Compassion Cannot Keep Requiring My Self-Abandonment

On the hidden cost of understanding everything except what it is costing you

One of the harder things I have been learning is that my compassion for other people has often come at the cost of compassion for myself.

I can understand why someone withdraws. I can trace their avoidance back to childhood, fear, shame, emotional neglect, or a nervous system that perceives vulnerability like a crime scene to tiptoe around. I have learned about myself and I can recognize that someone was never taught how to communicate, repair, apologize, or remain present when a relationship asks something difficult of them. Sometimes I can see it so clearly that I start explaining their behavior to myself before I have even admitted how much it hurt me.

This is one of the strange liabilities of being highly empathetic. A blessing and a curse is what I always say. You can become so fluent in everyone else’s emotional language that you stop speaking your own. You notice the wound underneath their defensiveness. Or the fear underneath their silence. Maybe you understand that the person who is emotionally neglecting you may have spent their entire life avoiding their own emotional needs. You recognize why your boss controls everything while discharging what they suppress onto every employee. Maybe you have a friend that disappears on your for weeks at a time with no regard or acknowledgement, so when you need support—crickets. You can understand your partner shuts down every time you bring up something real, or why your family keeps asking you to accept behavior they would never tolerate from you. I always refer back to the image of Charlie day connecting the dots:

You can see the line of someone else’s behavior so clearly, yet none of that takes away the grief of how that behavior impacts you. Maybe its in the pursuit of understanding, another that we unconsciously abandon ourselves?

That is the part I have had to stop explaining away.

Understanding why someone hurts me does not obligate me to remain available for the hurting.

I keep coming back to that sentence because I think there has been a part of me that believed understanding someone meant I had to keep giving them access to me. If I could see why they behaved this way, then leaving felt cruel.

Where did I learn that?

Where did I learn setting a boundary felt like punishment that I was handing out onto another being? Not to mention the guilt I may often experience expecting more and how that need felt unfair because I knew they were “doing their best,” even when their best repeatedly required me to accept less than I needed. I confused having compassion for their limitations with making those limitations my permanent living conditions—oooof. That part. I am learning that I can understand someone and still decide that proximity to their patterns costs too much for me. I can have compassion for the childhood that shaped them and still refuse to let that childhood continue shaping my life or causing me to organize myself around theirs. I can recognize that someone’s avoidance is protective for them while also acknowledging that it is painful for me.

Now the hard part, I can believe that they are not intentionally trying to cause harm and still take the harm seriously. Intent can give me context. It cannot be the only thing that matters in the whole equation.

I sometimes think of myself as the Bounty Quicker Picker Upper—the paper towel that is somehow absorbent enough to soak up everyone else’s emotional discomfort. What I mean is that I never want to see another person hurting, grieving, or moving through a season of depression. I have so much empathy for what those feelings can entail that my compassion system goes into overdrive, and I start searching for ways to free them from their discomfort.

Yet, with that being said, I can still understand there can be beauty in discomfort. There can be growth there too. Those of us who tend to be emotional sponges may rush to absorb another person’s pain, believing we are saving them from an ache, when that ache may be necessary for their development—and we are robbing them of that. Read that last part again. As someone who cares. It can be very hard to hear that our form of caring is robbing other people pf developing self-esteem and facing their own mirror for development. Dr. Amen said it best when referring to mothers who unconsciously over mother to the point of “robbing their child’s self-esteem to build their own. Through overcompassion, we may rob both ourselves and the other person of something important: their opportunity to sit with their emotions long enough to metabolize them and grow through them.

That’s development.

There are workplace dynamics where we understand exactly why the environment is dysfunctional. Leadership is overwhelmed. The organization is understaffed. Everyone is operating from urgency energy. The person mistreating us is under pressure from someone above them. We can understand every moving part and still wake up with dread in our bodies and panic in our hearts when we pull up to the parking lot. There are relationships where we understand why someone cannot meet us emotionally. They were taught to suppress their feelings or maybe vulnerability frightens them. Conflict makes them disappear. They need time. They need patience. They need grace. Yada yada… We Know! But— somehow, while we are carefully accounting for everything they need, our own needs go missing from the data.

Compassion starts becoming self-abandonment when I use someone else’s pain to argue against my own.

It happens when I say, “They are going through a lot,” as if I am not also going through the experience of being hurt by them, on top of my own layers of life heaviness. It happens when I make myself easier to neglect because I know they struggle with emotional intimacy. As a result— I keep lowering the bar and I tell myself I am doing this in the name of love. It happens when I become endlessly flexible so no one else has to experience the discomfort of changing, adapting, or witnessing. This last part is something I really need to work on for myself. Being flexible is not always a flex. It becomes self-abandonment.

I think many of us learned that caring means doing. Raise your hand if that’s you?

We do not simply witness another person’s ache, we rush in and attempt to remove it.

We soothe, fix, explain, accommodate, organize, anticipate, and overfunction. We make ourselves useful because usefulness has often been the safest way to secure our place in someone’s life. At least that’s what we may believe to be true. Think about the provider archetype. Imagine a man was conditioned at a young age to provide through monetary means. Imagine that man meets a woman that does not need that level of providing—just wants him. His operating system only know to: pay for this, pay for that, fix this, fix that. Suddenly his partner feels a void in the emotional sector of the relationship. She goes to communicate that to him and is met with defensiveness. He may be feeling not good enough, not appreciated enough. Whole time that is not what she is saying at all. But do they even hear each other? Her emotional need tugs on a level in his own development that is covered in dust and webs, never been touched because it was never required of him in his own family of origin. What does it do to a person when their identify is challenged by something as clear as— emotional availability.

We all learned that we behave X and we get Y.

Somewhere along the way, we may have learned that simply being ourselves was not enough. We needed to provide a specific emotional output (X) in order to receive what we thought was love. Maybe it was acknowledgement, either way that equation over time creates this internalized belief within many of us, myself included. I have even felt it show up as a content creator. With a belief that if I produce more I will be ___. We needed to be understanding, calming, undemanding, insightful, forgiving, available, or easy to love. If we stopped producing, we worried that the relationship might stop too. Abandonment trauma much?

That is difficult to admit because overgiving can look a lot like love from the outside.

Sometimes it even feels like love while we are doing it. Underneath it, though, there may be a quieter bargain: If I take care of what hurts in you, maybe you will not leave me. If I ask for less, maybe I will not overwhelm you. If I understand you well enough, maybe you will eventually understand me. If I keep proving how safe I am, perhaps one day you will become safe for me. That bargain can keep us in painful dynamics much longer than we realize. We are not only waiting for another person to change. We are waiting for all our compassion, patience, and emotional labor to finally produce the relationship we hoped those things would create. This is where projection lives. Where hope resides.

Walking away then feels like abandoning the investment, not only the person. It can look like facing the grief that our understanding could not love someone into becoming available. Think about that last part though. “Not being able to love someone into becoming available.”

That part alone speaks volumes to the trajectory of my life. Loving someone into availability feels like my inner child trying to get redemption for what was never available to her. Then it gets reenacted in my adult life, as loving people into what I needed them to be. In order to feel loved, seen, heard, or even acknowledged. There is an ache in seeing someone clearly and recognizing that you cannot fix what you see—or clean their lens so they could see for themselves. There is an ache in knowing that a person’s behavior comes from pain and deciding that you cannot keep standing close enough to be struck by it.

For people who are used to doing, sitting with that ache can feel unbearable. We want to convert it into action or possibly send one more thoughtful message, offer one more explanation, give one more chance, or find the exact combination of words that will finally unlock the door to their availability. Apparently, we have appointed ourselves emotional locksmiths. I giggle at the visual of myself with the large key ring full of keys to someone else’s emotional availability.

As I sit here and write, I reflect to myself. Maybe part of the practice is learning that I do not have to do anything about another person’s ache. I can care about it. I can honor it. I can sit beside it when doing so is safe and mutual. I do not have to climb inside it and start redecorating. I do not have to turn their healing into my assignment. Their discomfort is not always evidence that I am failing them either. Maybe more people than myself need to hear that.

Sometimes their discomfort is simply what happens when I stop abandoning myself to keep them comfortable. This is where boundaries become an expression of compassion rather than a withdrawal of it. A boundary says, “I see what you are carrying, and I am no longer willing to carry the consequences of it for you.” It says, “I believe your pain is real, and mine is real too.” It says, “I am not punishing you. I am responding to what this dynamic does to me.” There is room for tenderness and distance to exist together. There is also room to love someone and recognize that loving them closely is hurting you.

Choosing myself does not require me to turn someone into a villain. I do not need to erase their humanity in order to protect my own. The algorithm would not be as popular if this was the case for how humans behaved on it. I could easily dive into a rabbit-hole rant about the algorithm’s ability to infiltrate our thinking and condition us to believe that we have to villainize someone in order to cope with the grief and pain their actions have caused.

I do not have to prove that they are a terrible person before I am allowed to leave a job, relationship, friendship, or family dynamic that is depleting me. Sometimes no one is evil, it’s just two histories that meet, and one person’s way of surviving repeatedly injures the other. Sometimes compassion sounds less like “I will stay no matter what” and more like “I understand, and I cannot keep living this way.”

The question I am sitting with now is not only, “Why are they, this, that like this?” I already know how to ask that question. I am very talented at that question.

The newer questions are: What happens inside me when they are like this?

Oooooooo thats a juicy one.

Or

What do I keep sacrificing in order to remain understanding?

I like that question too

What am I afraid will happen if I stop overcompensating?

Do I believe I am still worthy of love when I am not fixing, soothing, or making myself useful?

Can I let another person be disappointed in my boundary without treating their disappointment as proof that the boundary is wrong?

That last question is hard for many of us! Sometimes when we place a boundary we are expecting some sort of instant confirmation that they will respect it. That a receipt will pop out:

“your boundary is confirmed they will accept”

Sometimes they won’t, sometimes there may even be pushback. I am also learning to notice the moment understanding becomes an excuse I am using. What do I mean here when I say this?

What is constant understanding protecting me from? Is there something I don’t want to see? Or be honest with myself about? So I attempt at understanding it away. Maybe what I am seeing requires me to make a choice I am not ready to take action with. Or maybe I am afraid to simple acknowledged that it’s a need weighing heavy on me and it needs to be addressed? Many people do not like change, so avoidance, and suppression are easier. Excusing gives behavior context, but it also acts as an eraser—removing accountability from the other party. Maybe that accountability is something you never see or experience from them. But it’s a lesson that occurs within them. We could be blocking that opportunity for that person simply because we’re overly compassionate.

Understanding allows me to see the whole person. Excusing asks me to disappear from the picture. If my empathy consistently requires me to minimize what happened, silence my needs, override my body, or remain available for repeated harm, then it is no longer compassion. It is self-abandonment and emotional self-harm.

I want a compassion that includes me— don’t you?

I want to be able to say, “I know why you struggle to show up, and I still need people who show up.” I want to say, “I understand why closeness frightens you, and I can’t keep surviving on emotional distance.” I want to say, “I love you, and this version of our relationship is costing me too much.”

That starts with courage

Maybe this is the work: allowing ourselves to understand without automatically volunteering to absorb. Letting empathy inform our choices without overruling our self-respect. Trusting that we can care deeply and still leave. Do you know how many people feel guilty walking away from a toxic work environment? Even if it would drastically improve their health?

Too many.

Compassion is not supposed to require our disappearance. Love is not supposed to be measured by how much of myself I can neglect in order to successfully get the other party to receive it.

Something I always tell myself and the people I work with.

You can’t compete with another person‘s limiting beliefs

Sometimes, trying to get someone to receive your love can feel like an impossible mission because they can only interpret that love through their own lens. If they feel unworthy, inadequate, or not good enough, no amount of love you give them will necessarily change how they see themselves. It is not always that your love is insufficient. Sometimes, they simply do not yet know how to recognize, trust, or receive it as something that is safe to surrender into.

Understanding someone may soften the way I hold the story. It may help me release resentment and it reminds me that people are complicated, wounded, unfinished, and human.

Yet, so am I

So are you

Maybe, that’s where we have to start.

Till next time

—Sav 🫶🏽