Compassion Is A Commitment

How To Extend Compassion Without Spiritual Bypassing

Compassion might not seem like a health issue, but it’s intimately tied to the health of the body. Because the body is a trailhead we are invited to walk down when our bodies act up, 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. This post is a prescription for anyone who overgives beyond your resourcing- because you love so much and care so big, even if you harm yourself by being so generous.

Ten years ago, I thought of myself as a compassionate person. I had quite an inflated view of myself, as I look back with some embarrassment and shame. 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 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, the lyrics of which you can read here. Suffice it to say, I now see those 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.

This Self-like part in me also compared me to other people who got angry at these asshats and set boundaries with them and 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. My ability to keep my heart open and gushing with a waterfall of love with 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." 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. Without fierce compassion to back me up, 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.”

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 spirally 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, they turn the other cheek and love 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 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 appeasing and complying.

Sometimes we have to keep our hearts open but pull our precious bodies and hearts away, loving someone from halfway across the world, behind a restraining order, 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.

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.

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.

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 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, they start distrusting me. I can tell when I’ve overstepped my own parts needs 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.

This is what I mean when I say compassion is a commitment.

It's easy for most people I know to have compassion for fuzzy puppies and kids in school shootings and babies in cages at the borders (although clearly, many people don't even have open-hearted empathy when they see these babies crying because they've been ripped from their mamas.) It's much harder to have compassion for the ones who lock up those babies and smash the puppies and shoot up the children.

It’s easy to have compassion for those in our inner circles, but it’s a commitment to have compassion for those who aren’t. We can’t always hack it, because we are human and therefore, by definition, imperfect. But we do our best- and fail- and forget- and then we try to remember again. Over. And over. And over.

Sometimes our traumatized loved ones behave in ways that are confusing and bewildering to us. We try to make sense of it, and fail to make sense sometimes. And then we remember our commitment to compassion, and we try again, and again, and again, without throwing our own parts under the bus ever again, and without remembering that compassion has a fierce face, and sometimes it has to say "No" or "Stop" or "Never again," or sadly, "Goodbye."

Self-led compassion is a tango between inward generosity and outward generosity, self care and other care, self compassion and compassion aimed out. What keeps me coming back is my choice to prioritize the people in my inner circle, without losing sight of the people in my outer circle, including the strangers I'll never meet but are still part of my human family. I cannot commit to extending compassion to every single human on the planet personally because I don't have the bandwidth. But I can choose who I am committed to doing this compassionate tango with- my internal family system, my external family system, my chosen family, and beyond those people, a more nebulous, transpersonal kind of compassion and care for others who suffer and others who cause suffering, an activist's compassion that cannot fully settle until injustices are equalized and avoidable suffering has stopped- not just because we have compassionate feelings, but because of sacred activism, compassionate action, compassion with feet.

What does it mean to practice Self-led compassion as a commitment and a choice? In actuality, it looks like this for me personally, although it is vastly different for everyone. Right now, I'm scheduled to go to Boston on Wednesday to spend two weeks with my partner Jeff. When I scheduled the trip months ago, it seemed like a good plan, since my daughter will be gone on vacation with her father during spring break one of those weeks and I hate being away from my beloved Jeff. My daughter was on board to have me gone one of the weeks, when both her mother and father would be gone, and she'd stay with April, our housemate, who has been in Mira's life for over ten years.

But now things have changed. Mira is needing her mother more in this post-pandemic moment of today. I'm supporting a dear friend through a very difficult surgical recovery. And the longing, missing, in love parts of me that are Jeff sick when we're apart are less dominant than the parts of me that are homesick for my loved ones in California when I'm in Boston.

But Jeff has a lot of needs right now too, cleaning up some difficult stuff in his life that needs a lot of attention, which I've been helping project manage and cheerlead. I have caregiving parts that don't want to let down Jeff, and I have caregiving parts that don't want to let down Mira or my post-op friend.

I also have parts that just want to be in California during springtime, when the wildflowers are in bloom and the atmospheric rivers are finally ending and the last days of Dungeness crab season are still here. I have parts that want to meander through wildflowers and not be in cold dreary Boston, parts that want to settle my nervous system with redwoods when Trump has been indicted and Putin is hell bent on destroying the world and children are shooting up children and airports just feel scary to my homebody young parts that want to cocoon at home with all the wreckage out there.

So how does one commit to compassion in these kinds of everyday moments? How do we make decisions that extend compassion first to our own parts, then to those in our inner circle, then to the wider community beyond our little tribes? Sometimes my parts are copacetic, and they don't need much generosity, and they let me be extremely generous outwards, even if someone else is misbehaving a bit. Other times, I need to boundary against everyone else's needs and go inwards for a time, tending to my own needs and protecting my young parts from my caregiving parts' tendency to prioritize others more than I prioritize myself.

Other times my parts are calm, the needs of my loved ones are met, and I have a whole chunk of compassion and generosity and bandwidth and space to extend towards strangers I've never met, as I do when I work on my Heal At Last non-profit project or when I post things like this, in case it helps you, dear reader. Sometimes I can handle being generous with strangers and being nourished by that kind of compassion while also tending to my own needs and the needs of my loved ones.

Sometimes I max out and can't handle being that compassionate for the suffering that extends beyond my immediate world. Then other parts feel guilty that I have the privilege to care only about myself and my inner circle if I'm in overwhelm, without being worried I'll be bombed or killed by police brutality or not get food for dinner or get the shit beat out of me by some authoritarian abuser who sees me as less than human because I am a woman. And I try to extend compassion to that part too.

Some days I am compassionate with total strangers and absolutely neglectful of myself. Sometimes my activism causes me to ignore my inner circle and neglect my own needs. That's more likely than me overly tending to my own parts or my inner circle- because doctors are brainwashed into thinking the needs of total strangers matter more than the needs of their own body temples or the needs of their family and friends, who give us a hall pass because we're busy saving lives. It took ten years of therapy for me to start to turn that pattern around, but I still struggle with those parts that will throw me and my loved ones under the bus because someone I've never met cries "Help!"

I seek to practice Self-led compassion now, not the "blind compassion" I was practicing ten years ago. With Self-led compassion, the "goal" (if there is one) is to put our own oxygen masks on first, tending to the needs of our parts before reflexively caring for others. But in reality, it's a daily struggle not to let my martyr parts take the lead until I get resentful, and that's my cue to do the "You-turn," turning my compassion back towards myself until I'm grateful once more for the opportunity to serve and fulfill my calling.

Compassion is a commitment. And sometimes I slack off and need to call another IFS friend to have a good rant before I can find my way to genuine compassion for us all. And that's okay too. Because all trauma deserves our compassion, as long as our compassion has teeth and heart and claws and screams and a firm HELL NO and a whole lot of gushy softness in between.

*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.

*Art credit, Entering the Portal of Compassion, Shiloh Sophia