Containing Ourselves, Containing Others

What is compassion? We talk about it as though it is something we direct outward, as though empathy is some kind of gift we hand over to another person, a gesture of generosity, a proof that we are decent. But if you really sit with the matter, it becomes much messier and far less straightforward. The ability to contain another person’s feelings, their disappointments, their needs, depends on whether we can first sit with our own. If there are parts of ourselves that we exile, keep locked away in a dark cellar, or throw out the window whenever they appear, then it becomes very difficult to tolerate those same qualities when they arrive in another person. Self compassion, then, is not a sentimental add-on to empathy. It is the soil in which empathy grows. Without it, we may still give the appearance of kindness, but our patience quickly runs thin, and sooner or later the cracks in our tolerance begin to show.

Think of it this way. Suppose there is something in yourself you cannot bear. Let us pick an everyday example. Say you are ashamed of your own tendency to procrastinate, to spend long stretches of time doing very little, or frittering away hours on distractions. You may despise that side of yourself, cover it over with busyness, or punish yourself with harsh internal voices that echo the scoldings of childhood. If someone close to you starts behaving in a way that reminds you of that same quality, maybe a partner who spends Saturday mornings in bed scrolling through their phone, your ability to empathise with them will be very limited. The sight of their so-called laziness will set off alarms in you, alarms tied to the parts of yourself you cannot face. You might snap at them, lecture them, or quietly simmer in contempt. What is happening here is not a true lack of empathy. It is rather the opposite: you know exactly what that behaviour feels like, and you have already rejected it so fiercely in yourself that you cannot bear to see it living comfortably in someone else.

The mind plays these little tricks constantly. Rejection of others is very often a shadow of self rejection. We disown pieces of our own life, then act surprised when we find those same pieces unbearable in those around us. It is almost as though we are trying to get rid of our own unwanted furniture by dumping it into the living rooms of others, only to recoil when we find they have furniture that looks just like ours. That is why empathy and self compassion are so intertwined. If you cannot live with a certain colour in your own house, you will not allow another person to bring that colour into yours. If you banish the part of yourself that feels fragile, needy, or lost, then when another person comes to you with those feelings, you will find yourself unable to hold them.

This is what I mean by being a container. Containment is the ability to receive what another person deposits in you, to hold it without flinching, and to give it back in a way that is transformed, more manageable, less poisonous. In psychoanalytic language, this is often spoken of between a mother and a baby. The baby projects their raw distress into the mother, and if the mother can hold it, think about it, metabolise it, then the baby receives back something bearable. But we do this with each other all the time, not just in infancy. Partners, friends, colleagues, even strangers on the street try to deposit their unbearable bits into us, and our task is to see if we can contain them.

Yet how can you be a container for another person’s pain if you cannot contain your own? If every time you feel shame, sadness, or confusion you rush to silence it, scold it, or lock it away, then you will not be able to hold those feelings when they show up in someone else. They will feel too heavy, too sharp, too much like the very things you have worked so hard to deny in yourself. You will find yourself pushing them away, labelling them as weakness or irresponsibility or drama. You may look judgemental, even cruel, but what is really happening is that you are protecting yourself from the parts of your own life you cannot face.

Let me use a simple image. Suppose you hate the sight of a Rubik’s cube. For reasons you may not even fully understand, you cannot stand the thing. You do not want one in your house, you throw it out whenever it appears, you associate it with frustration and failure. Now, if a neighbour insists on bringing you a Rubik’s cube as a gift, you will not be able to accept it. You will find a reason to decline, to grumble, to push it back. The cube is not simply a toy in this case. It is a stand-in for the part of yourself that you cannot tolerate. In the same way, when another person tries to hand you their grief, their uncertainty, or their dependence, you may reject it, not because you are incapable of empathy, but because you have trained yourself to slam the door on those same qualities in yourself.

This is why some of the most judgemental people are, at the same time, some of the most sensitive. They do not lack the ability to feel. They feel too much, but they cannot bear to feel it directly. So they push it away, often violently, when they see it living in someone else. They are like a man who cannot stand the sound of a violin because it reminds him of an old sorrow, so he grows angry whenever he hears the faintest note of it in the street. The sound is not alien to him. It is painfully familiar. That is what gives the reaction its edge.

Now, consider what happens when self compassion enters the picture. To practise self compassion is not to let yourself off the hook for everything. It is to learn to sit with your own failings, your own contradictions, your own soft underbelly, without immediately rushing to condemn or to cover them. It is to be able to say, yes, I do have lazy days, I do have selfish moments, I do have a fearful side, and that does not cancel my worth as a human being. When you make room for those parts in yourself, your sense of identity becomes less fragmented. You are no longer spending so much energy chopping yourself into acceptable and unacceptable pieces. And when you are less fragmented, you have more space for others.

Think of empathy here as a kind of shared house. If your house is already packed to the ceiling with furniture you are trying to deny is yours, you will not have any room to accept a neighbour’s belongings when they ask you to store something. But if your house is open, with space made by your willingness to accept your own furniture, then you can take in what others bring without panic. You may still decide what belongs and what does not, but the sheer act of being able to hold it for a while is what gives empathy its quality.

This also explains why sometimes we appear harsh or cold when we least expect it. A person we love brings us something small, a complaint about work, a sense of being overlooked, or a fear of failing, and we react with irritation. We tell them they are being silly, or overdramatic, or that they should simply get on with it. Later, we may feel guilty for being so dismissive. But if we look closer, we will often find that what set us off was not their pain in itself, but the way it brushed against a pain of our own that we have refused to look at. Their fear of failure touched our own hidden fear of failure. Their sense of being overlooked touched our own long-buried sense of being invisible. And because we cannot stand to feel that, we push it away in them.

To be self compassionate is to take the radical step of letting those feelings exist in yourself without banishment. This does not mean you let them run your life, but it does mean you give them a seat at the table. By doing so, you learn to become a container, not a fortress. You can hold pain without having to destroy it or eject it. And once you can do this for yourself, you are in a position to do it for others. You can accept their projections without being crushed by them. You can say, yes, I know that feeling, and I can hold it with you.

However, what we sometimes fail to recognise is that the voice that rejects parts of ourselves is not even ours. It is the voice we inherited from parents, teachers, or peers. A parent scolded us for being messy, and so we banish our own messiness forever. A teacher mocked us for daydreaming, so we cut that part off. But these parts of ourselves do not vanish. They sit in the background, waiting, and when we see them in someone else, we hear the old scolding voice rise up again, this time through us. We become the very voice that once wounded us. This is why self compassion is not simply indulgence. It is an act of breaking a cycle. When we allow ourselves to acknowledge those parts without shame, we stop perpetuating the same rejection on others.

Consider again the partner who sleeps late on weekends. If your reaction is fury or contempt, it may be because you grew up with a voice that equated rest with laziness, that punished idleness, that made you feel your worth was tied only to productivity. You internalised that voice, and now, whenever you see someone resting, it triggers that old wound. If you can meet your own need for rest with compassion, then suddenly your partner’s behaviour does not sting you in the same way. You might still wish they would wake earlier for breakfast together, but your complaint will not be fuelled by hidden shame. It will be a direct, simple desire, not a projection.

This is where empathy begins to look less like an effort and more like a natural byproduct of living in peace with yourself. When you are not busy cutting off your own limbs, you can sit beside others without rushing to cut off theirs. You can tolerate the things in them that echo your own history. And in some sense, that is what people long for in empathy: not that you will fix their feelings, but that you will be able to sit with them without panic, without needing to shove their feelings back in their face because they are too much for you.

It might sound simple, but it is profoundly difficult. Self compassion runs against the grain of much of our culture, which teaches us to be endlessly productive, endlessly perfect, endlessly in control. Many of us fear that if we allow ourselves compassion, we will collapse into laziness, indulgence, or weakness. But the opposite tends to happen. By softening towards ourselves, we free up the energy that would otherwise be spent on internal battles. And with that freed energy, we are more available to others, more capable of being containers rather than rejecting vessels.

Empathy, then, is not some noble virtue bestowed on saints. It is the ordinary capacity of a human being who has learned to live with their own contradictions. It begins with the ability to acknowledge that we all contain both strength and weakness, both discipline and laziness, both clarity and confusion. When you make space for these in yourself, you are less shocked to find them in others. You can say, yes, I know that too, and I can hold it with you for a while.

If you trace it all the way back, empathy is built out of the small daily acts of letting yourself be human. It is in the choice to sit with your own mistakes rather than hiding them, to allow your own sadness rather than silencing it, to tolerate your own vulnerability rather than armouring against it. Each of those choices makes you less fragmented, less brittle. And with that, you become a person in whom others feel safe to deposit their burdens.

In this way, empathy and self compassion are not two separate qualities, but two sides of the same movement. To contain another, you must first be willing to contain yourself. To accept another’s mess, you must first live with your own. The Rubik’s cube that you cannot stand in your house will always make you throw out the cube others bring. But once you can let your own cube sit on the shelf without panic, you might find yourself able to receive theirs too, even if you still do not particularly like it. That is the quiet link between compassion for self and compassion for others.

The more you learn to sit with your own life, the more capable you become of sitting with the lives of others. Without self compassion, empathy is fragile and conditional. With it, empathy becomes natural, almost effortless, because you no longer need to reject in others what you have already learned to hold in yourself.

That is why this link is worth exploring carefully. Empathy is not an act of heroism. It is a reflection of how at home you are with yourself. The more at home you are, the more welcome others will feel when they step inside. That is not a moral command, but simply the way human beings are built. If we can contain our own lives, we can contain others. If we cannot, we push them away, sometimes harshly, sometimes without meaning to, but always in proportion to the parts of ourselves we are still trying to disown.

So the question is not whether you are empathic enough, but whether you are willing to make peace with your own life. Everything else flows from there.