On the Bittersweetness of Compassion

What we gain from sadness, grief, and depression

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I woke up again at 5 AM the other morning.

It’s been a pattern since my first trimester to wake up somewhere in the window between 4 to 5 AM.

Some nights I just wake up for a brief moment and fall back asleep.

Other nights I wake up congested and unable breath and fall back asleep.

Other nights I wake up with a fair amount of energy and many emotions.

Last night was the latter.

I woke up anxious.

Worried.

Worried about the life that my child will have.

Worried about the current state of the world.

Worried about the kind of life that I can provide for my child.

Worried about the kind of life that I’d like to have for my child and how our current reality doesn’t quite align with that.

Worried about my own ability to provide for this child the love, care, compassion and attunement that he needs, especially with limited support and resources in this current modern way of living.

My mind began going through all the dreams, hopes, aspirations and wishes that I had from a young age about what this time of my life would be like.  This aspiration to learn how to care for children well, among many other things, had already propelled me to take the career paths I’ve taken and to learn what I’ve learned about what makes humans… well, humans.

As I sat in the worry, eventually I moved into more irritability and anger, which brought along a strong desire to try to make changes about the situation at hand. (As if I’m somehow going to solve all of life’s problems at 5 AM).

Only I quickly realized that there’s nothing more I can do.  That what I’m trying to change is outside of my control right now.

I’ve done all I can.  There’s nothing more I can do.

And that I have to somehow, some way, make our current circumstances work.

Which, naturally, led to a place of sadness and grief for what, on some level, feels like a lost dream… in the midst of a dream coming true.

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For many of us, feeling sadness and grief is the place that we fear the most.  If we don’t fear it we, at the very least, fear sharing and expressing that sadness and grief with others. (It often connects back to past experiences where we did express it, but those around us were not able to meet us in it with empathy and compassion).

It’s a little ironic though — because the very thing that we fear the most is also the very thing that allows us to truly connect and relate to one another.

This week I started reading a new book titled, ¹Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain.  You might remember her from her book Quiet that was very popular a few years ago in normalizing introversion.

I have been reading a lot of books lately, many about pregnancy and such, but the title and premise to this one led me to pause all my other reading and dive into this one.  In fact, the title alone led me to stop in my tracks, because it perfectly describes how I’ve been feeling for the last 2 years and especially during this pregnancy.

I’ve felt so much grief, and yet so much joy.

So much sadness, and yet so much peace.

So much sorrow, and yet so much relief.

This has been partially due to the pandemic, partially due to being a therapist whose trying to be a safe container for clients during the pandemic, and partially due to going through plenty of my own human struggles and processes with all of this other stuff going on in the background.

The book covers a lot, but what immediately grabbed my attention is that she very quickly talks about compassion.

The word compassion literally means “to suffer together”, and she writes “sorrow and tears are one of the strongest bonding mechanisms we have”.

She then goes on to explain how the compassionate instinct is naturally built into our nervous system.  There are a few regions that are connected to this, but one notable one is the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem through the neck and torso.  We know that the vagus nerve is connected to functions like digestion, sex, and breathing.

“When we witness suffering, our vagus nerve makes us care.  If you see a photo of a man wincing in pain, or a child weeping for her dying grandmother, your vagus nerve will fire” (Cain, 2022).

What makes it even more interesting, is that Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene and Princeton neuroscientist and psychologist Jonathan Cohen found through a study that when people were “asked to consider the suffering of victims of violence”, they displayed activation in the same brain region that a previous study had shown was activated in mothers as they gazed at pictures of their babies.

Additionally, neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns from Emory University discovered that “helping people in need stimulates the same exact brain region as winning a prize or eating a delicious meal”.

There are also studies that show that people who are or were depressed are “more likely to see the world from others’ points of view and to experience compassion”.

So this might just turn many of the thoughts and associations we’ve had with depression on it’s head.  Depression is usually something we pathologize in our culture by quickly and immediately saying that something is “wrong” and needs to be “fixed”.  The modern tendency might even be to quickly push someone to take an antidepressant before even suggesting to someone that it might be worth talking to someone first. Another tendency might be to, simply, not do an adequate assessment prior to giving a prescription, which only reinforces this culture of pathology and “quick fixes”.

So the reality that depression actually enhances our empathy and ability to be compassionate might be a bit of a shocker.  

Honestly, for me, it gives me goosebumps.  Because I’m very aware from seeing many clients over the last 7 years that underneath our anxiety and anger is often sadness and grief.  And that grief is often grief over lack of human connection.

Which makes a lot of sense, as it is literally built into the the bedrock of human existence, as our impulse to respond to one another’s sadness with empathy and compassion is rooted in the same location of the brain “as our need to breathe, digest food, reproduce, and protect our babies”.

It is literally the root of who we are and what we need for survival.

(And, by the way, the thought has not escaped me that the vagus nerve, like many nerves, kind of looks like a big root, which only reminds me of how we really are one with nature).

1. Cain, Susan (2022). Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Crown Publishing, New York, NY.