Compassion: More Than Being Kind
Jamie Alaise | AUG 27, 2026
compassion
meditation
Why Neuro Still treats compassion as a skill — and why it may matter far beyond the individual
At Neuro Still, we work from a simple philosophy:
Attention + Compassion = Connection.
Attention is where we begin.
Learning to notice where our attention has gone. Learning to return. Becoming more available to the experience happening in front of us.
But attention alone isn't enough.
Because once we become more aware of ourselves, another question appears:
How do we meet what we notice?
This is where compassion enters the Neuro Still Method.
And compassion may not mean quite what you think.
Compassion isn't simply being nice
Compassion is sometimes confused with kindness, sympathy or agreeing with another person.
We see it differently.
Compassion involves recognising difficulty or suffering — in ourselves or another person — and responding with understanding and an intention to help where appropriate.
That doesn't require agreement.
It doesn't require accepting poor behaviour.
And it certainly doesn't require abandoning boundaries.
One of the principles we teach at Neuro Still is:
Compassion is not the absence of boundaries.
You can understand why somebody behaved in a certain way without believing their behaviour was acceptable.
An experience may explain an action without excusing it.
You can care about someone and say no.
You can understand someone and step away.
You can also recognise your own mistakes without turning that recognition into relentless self-criticism.
Compassion isn't about making everything acceptable.
It's about changing the quality with which we meet what is difficult.
Compassion and empathy aren't quite the same thing
There's another useful distinction.
Empathy broadly involves understanding or sharing something of another person's emotional experience.
Compassion goes further: it involves concern for suffering and an orientation towards responding to it.
That distinction matters.
If somebody we love is struggling, simply absorbing all of their distress isn't necessarily helpful to them — or to us.
Compassion allows us to remain connected to another person's humanity while considering:
What would actually be helpful here?
Sometimes the answer is listening.
Sometimes helping.
Sometimes giving somebody space.
Sometimes setting a boundary.
And sometimes recognising that we cannot fix what another person is experiencing.
Can compassion actually be trained?
The evidence suggests that it can, although we should be careful not to oversell what the research tells us.
A meta-analysis examining 21 randomised controlled trials involving 1,285 participants found that compassion-based interventions improved measures of compassion and self-compassion and were associated with improvements in measures including wellbeing, psychological distress, anxiety and depression.
The researchers also highlighted an important limitation: much of the evidence was based on relatively small studies and larger, methodologically stronger trials were needed.
More recent research has strengthened parts of that picture. A separate meta-analysis examining 56 randomised controlled trials of self-compassion interventions found small-to-medium reductions in depression, anxiety and stress immediately after interventions, although longer-term effects were generally smaller.
So we shouldn't say:
"Compassion will make you happy."
But there is reasonable evidence that compassion and self-compassion are trainable and that interventions designed to cultivate them can benefit psychological wellbeing.
Read the compassion intervention research
What happens when compassion enters a family?
This is where the research becomes particularly interesting to us.
Family life gives us endless opportunities to practise attention and compassion.
It also gives us endless opportunities not to.
Someone is tired.
Someone hasn't listened.
A child is upset.
A parent is stressed.
A partner responds badly.
We interpret behaviour.
We react.
They react to our reaction.
And suddenly the argument is no longer about the thing that started it.
Compassion doesn't mean that families stop disagreeing.
A more interesting question is whether changing the way one person relates to difficulty can influence the wider family system.
Some early evidence suggests it can.
Compassion and parenting
In a 2023 randomised controlled trial, researchers recruited 102 parents and compared a brief, two-hour Compassion Focused Therapy intervention with a wait-list control.
Initially, parents receiving the intervention showed significantly reduced self-criticism, while their children showed reductions in reported emotional and peer problems.
At the three-month follow-up, parental self-criticism had decreased further, parental hostility and verbosity had reduced, and researchers reported improvements across a range of child outcomes.
That's fascinating.
But we should interpret it properly.
It doesn't prove that teaching a parent compassion automatically transforms their children.
It's one relatively small trial.
What it does suggest is that how parents relate to themselves may have consequences beyond themselves.
The way we treat ourselves may enter the room with us
Imagine a parent makes a mistake.
One internal response might be:
"I'm terrible at this."
That criticism creates its own emotional state.
And that state doesn't necessarily remain neatly contained inside the parent's head.
It may influence tone of voice.
Patience.
Defensiveness.
How quickly we react.
How willing we are to repair.
Research involving 167 parents provides another interesting piece of this picture.
Parents were asked to recall difficult parenting experiences associated with guilt or shame and were then randomised to either a self-compassion prompt or a control condition.
Those receiving the self-compassion prompt subsequently reported greater self-compassion and lower guilt and shame.
Self-compassion, therefore, isn't necessarily saying:
"I did nothing wrong."
It can mean:
"I can acknowledge that this was difficult — or that I got something wrong — without attacking myself in the process."
That's a very different relationship with failure.
What about the children?
One small preliminary randomised study is especially intriguing.
Parents of infants and young children completed a secular compassion-training programme over eight to ten weeks.
Researchers measured hair cortisol concentrations in both parents and children.
Children whose parents received the compassion training showed a significant decrease in cortisol relative to the wait-list group.
That's interesting, but this is exactly where Neuro Still needs to remain disciplined.
There were only 39 parent-child pairs in the study.
We absolutely shouldn't turn this into:
"Your compassion lowers your child's cortisol."
That's not established.
What the study provides is an intriguing early indication that interventions directed at parents might potentially have measurable effects beyond the parent themselves — something worthy of considerably more research.
Compassion between generations
Family relationships aren't limited to parents and children.
Grandparents can be part of the parenting system too, and those relationships can contain disagreement, different values and blurred boundaries.
A randomised trial involving 100 Vietnamese parents tested a parenting programme that incorporated a compassion-focused component aimed partly at the parent-grandparent relationship.
The intervention produced short-term improvements across several measures, including co-parenting conflict, parenting behaviour, parental adjustment and child outcomes.
Some improvements — including co-parenting conflict and child prosocial behaviour — were maintained six months later.
Again, compassion wasn't synonymous with removing boundaries.
Quite the opposite.
It was being introduced into relationships in which boundaries, disagreement and communication actually mattered.
That fits closely with our definition:
Compassion can help us understand another person's humanity without requiring us to surrender our own needs or boundaries.
Compassion doesn't stop with parenting
The same principle may apply to caring relationships more broadly.
A randomised clinical trial involving 161 informal caregivers of people experiencing mental illness tested Compassion Cultivation Training against a wait-list control.
Those who completed the compassion programme showed reductions in depression, anxiety and stress, with differences still present at six-month follow-up.
This matters because caring for another person can become emotionally demanding.
Compassion shouldn't mean absorbing unlimited suffering.
A sustainable compassionate response has to include the person doing the caring too.
A family doesn't experience our intentions. It experiences our behaviour.
Most of us care about the people closest to us.
But caring about someone and being present with them aren't always the same thing.
We can love someone while staring at our phone as they're speaking.
We can love our children and still respond impatiently because we're overwhelmed.
We can love our partner and become so caught in our own interpretation of an argument that we stop hearing what they're actually saying.
This is why Attention and Compassion belong together.
Attention allows us to notice.
What am I feeling?
What are they saying?
What story am I adding?
Am I listening — or preparing my response?
Compassion then changes the next question.
Not:
How do I win this?
But perhaps:
What's actually happening here?
What might I not know?
What does this person need?
What do I need?
Where does a boundary belong?
What is the most constructive response available to me?
That's where attention begins becoming connection.
We never fully know what another person is carrying
Every person you meet has an internal experience that you cannot fully see.
They have memories you weren't there for.
Worries they may never mention.
Experiences that shaped how they respond.
Moments of confidence.
Moments of fear.
Losses.
Hopes.
Insecurities.
Just as you do.
Remembering that doesn't mean explaining away harmful behaviour.
But it can create a little space between behaviour and judgement.
Instead of:
"What is wrong with them?"
There may occasionally be room for:
"I wonder what's happening for them?"
And sometimes that small shift is enough to change what happens next.
Fromm: love as something we practise
Decades before modern compassion science, social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm argued for a view of love that remains relevant here.
For Fromm, mature love wasn't simply an emotion that happened to us. It involved capacities such as care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.
We shouldn't confuse Fromm's philosophical writing with modern experimental evidence.
But the underlying idea sits beautifully alongside what contemporary compassion training asks us to consider:
Our relationships are shaped not only by what we feel, but by capacities we practise.
Attention can be practised.
Compassion can be practised.
Listening can be practised.
Repair can be practised.
Understanding can be practised.
Connection, then, isn't simply something we're lucky enough to have.
It's something our behaviour can continually help create.
Why compassion is the second pillar of Neuro Still
We begin with attention because before we can change our relationship with an experience, we first have to notice it.
We notice the thought.
The reaction.
The tension.
The judgement.
The person sitting opposite us.
Then compassion asks:
How do I meet what I've noticed?
Not perfectly.
Not passively.
And not without boundaries.
But perhaps with slightly more understanding and slightly less automatic judgement.
Our aim isn't to create people who never become angry, never disagree or endlessly accommodate everyone around them.
That's neither realistic nor healthy.
We're interested in something much more practical.
Creating enough awareness to recognise what's happening...
and enough compassion to consider how we want to meet it.
Because the real test of these practices isn't what happens while we're sitting quietly with our eyes closed.
It's what happens when we open them.
When someone frustrates us.
When our child needs us.
When our partner is speaking.
When we've made a mistake.
When another person makes one.
When a boundary needs to be drawn.
When someone simply needs to be heard.
That's where the Neuro Still philosophy comes alive.
Attention + Compassion = Connection.
Not as a scientific equation.
As a way of practising how we meet ourselves, each other, and the lives we're already living.
Explore the Research
Compassion-based interventions — systematic review and meta-analysis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29029675/
Compassion Focused Therapy for parents and children — randomised controlled trial
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36892093/
Self-compassion following challenging parenting experiences
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30376651/
Compassion training for parents and child cortisol
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31583748/
Compassion and parent-grandparent relationships
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36229115/
Compassion Cultivation Training for family caregivers
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2777143
Jamie Alaise | AUG 27, 2026
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