As my partner Jeff Rediger and I just finished writing about in our book Relationsick, compassion might not seem like a health issue, but it’s intimately tied to the health of the body. It turns out that when our bodies act up, the body is a trailhead we are invited to walk down. The thing is, many people are confused about compassion, thinking it’s only something we extend to other people, forgetting that if we fail to extend compassion to our own “parts,” the chronic nervous system dysfunction resulting from self-neglect or even masochistic self-abuse in the name of being compassionate to someone else can make you sick.
The body is a trailhead because sometimes our bodies are begging for us to have compassion for ourselves with as much gusto as we extend compassion or caregiving to other people. We can become relationsick when we overgive beyond our resourcing, all in the name of a confused kind of compassion that cuts out self-compassion and focuses compassion only on other people.
Be the first to learn about what’s in the book Relationsick, which won’t come out until April 2026, by joining LOVE SCHOOL, where Jeff and I will be previewing our work on power, health, and relationships. JOIN LOVE SCHOOL HERE.
Ten years ago, I thought of myself as a compassionate person. As I look back with some embarrassment and shame, I now realize that I had quite an inflated view of myself, I had what in IFS is called a “Self-like part,” a part which thought it was me. This part thought it was quite loving, awakened, and divine. It thought I was so masterful at unconditional love that I could have the most extreme compassion for even the most abusive, narcissistic, utterly unempathic asshats.
When I heard other people ranting about their partners or their bosses or their mother-in-laws, the story I told myself was “These people just haven’t climbed high enough up the mountain to be capable of stretching themselves into the depths of unconditional love, even when people act very badly.” I saw myself as special. I revered the lines of an Alanis Morrissette song, You Owe Me Nothing In Return, which you can listen to here.
Suffice it to say, I now see Alanis’s words as exactly what would enable a person blended with narcissistic parts to do whatever they damn well please, knowing they would be let off the hook by the “spiritual” lover. (As a side note, Alanis is now an IFS person who wrote the foreword to Dick Schwartz’s book No Bad Parts, so I assume that, like me, she’s learned the hard way that the kind of love she sings about isn’t sustainable and enables perpetrators of abuse.)
This Self-like part in me also compared me to other people who got angry at these asshats and set boundaries with them. It inflated me as superior to the angry people who “polarized” and got all judgey with others and failed to stay in non-dual awareness with “we are all One” consciousness. I thought I was on the fast track to enlightenment. I erroneously believed that my ability to keep my heart open, gushing with a waterfall of love for people who crossed my boundaries, exploited me, controlled me, manipulated me, stole from me, enlisted me in their polyamorous harems, and lied to me was proof of my spiritual development. Obviously.
In some ways, it was true. I did have compassion for these people. I knew their trauma histories and had a great deal of empathy for their suffering. I understood the psychology of why they behaved the way they did, and I didn’t wish to judge them for behaviors caused by horrible parenting or traumas that were not their fault. I figured someone needed to finally love them back to health, and I was just the girl to do it.
The problem is that I was exhibiting zero compassion for my own “parts.”
I found Internal Family Systems (IFS) at just the right time. About a month before my cousin Rebecca Ching told me IFS would be a game changer in my life and my work, I read the shattering “blind compassion” chapter in Robert Augustus Masters book Spiritual Bypassing. I felt busted and disoriented, which led to what Resmaa Menakem calls a “quaking” in my nervous system I thought I was walking in alignment with my spiritual path impeccably. But it turns out I had a lot to learn and a lot of deprogramming to do to break out from what I had been taught about what it means to be a good and virtuous “spiritual” person.
I was quaking indeed when I read these words and knew them to be true instantly:
“Blind compassion is rooted in the belief that we are all doing the best we can. When we are driven by blind compassion, we cut everyone far too much slack, making excuses for others’ behavior and making nice situations that require a forceful “no”, an unmistakable voicing of displeasure, or a firm setting and maintaining of boundaries. These things can, and often should be done out of love, but blind compassion keeps love too meek, sentenced to wearing a kind face.
Blind compassion is kindness rooted in fear, and not just fear of confrontation, but also fear of not coming across as a good or spiritual person. When we are engaged in blind compassion we rarely show anger, for we not only believe that compassion has to be gentle, we are also frightened of upsetting anyone, especially to the point of their confronting us. This is reinforced by our judgment about anger, especially in its more fiery forms, as something less spiritual; something that shouldn’t be there if we were being truly loving. Blind compassion reduces us to harmony junkies, entrapping us in unrelentingly positive expression.
With blind compassion we don’t know how to – or won’t learn how to – say “no” with any real power, avoiding confrontation at all costs and, as a result, enabling unhealthy patterns to continue. Our “yes” is then anemic and impotent, devoid of impact it could have if we were also able to access a clear, strong “no” that emanated from our core.
When we mute our essential voice, our openness is reduced to a permissive gap, an undiscerning embrace, a poorly boundaried receptivity, all of which indicate a lack of compassion for ourselves (in that we don’t adequately protect ourselves). Blind compassion confuses anger with aggression, forcefulness with violence, judgment with condemnation, caring with exaggerated tolerance, and more tolerance with spiritual correctness.”
Reading this excerpt left me gobsmacked. Here I thought I deserved a PhD in unconditional love, but all along, I was in kindergarten when it came to loving myself, standing up for myself, protecting myself, and holding abusers accountable for harmful, destructive behavior that I was enabling rather than confronting. My ability to extend compassion to hurt people who hurt people was a virtue indeed. But my compassion lacked guts. I needed to learn fierce compassion, the kind of compassion that says “Brother, sister, your soul is too beautiful to behave this way and I will not enable it and let you off the hook when you hurt me and others so egregiously.” The compassion I was practicing was weak, passive, conflict avoidant, frightened of confrontation, and strengthening the narcissism in my abusers rather than actually loving them enough to stay “Stop treating me this way.” It was spiritual bypassing, not real compassion. (We’ll be talking a lot about healing from spiritual bypassing in LOVE SCHOOL too.)
Gentle Compassion Vs. Fierce Compassion
Now I think of compassion as having two faces- one gentle and soft, the other fierce and full of tough love. Sometimes when we are suffering, we need someone to hold us, co-regulate us, validate us, and soften, especially if we’re feeling remorse and spiraling in shame because we’ve done something awful. But some people are so wounded they don’t feel remorse or shame when they do something horrible. They count on people like I was to be their prey. They suck from us parasitically and we keep saying “I forgive you,” thinking that’s what “spiritual” people do, turning the other cheek and loving harder.
I’ve since learned that sometimes love requires us to say no, to let down someone who is making entitled demands, to set boundaries and hold them firmly, to hold people we love accountable, to give someone abusive the chance to do better. Changing how we behave with entitled, exploitative, demanding, pushy, or agenda-driven people is risky. They might not react nicely or be pleased with our pushback. They might attack or threaten abandonment or punish us. But to truly extend compassion in all directions, we have to risk losing someone. Only then do we find out if they’re worth sticking around for. You learn everything about someone the minute you finally stop enabling, appeasing, and complying.
Sometimes we have to keep our hearts open but pull our precious bodies and hearts away, loving someone from the other side of divorce papers, halfway across the world, behind a restraining order, or behind bars, if need be. That is how we unconditionally love and extend compassion to our own vulnerable parts, even if it upsets people who have grown accustomed to us accommodating and neurotically tolerating their hurtful behavior, failing to hold them to account.
Sometimes Compassion Means Saying Goodbye
I had to do this with someone I really loved during the pandemic. This person was someone famous, someone many of you would know, someone who I swore I would always defend and protect and love. But during the pandemic, this person went off the rails. I tried to call this person in, coax sanity, challenge conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism and right wing thinking from someone who had always been a leader of progressive liberals. It was my way of being unconditionally loving. I understood the behavior. I know this person’s history and I knew the other stressors weighing in.
But to have stayed silent would have lacked fierce compassion, fiery love, revolutionary love, as Valarie Kaur terms it. Silence is violence, they say. But of course, this person interpreted my speaking out as a betrayal. I was no longer blindly compassionate or neurotically tolerant. I was scared and angry that this person with a big following was spreading anti-vax misinformation, sowing fear and doubt about public health guidelines, and raking in the cash and narcissistic attention from people who saw this person as a contrarian hero.
I still love this person unconditionally. But I finally realized that compassion is a commitment, but sometimes we have to practice our compassion from a well boundaried distance. And sometimes we have to call bullshit so other people don’t get hurt.
Unconditional love. Conditional access.
We can love people unconditionally and still deny them access to our inner sanctums. Access to our bodies, our beds, our homes, our children, our money, our generous hearts should be very conditional. We need to make such things conditional on whether someone is safe enough, trustworthy enough to earn their way into our close sanctuaries. It’s not unloving to restrict access to people who cannot be trusted to be kind, loving, decent human beings who care about us and demonstrate so, not with their words, but with their actions.
I am so grateful that IFS taught me the “how” of continuing my education in how to love, by helping me learn to have compassion, not only for hurt people who do hurtful things, but for the parts of me that were groomed to let people who hurt me off the hook in the name of unconditional love, the parts indoctrinated to forgive even the most unremorseful people who have no intention to stop doing the hurtful thing.
You Get To Keep The Good Stuff
The good news is that I didn’t lose the parts of me that have the capacity to extend a great deal of generosity of heart to other people when they behave abusively or cross my boundaries because of their own boundary wounding or trauma histories. The difference is that I have now unburdened parts that had been exiled, parts I’m really grateful for- fierce parts, parts that stand up for me and others who are vulnerable, assertive parts that confront injustice, unfuckwithable parts that have clear boundaries and have learned how to say no and hold the line, even if I still love someone and feel an attachment to them and even if they push hard.
I have become sturdy, not so easily blown around. I have roots firmly planted in deep earth, so the winds of someone else’s aggression or pressure to undo my boundaries no longer collapse me. Other people can keep doing their song and dance, but I am able to hold firm, no matter how much hot air they blow.
These sturdy, fierce parts that have my own back dance with the parts that have other people’s backs and extend compassion outwards. Sometimes the tango of compassion means I need to prioritize my own needs over someone else’s needs- as an act of compassion for myself. Other times, I have to negotiate with my parts to extend to the edge of their capacity because someone else’s needs might need to be more important than my own from time to time. Because my parts trust me from ten years of Self-to-parts work, they’re usually willing to settle down and let me sacrifice some of their needs so I can help someone else whose needs are greater, as long as it’s temporary. If I do that for too long, my own parts start distrusting me. I can tell when I’ve overstepped the needs of my own parts because a resentful, passive aggressive part steps in to warn me. Resentment is always on me, letting me know I’ve extended myself beyond my resourcing and need to pull back.
But if extending myself is a short term solution, my parts are okay with letting my Self extend generous soft-hearted compassion to others, even if it means I’m neglecting my own parts for a short time. But only for a short time, and only if the generosity is reasonably reciprocated when I’m the one in need.
We Have To Practice Compassion- In Community
Want to go deeper into how to have compassion without “blind compassion” or spiritual bypassing? You’re invited to join our IFS-informed community of practice for couples and singles healing relational trauma in LOVE SCHOOL.
You’re also welcome to register for these online programs about healing from spiritual bypassing:
Spirituality Without Bypassing (with IFS founder Dick Schwartz)
At the end of the day, the difference between compassion and enabling depends on your parts. If you’re throwing your parts under the bus in order to be compassionate with someone else, if you’re letting someone else off the hook in the name of being compassionate, if you’re not speaking up about something that’s upsetting you because you don’t want to rock the boat, you may actually be enabling someone to behave in ways that aren’t really okay with your parts as a way to avoid conflict. If spiritual bypassing is, as Robert Augustus Masters defines it, “conflict avoidance in holy drag,” then appropriate confrontation, boundaries, and accountability are its opposite.
There’s nothing wrong with being compassionate or forgiving people who have hurt you, as long as you’re also being compassionate and forgiving of your own parts in equal measure. Walking that razor’s edge between compassion for your parts and compassion for others just might be the very definition of a spirituality worth practicing.
*I just want to make a call out to the blind/non-sighted who have asked me not to use the word “blind” to refer to anything ignorant or uninformed or somehow negative. I totally respect this request and am only using the term blind compassion because it’s a direct quote. Any suggestion of how to change that term to make it less offensive to blind people while still respecting the author’s direct quote is welcome.
