I am quick to anger – on the inside. On the outside, I am generally neutral to goofy.

Over the years I have come to learn that most people who create pain in other people’s lives through violence, theft, inappropriate behaviour, misplaced affections, verbal, emotional or sexual abuse and abuse of authority or position over another do so as a form of transference.

What I mean is that people in pain, particularly those who are isolated and alone, seek ways to move their pain to other people.

They act in ways to ease their pain, sometimes knowing full well they are hurting others and sometimes oblivious to it… but the pain doesn’t stop, it simply spreads like a cancer.

When I was younger, my response would be to fight. To punch someone in the face (or in one unfortunate instance punching someone in the back of the head and breaking my hand).

For a brief moment, I would feel better in the way novocaine dulls the pain. But it would not be long before the pain came flooding back along with consequences.

So. Many. Consequences.

Consequences have the not surprising ability to complicate an already painful circumstance often leading to more pain and the cycle continues.

Moving pain does not deal with the source of that pain. Until the source is dealt with, the pain remains and grows no matter how you seek to change your circumstance or offload the pain to others.

As I have matured, I have come to view compassion as the most valuable response to others (and ourselves) when they dump their pain in your life.

This can be hard because when people hurt us, our instinct is to hurt back either in self-defence or vengeance. We also definitely need to still protect and defend ourselves and our loved ones no matter the source of the pain, but our response needs to be measured and tempered by compassion.

A broken nose is still a broken nose with or without a compassionate response.

Still, the task of compassion is first to recognize where hurt is coming from and then modify our responses in recognition that hurt beings lash out and act from their pain.

Compassion does not mean you need to allow yourself to become a physical or emotional punching bag or otherwise act as an unhealthy outlet for someone else’s pain… it means awareness and caring in response.

Compassion does not excuse an act of hurt either. As rational, smart beings, our actions are choices. We need to take responsibility for those chooses regardless of the circumstances that may have led to them.

What does compassion look like?

It can be a listening ear or a quiet presence in a hurt person’s life; It can be silence in the face of rage; sometimes compassion looks like not taking revenge on someone but finding alternatives. For that relative struggling with an addiction, it might mean an intervention or even commitment to care. Compassion comes in many forms.

Empathy is compassion’s twin sister. Empathy is possible when we can relate through experience or when one has the rare ability to comprehend, even without experience with another’s pain. Empathy can foster compassion and vice versa.

Responses to being hurt like compassion and empathy can prevent an escalating arms race of brokenness and pain.

It is important to note that compassion and empathy cannot heal or deal with the source of another’s pain, but they may create the space wherein someone become self-aware enough to start actively dealing with the source of their pain instead of relying on others to numb it.

Of course, in the midst of seeking to respond to someone else’s pain we also need to make sure we are not enabling it further. We need to make sure people understand our compassion and empathy are simply that and not something more.

We live in a broken, angry, divided world filled with every kind of pain imaginable and then some. We do not need more anger, hate and broken emotion. We need more agents of compassion and empathy.