
Perhaps this is where the compassion course will meet up with boundaries, which is a topic I’ve done intensive self-study on after decades of being told my needs were irrelevant and burdensome and wrong. They’re not. They’re human and they’re me.
I, a human, deserve to have my needs met, with compassion. You, a human, do too.