As my partner Jeff Rediger and I just finished writing about in our book <\/span>Relationsick<\/span><\/i>, compassion might not seem like a health issue, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s only something we extend to other people, forgetting that if we fail to extend compassion to our own \u201cparts,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The body is a trailhead <\/span><\/a>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 <\/span>relationsick<\/span><\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Be the first to learn about what\u2019s in the book <\/span>Relationsick,<\/span><\/i> which won\u2019t come out until April 2026, by joining LOVE SCHOOL, where Jeff and I will be previewing our work on power, health, and relationships. <\/span>JOIN LOVE SCHOOL HERE.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n 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 \u201cSelf-like part,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n When I heard other people ranting about their partners or their bosses or their mother-in-laws, the story I told myself was \u201cThese people just haven\u2019t climbed high enough up the mountain to be capable of stretching themselves into the depths of unconditional love, even when people act very badly.\u201d 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 <\/span>here.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Suffice it to say, I now see Alanis\u2019s 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 \u201cspiritual\u201d lover. (As a side note, Alanis is now an IFS person who wrote the foreword to Dick Schwartz\u2019s book <\/span>No Bad Parts,<\/span><\/a> so I assume that, like me, she\u2019s learned the hard way that the kind of love she sings about isn\u2019t sustainable and enables perpetrators of abuse.)<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cpolarized\u201d and got all judgey with others and failed to stay in non-dual awareness with \u201cwe are all One\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n In some ways, it was true. I <\/span>did<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The problem is that I was exhibiting zero compassion for my own \u201cparts.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I found Internal Family Systems (IFS) at just the right time. About a month before my cousin <\/span>Rebecca Ching <\/span><\/a>told me IFS would be a game changer in my life and my work, I read the shattering \u201cblind compassion\u201d chapter in Robert Augustus Masters book Spiritual Bypassing. I felt busted and disoriented, which led to what Resmaa Menakem calls a \u201cquaking\u201d 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 \u201cspiritual\u201d person.<\/span><\/p>\n I was quaking indeed when I read these words and knew them to be true instantly:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cBlind 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\u2019 behavior and making nice situations that require a forceful \u201cno\u201d, 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.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n 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\u2019t be there if we were being truly loving. Blind compassion reduces us to harmony junkies, entrapping us in unrelentingly positive expression.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n With blind compassion we don\u2019t know how to \u2013 or won\u2019t learn how to \u2013 say \u201cno\u201d with any real power, avoiding confrontation at all costs and, as a result, enabling unhealthy patterns to continue. Our \u201cyes\u201d is then anemic and impotent, devoid of impact it could have if we were also able to access a clear, strong \u201cno\u201d that emanated from our core.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n 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 \u201cBrother, 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.\u201d 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 \u201cStop treating me this way.\u201d It was spiritual bypassing, not real compassion. (We\u2019ll be talking a lot about healing from spiritual bypassing in <\/span>LOVE SCHOOL<\/span><\/a> too.)<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019re feeling remorse and spiraling in shame because we\u2019ve done something awful. But some people are so wounded they don\u2019t 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 \u201cI forgive you,\u201d thinking that\u2019s what \u201cspiritual\u201d people do, turning the other cheek and loving harder.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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\u2019re worth sticking around for. You learn everything about someone the minute you finally stop enabling, appeasing, and complying.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s history and I knew the other stressors weighing in.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t get hurt.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I am so grateful that IFS taught me the \u201chow\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The good news is that I didn\u2019t 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\u2019m 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I have become sturdy, not so easily blown around. I have roots firmly planted in deep earth, so the winds of someone else\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n These sturdy, fierce parts that have my own back dance with the parts that have other people\u2019s backs and extend compassion outwards. Sometimes the tango of compassion means I need to prioritize my own needs over someone else\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re 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\u2019s temporary. If I do that for too long, my own parts start distrusting me. I can tell when I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve extended myself beyond my resourcing and need to pull back.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019m neglecting my own parts for a short time. But only for a short time, and only if the generosity is reasonably reciprocated when I\u2019m the one in need.<\/span><\/p>\n Want to go deeper into how to have compassion without \u201cblind compassion\u201d or spiritual bypassing? You\u2019re invited to join our IFS-informed community of practice for couples and singles healing relational trauma in LOVE SCHOOL.<\/span><\/p>\n JOIN LOVE SCHOOL HERE.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n You\u2019re also welcome to register for these online programs about healing from spiritual bypassing:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Spiritual Bypassing 101<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lissarankin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/is-it-compassion-or-enabling.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nGentle Compassion Vs. Fierce Compassion<\/b><\/h2>\n
Sometimes Compassion Means Saying Goodbye<\/b><\/h2>\n
Unconditional love. Conditional access.<\/b><\/h2>\n
You Get To Keep The Good Stuff<\/b><\/h2>\n
We Have To Practice Compassion- In Community<\/b><\/h2>\n