Break Away from Idiot Compassion: Let Your Fierce Flag Fly
Hi there. Welcome to One Day You Finally Knew: A Podcast for Folx Breaking Away. I'm your host, Jessica Chasnoff. And I am thrilled to be here. A partner walking alongside you, as we explore and uncover what no longer serves us and how we might be able to let those things go and set them down. Let's see where our walk takes us today.
Hello there. I kind of want to say, hello, my pretties, because I'm thinking a lot about witches these days in the midst of, I believe what is often called "spooky season". Of course, the way that I'm thinking of witches, is not so much in the Halloween sense, uh, but more about women who were deeply tuned in to nature and bridging divinity and the earth, put on trial for being witches, hanged, and burned, and all of those unsavory experiences that a woman might have to go through for living her truth. And here we are. Another episode of this podcast, which is about breaking away from what is not our truth. So I could have concocted a whole episode about being witchy and priestess work, which has been on my mind personally, along my own personal journey. But instead, I'm going to stick with a theme that I've been thinking about for the past couple of weeks, which is actually a big part of the work that I do with my clients. This will come up a lot. And this is the idea of offering true compassion.
Which can be fierce. Which is the opposite of idiot compassion. Which is really about enabling someone to continue to misbehave. We are a culture of enablers here, really. We tend to be. There's all the catchwords, like co-dependent and all of that. But really, there's this way that we have been taught" be nice".
" Don't make any conflict. Don't rock the boat". What I heard a lot of growing up was "roll with the punches". I got that one a lot. What kind of fascinates me about that is that, in my matrilineage, there is a genetic predisposition for spinal stenosis. And that is when the spine becomes arthritic and starts choking off the spinal cord, which can lead to not just pain but also paralysis and a lot of other really difficult and painful symptoms.
So I've kind of always found that fascinating on my journey of, um, discovering, uncovering really, and then rediscovering my truth. How "roll with the punches" doesn't sit well with my body. I actually don't think it's sat well with the body of any of my ancestors in my matrilineage.
What it's like to be able to stand up and have this spine and come from that place of bold, uprightness, and regality. Is that a word? Regality? Regalness? Regality? Okay. Well, grammagical. If that's not a word, I'm going to use it. Regality. And what it would offer the spine and spinal cord and the blood supply and all of the nerve endings, to not roll with punches being thrown. Anyway, that's something I think about a lot in terms of my inner work and my own somatic experiences.
And so, this idea that we're not supposed to be boat-rockers. Girls and women and bodies that look like what we believe are girls and women should not rock the boat. We should play nice. So what happens is that leads to not actually being truly compassionate with people because instead of saying, "Hey, you know, I'm not going to enable you to continue to do this". We instead
choose to not create conflict, to not make waves, and also thinking that by giving the person what they want, that somehow that's being kind and compassionate, when really it's the opposite. So I'm gonna use a personal experience and then talk a little bit about a client's experience.
And then as always, make this your own and bring it into your own life and see how it feels to let it simmer in you and potentially use it. You might be hearing, I have this noisy little teacup and saucer and spoon. They're my grandmother's teacups, though. They are tiny and adorable and so sweet to drink tea out of them.
First, to just talk about this personal example, I'm going to talk a little bit about the person who coined the term, "idiot compassion". Once again, idiot compassion is not true compassion because we're enabling someone to keep creating harm or some kind of unkindness. The term was coined by a very brilliant meditation teacher from Tibet who brought the Tibetan Buddhist teachings and meditation to the west.
His name is Chogyam Trungpa. I've said this before. You know me well enough by now to know that I do my absolute best not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Uh, and I think that many of Chogyam Trungpa's teachings are quite insightful, incredibly useful. Highly applicable in life. I still believe that his book "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" is an excellent book for every shelf. I also want to say though that under his umbrella of "crazy wisdom" there were a lot of abuses within his community. Like so many gurus we see. I'm not saying there aren't women gurus who abuse their students. But we do see a lot of sexual abuse with male gurus. It seems like there's, yet another story of some (long sigh) dude, up in a high position who has managed to abuse his power by sexually harassing or assaulting female students. I absolutely believe that went on from the very beginning in this lineage and the community he created has been in the news relatively recently for the holder of the lineage, his son, known as the Sakyong, who also was abusing students. Sexually assaulting women.
So, that's painful stuff. I was part of this community for a while. Several years back. Actually got quite involved in it. I, I went on retreats and took part in their programs and their version of a Buddhist seminary. This is back when I was identifying as a Buddhist. I don't call myself a Buddhist now, though, I really do appreciate so many of the tenets of Buddhism. What starts at the tippy top trickles down all the way. And so, in my own community, when I, not only witnessed and suspected, but when it was brought to my attention by young women in the community that there was an elder who was clearly showing himself to be a sexual predator and I brought that to the elders in my town's branch of this community, they enabled this person to continue to misbehave.
So, here we have the bringer of the teachings, who talked about idiot compassion, and unfortunately, that was what I saw happening in this community. This guy wasn't really put through much, it was more of a discussion. When the decision was handed down that this predator was going to remain in the community that's when I decided that I needed to leave. I don't have any regrets about that and have moved on in my spiritual unfoldment. Yeah. So, you know, talk about "do as I say, not as I do", unfortunately, I think that that is something sometimes that happens in all kinds of communities and we really need to watch out for them.
I was trying to bring true compassion to this situation. True compassion would have looked like, "okay, this is what's been brought to our attention. We believe these young women. There are consequences. Here's what they are. There was none of that. I can't know this for sure, but I am quite certain that if this individual is still within the community, that he continues to predate on women, which is deeply disturbing. And, of course, not a surprise.
We've all encountered situations where the belief is we're being compassionate. We're giving love to this person by letting them know that they can basically do whatever they want. That's the idiot compassion piece. The true compassion piece is "you've been misbehaving. That doesn't mean that you're any less worthy of love or don't have a kernel of basic goodness in you because everyone does. And there's consequences for your actions".
This is something that we can apply in all aspects of our lives. I was thinking about some examples to bring in. This particular example is not attached to a client. This is the example I often give to clients, which is... so you're a parent and you have this adult child who has been abusing substances. They have lost their job. They have no place to stay and they're really spiraling.
And so of course, a parent doesn't want to lose their child. But, if the parent, out of fear, says come back and live at home. You can stay here with us, and does not make any demands, then that is not true compassion. That basically is I need to assuage potential guilt from my child becoming houseless. Right. So I'll give them a place to stay. Okay. That actually enables them to continue to misbehave because we're not looking at the root issues.
If the parent were to say, okay, you can come stay with us. You're going into therapy. You're gonna go to a narcotics anonymous meeting every day. This is how we're going to check-in. This is what we're going to do. You're going to be applying for jobs. It's like, okay, I love you. I see your basic goodness. I know that you can get through this. I trust that. I trust that wisdom inside of you. And I'm not going to enable you to continue to misbehave. And so this is the system that we're gonna set up.
That is true compassion. And again, it can be fierce. It can be saying, in no uncertain terms, I'm not gonna let you harm yourself, harm others. At least not in front of me. I'm not going to take part in that anymore. I'm not going to collude with your behavior.
Okay. As you can imagine, this can come up and just about any relationship that we have. It makes me think of a client that I worked with who was having some real challenges with her partner. Really loved this person. She found herself tolerating his infidelity, even though it was not part of the agreement of their marriage, that they would be going outside of the marriage for sexual partners. I don't call it infidelity unless the agreement between parties is that the relationship is monogamous. In their case, it was.
So, she would catch him cheating. He would say that he would change. Things would look good for a while. He would do what she asked him to do. Yet it never stopped and she really didn't want the relationship to end, clearly. I suspected that at some point it was going to have to, if she was going to have her highest dreaming. But, if somebody is coming in and they really want to stay with their person, then you know, I'm going to support them in what they want. As best as I can.
I don't know what's best for people. Though, I, I did not think that she was in touch with her strengths, that she'd realize that she did not need to be with this person. And I just trusted that she would come to that knowing when the timing was right. But in the meantime, we just do what we can and we work with what we can. So we continued to work with each other through times that he was on his best behavior. In times that he would slip. She really felt that she was being loving and compassionate by allowing him to stay. Giving him more chances, believing him when he said he was working on it, that it wouldn't happen again. But when we were able to look at how it's not actually truly compassionate when we allow someone to continue harmful behavior, that shifts things a little bit.
We got curious about what would happen if she let him know that she wasn't going to enable his behavior anymore and that he could make a choice about what he was gonna do. It was really beautiful how over time, she was able to come to this space inside of herself where she could be okay with whatever that choice was going to be. That takes time and that takes work. So the way that she approached it with him, the final time was to say,
you have gone outside our marriage. I have set this precedent that I will forgive you and take you back and trust that you're not going to do it again, but you continued to do it. I'm not willing to do that anymore. We made an agreement when we married that we were going to be monogamous and that works for me, but the data is showing, that doesn't work for you. And so you have a choice. You can decide that you want to keep the agreement of the marriage, which is that it is a monogamous arrangement, or because I don't want to keep you from doing what you are needing to do, I am going to end our agreement.
What I love about this is, we're just talking about the nuts and bolts of it. Here's the agreement. You've gone outside the agreement. If that's something you want to continue to do, then we gotta dissolve the agreement. Her work was fierce and tender self-compassion. That is what brought her to the place where she could be fiercely compassionate with him. Self-care practices. The cultivation of self-compassion. And by the way, Kristin Neff has done this amazing research over the years. Any paper you see, any publication that you see that has self-compassion research in it is basically going to be tied back to Kristin Neff. She has a couple of great books. I will link them in the show notes.
The reason why I talk so much about self-care and talk about the importance of self-compassion is because that is the ground for us to make decisions around breaking away from something that isn't serving us. And it's also the way that we can offer somebody else true compassion rather than idiot compassion. That's why I am so into it. And why I really encourage you to try these practices. When we talk about the hand on the heart or just gently speaking to yourself, that's cultivating self-compassion. That kernel in you grows into something so strong that you can be fiercely compassionate with someone else.
So she put it to him this way, my client, and he was like, "oh, yes. Yes, of course, I'm gonna keep our agreement". Right. And he did not. And she was done. Her internal journey around that made it so that when she came at him with this warrior sword, she was just cutting through it. We talk about Kali . Goddess. Destroyer. She's a Hindu goddess. She's often depicted, she has the head of a man in one arm. I mean, it's powerful stuff. And so she cuts through the nonsense. My client's ability to be tender and also fierce with herself.
Like, how many times am I going to go through this? Is he going to change? Well, if he doesn't keep the agreement, we can't go on. And so she was ready for that. Of course, it was painful. They'd been married for many years. But she was also ready for it. Being ready for something doesn't mean that it's not painful when it happens. It just means that that readiness carries us through to a place of completion and it carries us through to our next level of mastery. Okay.
Certainly, if this is something that you've already done, applaud yourself for it because it's good, hard work. And if there is something that you realize requires this fierce compassion, this true compassion, and that it's actually been that enabling, that idiot compassion that has been guiding you, get curious about how you can shift that. Because you absolutely can. You absolutely can. Okay. So that's a little primer on the different kinds of compassion. I will look forward to this time with you next week..
Thank you so much for listening today. If you are enjoying this podcast, please consider writing a review and giving it a five-star rating. That can make the podcast more visible to others who might benefit. And if you are wanting to connect with me, I would love it. My contact info and socials are in the show notes.