Most marriages die a slow, agonizing death due to a lack of compassion. Compassion is sympathy for the pain or anguish of another. At its core, it is a simple appreciation of the basic human frailty that we all share. When you feel compassion, you feel more human and less isolated.
Without compassion, you are not likely to form emotional leaps. Think back to when she was dating her spouse. Suppose she had to call and report that her parents had died. If your date replied, “Well that’s hard, call me when you get over it,” would you have fallen in love? Chances are, you fell in love with someone who cared how you felt, especially when you felt bad.
Most of what they fight now is not money, sex, in-laws or child rearing. Those are common problems that seem insurmountable only when you’re hurt. What causes the pain, that is, what you really fight for, is the impression that your partner doesn’t care how you feel. When someone you love isn’t compassionate, they feel abused.
As compassion diminishes, resentment automatically increases, making common problems impossible to solve. Without compassion, resentment inevitably turns to contempt.
Contempt is disdain for the harm of others, due to their low moral standing, character flaws, mental instability, ignorance, or general unworthiness. Contempt is fueled by a low but steady dose of adrenaline. While the adrenaline lasts, you will feel more confident and self-righteous when blaming your bad feelings on some flaw in your partner. But you also feel less human. And when the adrenaline wears off, you feel depressed.
Both compassion and contempt are extremely contagious. If you are around a compassionate person, you will become more compassionate. If you are around a derogatory person, you will become more derogatory unless you make a determined effort to remain true to your deepest values.
Both compassion and contempt are highly influenced by projection. If you project onto others that they are compassionate, they are likely to become more considerate. If you project derogatory characterizations, such as “loser, bully, selfish, lazy, narcissistic, irrational, devious, etc.”, they are likely to be even more derogatory.
When couples come to our boot camps out of chronic resentment, anger, or emotional abuse, they have developed the habit of protecting their egos by devaluing each other. They try to justify their contempt with “evidence” that the partner is selfish, lazy, narcissistic, crazy, abusive, etc. Contempt makes both of you feel chronically criticized, controlled, or attacked. They feel victimized and rationalize their bad behavior as mere reactions to what their partner is doing. Their defenses so automatically justify their resentment and contempt that it’s impossible for them to see it.
Nor can they see that their resentment and contempt have separated them from their deepest values and made them what they are not.
Once defenses become habits, they run on autopilot and resist change through perception; just understanding how habits work is not enough to change them. They are likely to repeat themselves in any future relationship that becomes close.
The only way out, whether the couple stays in the relationship or not, is to focus on compassion, not on manipulating change in the other, but on feeling more human and reconnecting with their deepest values.
The problem is that most couples are afraid to embrace compassion once they’ve been hurt. My next article will address the understandable but self-defeating fear of compassion.