The joy of others: unlocking compersion in relationships with Marie Thouin

Usha Rose (0:02)

Welcome to the Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Podcast, where we explore conscious relating, emerging culture, and transformative wisdom with ISTA faculty and experts from around the world. I'm your host, Usha Rose, facilitator and organizer with ISTA.

Hello and welcome. This is Usha Rose. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Marie Thouin for another exciting podcast episode on the Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Podcast. Welcome, Marie.

Marie Thouin (0:40)

Thank you so much, Usha, for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Usha Rose (0:44)

Yes, I'm so excited to have you here. We got introduced by an ISTA graduate who I had interviewed on this podcast the last season, Dr. Jolie Hamilton. We had a really fascinating conversation on jealousy and she had mentioned to me that she has a colleague and a friend who did a bunch of research on compersion and I was like, oh, tell me more. I would love to meet her and bring her on the podcast. So grateful that I'm now sitting here with you.

I'm going to give our listeners a little introduction to Dr. Marie Thouin, who is a mindful dating and relationship coach who supports people of all backgrounds and relational orientations to create vibrant and intentional love lives. She is the author of What is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. This is the first ever comprehensive scholarly book on compersion. So cool. Marie has published Seminal Research Studies, the first encyclopedia entry on compersion, and is the creator of www.whatiscompersion.com, a popular website that features her research blogs and resources on the topic of compersion. Her work has been featured in multiple podcasts and publications, including HuffPost, The Savage Lovecast, Multi-Amory, and Elle. So we're going to be talking about compersion today, and you are a researcher on this topic, and I would love to hear more. There's probably listeners who aren't familiar with what compersion is. So we should just start right there. What is compersion?

Marie Thouin (2:46)

Great question to start. Of course, that is the title of my book. So people who really want a deep, deep dive will love that book. But I will give you the medium version. I'll give you the short and then the medium version of the definition. The short version is that compersion is our wholehearted participation in the joy and happiness of others. So I'm happy that you're happy is the short version, positive empathy.

The medium-sized version is what I and my colleague, Dr. Sharon Flicker, published last year as the first ever encyclopedia entry on compersion. We published it in the Springer Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior and Psychology, and after many conversations about really how to word the most accurate definition of compersion based on our research, we decided to break it down in three definitions. The first two being specifically in the realm of consensual non-monogamy, and the third one encompassing general context. So I'll start with the first one, and that's what we generally think about when we think about compersion. So the first one is that compersion is the broad range of positive emotions that we might experience in relation to our intimate partners, other intimate relationships. So that means I'm happy, I'm feeling happiness when you're feeling happiness in another intimate relationships in a non-monogamous context. The number two definition though is the range of positive thoughts, attitudes and behaviors we might experience when we're witnessing our partner being happy in another intimate relationship. So that takes it away from just being an emotion to also being an attitude, a thought or an action. And that really expands the understanding of compersion and non-monogamy because it's not just like, oh, you have it or you don't, you're lucky to feel it or you're not, but you can actually cultivate it. And then the third definition is all of these things, the broad range of positive emotions, thoughts, attitudes and actions that we might experience in relationship to somebody else's positive experience in any context. People are starting to use that word in context other than non-monogamy. So for example, like I'm happy that my colleague got a promotion and I'm congratulating them and taking them for lunch because I want to celebrate with them. That could be called compersion. There are so many other examples in other relationships as well.

Usha Rose (5:46)

Yeah, awesome. Okay. So many questions are coming up to further explore this topic. One of them, the example that you just gave, like you're really happy your colleague had a promotion and so you take them out to lunch to celebrate.

I imagine that kind of thing has existed for a long time. And I'm wondering about the word compersion because my understanding is that the word compersion kind of evolved out of the polyamory world, like when the word polyamory got termed and where people started identifying as being polyamorous and that relationship style started becoming more accepted, more popular in the terms of like normalized. And so like new terminology has been developing as it does. So my understanding is that the word compersion is a fairly newly developed word, even though perhaps the definition maybe has always existed, but now we're finding a reason to actually name it as such. So could you speak a little bit about like where the word came from? And yeah.