Living With Schizophrenia

To me, compassion and empathy are the same thing. It means that a person is willing to walk a mile in another person's shoes. Compassion means to feel passionately another person's feelings, or as closely as possible. It's not sympathy, which is more like pity. It's feeling another person's pain and/or respecting it. Compassion towards the self means seeing both sides of an issue. It means not putting yourself down or beating yourself up. It's like not assuming you're stupid, just because you did something stupid, or that you're a bad person just because you did something wrong. Admitting powerlessness of an addiction is a form of compassion. It means acception that we are limited, fallible, and human, and not putting ourselves down for being human. My life would have been different had I been more compassionate towards myself in the past when I refused to accept my limitations with other's behavior. I am now more compassionate towards myself, which means I am more forgiving of the things I did and accepting that I just can't control certain things or behaviors in others. I probably would have found peace and serenity sooner had I been different.