Chapter 7, “Places We Go with Others,” explores compassion, pity, empathy, sympathy, boundaries, and comparative suffering.

Brown explains that the primary difference between compassion and empathy is that the former is a practice, while the latter is a skill, albeit one that is crucial to the practice of compassion. To practice compassion involves a continuous awareness of the universal vulnerability of living things, as well as the varying conditions of human suffering. It also necessitates a cultivated attitude of loving-kindness that impels one to take action with regard to others’ suffering. Brown notes, however, that a truly compassionate relationship is not that of a doctor and patient or one of rescue. It is, rather, one between people made equal by an understanding of what they share with each other.

While pity is often interchanged with compassion, it is, in fact, compassion’s “near enemy.” The concept of the near enemy stems from Buddhism and refers to a trait that seems akin to a certain virtue but is actually incompatible and harmful or counterproductive. Brown gives as example equanimity and indifference. While equanimity is a virtue that is a function of being mentally flexible and resilient, it is often conflated with its near enemy, indifference, which is the refusal to engage or open oneself up mentally to one’s surroundings. Far enemies refer to the more obvious contraries, such as love and hatred. Near enemies, however, can be more dangerous for the simple reason that they can be confused with genuine virtues.

While compassion builds a sense of solidarity in the face of adversity, Brown puts forward that pity tends to produce the opposite effect: isolation and separation (e.g., “I feel bad for what’s happening to that person. But I’m glad it’s not me.”). Pity has the following characteristics: one, a sense that one is superior or in a better position; two, an awareness that is mostly or exclusively of one’s personal reaction; and, finally, a desire to maintain distance and avoid being affected by the other person’s suffering.

Brown refers to empathy as the set of skills that allows one to model another person’s emotional interior based on their expressions and behavior. These skills include being able to understand and recognize different emotions and thoughts, imagine another person’s perspective, and adjust one’s own emotional state to match another’s. Empathy has both a cognitive and affective aspect: the cognitive aspect allows us to parse and understand another person’s mental state and its possible causes; the affective part, sometimes called experience sharing, is what allows us to experience the same emotions as others simply through understanding. A type of emotional burnout called compassion fatigue actually occurs when one is overwhelmed by the experience of affective empathy.

Empathy is sometimes confused with sympathy, but the latter tends to be based on pity rather than compassion or empathy. Brown likens it to pity, as it isolates and keeps the other person at a distance—a sympathetic person is more preoccupied with their own personal reactions and feelings than with others’ well-being.

In order to practice empathy and compassion, Brown asserts that it is important to maintain boundaries. We must be able to respect each other’s feelings and autonomy in order to develop shared vulnerability and mutual receptive kindness.