Ladies, we have a toxic compassion problem

All this caring might be getting out of hand

This is the second article in a series on female relational competence and the irony that women are widely assumed to excel at it while repeatedly displaying behaviours that other people experience as the opposite. The first article argued that women often bypass the work required to build relationships. This one argues that they also bypass the work required to understand another person before acting. The third article will examine how trauma informed thinking contributes to this problem. Together, these articles challenge the enduring assumption that relational competence comes naturally to women.

I’m including myself in this conversation because I’ve corrected people while feeling entirely justified by my intentions and had to examine the aggression behind my own certainty.

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I was once at a talk listening to a woman present her work. During question time, someone stood up and said, “I’d like to push back on something you said.”

“Thank you for your presentation. I really appreciated your perspective. It’s such an important area and I completely understand why you’ve approached it that way. I’ve worked in this field for many years... [long winded explanation of contribution to the field] ...the current thinking has changed considerably. Best practice now encourages us to think differently about the language we use because words have consequences...”

I leaned in, wondering what was going to get challenged. Then I heard, “I just wanted to challenge your use of the phrase...”

I looked around the room expecting at least a few eye rolls. Instead I noticed nodding heads and, might I say, approval from many women in the room.

The challenger was a woman.

You look at enough social media threads and you can't help noticing the pattern. A clinician recently published an article on LinkedIn honouring a world renowned psychiatrist who had dedicated his career to treating treatment resistant depression and had died by suicide. He reflected on his colleague’s death and discussed advances in the field. Women soon filled the comments with repeated objections to the phrase “committed suicide”, turning an article about the psychiatrist’s life and work into a demonstration of female social regulation.

There is a good argument for using died by suicide. The word committed has historically been associated with crime, and suicide reporting can influence people in a vulnerable state. Public health organisations recommend language that reduces stigma and avoids romanticising or sensationalising death. Holly MathNerd provided a convincing evidence-based argument as to why in this case, language actually matters. None of that requires twenty people to make the same correction under one man’s post.

How to Help Men

I won’t comment on the intent behind the article, the quality of its content or the writing itself. There are already plenty of public accusations about typos, poor writing and self-promotion under the post. My focus is on analysing the reaction and the mechanisms driving it, which seemed wildly disproportionate to the language violation.

From his name, where he practises and the way the article is written, he appears to be an older francophone clinician based in France, writing in English as an additional language. Like many English speaking countries, France has gradually shifted away from phrases such as a commis un suicide in favour of alternatives that avoid associations with criminality. Even so, the older expression remains familiar, particularly among older clinicians and in everyday speech.

Committed suicide closely mirrors the traditional French phrasing and is a plausible linguistic transfer rather than evidence that he intended to make a moral statement about suicide. He might have translated the expression he had used for decades without realising that English speaking mental health circles now prefer different terminology. Any of those explanations seems more likely than the idea that a psychiatrist writing respectfully about the death of a colleague and the advances in treating depression intended to stigmatise people who die by suicide.

I've just demonstrated that, with a little curiosity, there were several reasonable hypotheses available before anyone chose to publicly correct him. Despite all that, it’s difficult to see why this required repeated public correction from people who had already seen that several others had made exactly the same point.

Someone could have sent him a private message and likely did. One person could have left a respectful public comment explaining why different language is now preferred and what led to the change (although that might risk qualifying as womansplaining). I imagine that the information would have reached him either way. Instead, woman after woman (and a few men) repeated the correction, thanked one another for making it, responded to other commenters and behaved as though they had become the authorities over his post.

This is the spot of the screenshots from the discussion with identifying details removed illustrating the pattern I’m describing that paid subscribers can see.

If educating the author, and by extension everyone reading the thread, wasn't the primary function of the women’s behaviour, then what was?

The myth of female innate compassion

Women are seen as naturally empathetic, caring, and compassionate, with a great capacity to comfort and soothe, and attuned to the emotional needs of others. Some are fierce protectors of the vulnerable and underdogs, so it’s no surprise that women are overrepresented in social justice activism and advocacy circles. You could say that it’s women who are more sensitive to threats to the wellbeing of others. Because women are seen in this light and are expected to live up to it in many workplaces and social circles, openly questioning these assumptions about these female traits is socially risky.

The women I observed didn’t demonstrate any of these characteristics but did their best to live up to an image of them. These women expressed their concern for vulnerable people (the dead and their survivors), appealed to best practice and expressed a desire to reduce discomfort. The responses attracted approval from other women and reinforced a compassionate identity. They also repeatedly targeted another adult after the informational value of the correction had largely been exhausted, in an effort to protect the dignity of the subject while disregarding the dignity of the author.

I can’t say that women are naturally compassionate, empathetic, caring or kind. Those attributes must be cultivated and aren’t embodied in a sex because that’s what we want to see in ourselves. What women naturally possess is the capacity for anger and aggression when they believe someone has crossed a line.

The behaviour on that thread was covert aggression presented as compassion and advocacy.

Covert aggression

I’ve previously described this form of covert aggression. Women assert dominance without appearing dominant by delivering control through concern, politeness or moral values. The socially acceptable delivery conceals the aggressive attempt to regulate another adult’s actions and perceptions, and makes anyone who objects appear unreasonable.

Skye Sclera makes a useful distinction between anger and aggression. Anger is a feeling that alerts us to a perceived threat, injustice, boundary crossing or rule violation. Aggression is the action we take in response. As people mature emotionally and morally, they learn to separate anger from aggression long enough to decide what the situation calls for and whether acting on their anger will serve a worthwhile purpose.

You Just Want To Be Mad

Women often say they don’t have permission to feel angry when what they mean is that other people resist their aggression. No one can prevent a woman from feeling angry. However, people can object when she uses that anger to reprimand or humiliate someone else, or when she attempts to control them through public shaming and enforced compliance, even if she’s unaware that anger is her fuel.

Aggression has a legitimate protective function. When someone threatens a child or vulnerable person, anger signals a trespass and aggression helps defend the person and restore the boundary. We expect mothers to become fierce when the situation calls for it. Few people object to a woman baring her teeth when someone is trying to harm her child.

The threat on LinkedIn was a French psychiatrist using an outdated phrase.

The women still responded as though something vulnerable required their immediate protection. In their minds, it did. The phrase committed suicide had crossed a boundary around language, dignity and the treatment of people who die by suicide. This was their communal territory, the author had breached the rule, and someone needed to restore order.

Apparently, several someones.

By the time the twentieth woman repeated the correction, the thread displayed the same act from multiple women who knew the rule, accepted the authority behind it and felt entitled or obliged to enforce it.

Public health authorities, mental health organisations and professional bodies give the preferred language its authority. The phrase died by suicide carries more than a wording preference. It represents current knowledge, professional legitimacy and concern for the people the rule claims to protect. Once the language acquires that status, correcting someone can feel like defending something larger and more important than either person in the exchange.

Each woman appealed to that higher authority and borrowed its power to correct the author. She didn’t need to establish her own expertise because the rule spoke through her, almost like a god whose commandments require enforcement and whose moral authority overrides the standing of any individual who speaks differently. The author’s expertise complicated matters because he also carried authority, although his use of the prohibited phrase placed him beneath the authority of best practice in that exchange.

Publicly correcting him protected the norm and affirmed the authority behind it. The correction also diminished him by positioning him as someone who required instruction under his own post. That effect didn’t require a conscious attempt to strip him of authority. It followed from placing the rule above him and treating his language as evidence that his own judgement carried less weight.

Toxic compassion

The women turned protective aggression into toxic compassion when they defended the dignity of people who die by suicide by disregarding the dignity of the person who crossed the boundary. The rule identified who deserved protection, while the man standing in front of them somehow fell outside its jurisdiction.

Toxic compassion also places women in the Rescuer role within Karpman’s Drama Triangle. It assigns the Victim position to people the language might harm and the Persecutor position to the person who used it, giving the Rescuer moral permission to intervene. Rescuing disempowers everyone by treating one group as helpless and another adult as someone who requires correction and control.

They delivered their aggression through concern, professional guidance and advocacy for vulnerable people. Other women rewarded each correction because it enforced the norm, affirmed the authority governing the language and protected the people whom the rule sought to defend. Their mutual approval allowed every woman involved to treat her aggression as faithful service to a higher authority that no caring or informed person should question.

Women rarely call this aggression because the word threatens the identity their actions affirm. Compassionate women don’t imagine themselves controlling other adults. They call it educating, protecting or helping. Toxic compassion allows them to act aggressively while preserving the belief that care drives everything they do.

Humans tend to judge their own actions through access to their intentions. We know what we meant and what we hoped to achieve. The other person encounters what we actually did. A woman can tell herself that she protected people from harmful language. The author faced twenty women publicly reprimanding him under an article he wrote to honour a departed colleague and discuss advances in treating depression.

These expectations shape how women interpret their own behaviour. Women rarely examine the regulatory function of actions they perform in the name of compassion, care, protection and advocacy. While these women focused on the harmful impact of his language, they appeared largely unaware of the impact of their own corrective actions. Like most of us, they were far better at evaluating another person’s behaviour than at examining the impact of their own while they were engaged in it. The same attempt to protect one person’s dignity can diminish another’s.

The distortion appears in the gap between self perception and interpersonal effect. Every woman leaves believing she educated the author, helped everyone reading, and made the discussion safer through the use of approved language. She leaves with her identity as a caring, compassionate, and considerate woman reinforced. Other people see the same behaviour as an attempt to correct, regulate or control them. The distortion protects the woman’s self perception while making it difficult for her to notice the actual effect on others. The stronger the coalition’s approval, the less reason she has to question whether the behaviour achieved what she believed it achieved.

Other women praised the aggression and repeated it. Their approval told each woman that she had acted well and gave her no reason to examine the humiliation or pressure created by the pile on. If the author withdrew or avoided similar conversations in future, the women could interpret his silence as successful education. Toxic compassion removes the feedback that might force someone to confront the aggression in her care.

I know this because I’ve done it too. I’ve corrected people under posts and in conversation while feeling entirely justified by the point I wanted to make. I still have to catch the impulse to let anger propel me into aggression before I’ve made any serious attempt to understand why someone spoke as they did. Anger creates urgency and certainty, and certainty makes curiosity feel unnecessary.

This is how women aggressively police what other people say and then wonder why those people stop discussing certain subjects around them. People quickly learn which interpretations the group permits and which words will bring twenty self appointed educators to the door. No one has to adopt the language the group approves, but beware if you don’t.

Photo by Kyle Hinkson on Unsplash

Compassion competence

This isn’t another piece about women needing to fit themselves into an acceptable mould so that patriarchal systems can accept them. We create and enforce these rules amongst ourselves, then direct aggression at anyone who crosses them. Before crying “The Patriarchy”, we need to examine whether we demand understanding from others while refusing to extend it ourselves, then call our aggression compassion when someone fails to speak in the approved way.

Empathy is a sincere attempt to understand another person’s perspective, context and experience without needing to agree with them or do anything about it.

Compassion responds to what the situation calls for while preserving the humanity and dignity of everyone involved. It draws on empathy and remains rooted in nonjudgment. Compassion can set a hard boundary or deliver an unwelcome truth. The response can seem harsh to the person receiving it without humiliating them or reducing them to an offender who no longer deserves dignity.

Toxic compassion bypasses empathy and responds judgmentally to what someone has said because their words violated an accepted rule. The effort to protect people whom the language might harm then justifies aggression against the person who used it.

We women often want men to listen carefully, understand our perspective and interpret our words within context. We undermine that demand when we assume we already understand a man well enough to correct him without extending the same effort towards understanding him. Show me that you understood what I wrote and the spirit in which I wrote it before telling me how I should have written it.

These women directed their empathy towards the people they imagined the phrase might harm and directed aggression towards the man who used it. They assumed the worst meaning of his language while withholding good intent from a psychiatrist writing respectfully about his colleague’s death.

Protecting one group’s dignity by publicly shaming another person is toxic compassion. A caring identity doesn’t change the aggression, and a compassionate intention doesn’t excuse sacrificing the person standing in front of us.

, when have you been so certain that you were helping that you never stopped to ask about the effect you were having on the person in front of you?

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

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