The Fallacy of “Be Kind Anyway”
When you have been abused by someone, you self-abandon when you choose to stay and make it okay for them.
Being in an abusive relationship, whether it is an emotionally, sexually, verbally, or emotionally one can make even the most confident, happy person second-guess themselves. We are taught that we should be kind to people no matter what; that hurt people are lost and hurting, so be gentle and patient. Do things to send them love so that they will learn to be more loving and be better overall. This, unfortunately, is not really how it works for the most part.
I am someone who knows the value and the strength of how love can change someone. I am fortunate to have had this kind of love in my life at certain times. When someone loves and adores us, is consistent, shows up, has our back, and supports us, it is easy to feel lovable. This can help you straighten up a little more, feel confident, and know your worth. This depends on who you are and how ready you are to be changed by love into love. However, for many trauma survivors, the need to “be kind anyway” comes from a place of fear. It comes from wanting to be loved and cared for so much that we overlook and downplay how abused we are being. We hope that the person we are “forgiving” time and again will eventually wake up and see the good they actually have in us. Maybe they will eventually notice how we always care and always forgive their bad behaviors.
This usually starts in childhood with a caregiver who relied and depended on us too much to take care of their feelings and needs because they hadn’t been given the right kind of attention and love as children by their caregivers. Often, they are in relationships with emotionally unavailable people and guess what? Young children are FILLED with lots of emotional availability for their parents. They make for the perfect surrogate spouse (which is called emotional incest, by the way, and it is NOT okay). People are often quite starved of love in our world. Children need a lot of time, love, and attention. They need encouragement, celebration, hugs, to be read to and interacted with. They need to be seen and understood. They need their caregivers to be available to them 24/7. They need to sleep, eat healthy food, and play at regular times each day. It is a full-time job and many parents cannot do this. This isn’t because they don’t want to. Some parents believe that giving children this much attention will “give them a big head” and so they purposely deny their children what they need to function and thrive. Some people who were spanked or hit believe this is the best way to make a child obedient. These issues, as you might be able to tell, only cause a great deal of unworthiness and shame for a child and he grows up to need, as an adult, what he wasn’t given as a child. These childhood needs don’t go away. They had to be given at the appropriate time and in the appropriate dosing. If the child didn’t get it, he will search for it in his adult relationships.
So, when a child who was emotionally abused grows up having been belittled, manipulated, criticized, competed with, controlled, and restricted by his caregiver, his emotional needs were not met and, in fact, he was taught to believe that unless he is following someone else’s very strict agenda, he is not a good person. He might even be raged at, called names, or hit if he does not always cater to his caregiver’s strict orders. This will add even more shame and false beliefs about being selfish and wrong for choosing his own desires or needs. He will stuff these beliefs far down with a layer of shame on top of them to freeze them into place and remind him that when he chooses to do anything his own way and follow his own North Star, he is a bad boy. He is forced to deny himself. Then, unless he does his inner work, he will do what he was taught and repeat the behaviors. Without much self-awareness, a person will simply repeat what their parents taught them because that’s all they know. And, in their mind, they turned out okay so why not repeat the behaviors? Besides, shame and the inner critic with the abusive parent’s voice will stay in charge in the boy’s mind and thoughts and beliefs to make sure he always does the “right” things.
Likewise, you could be a child who feels the need to self-abandon and pretzel yourself in order to make your emotionally abusive parent feel okay and loved and nurtured or you will have to live with the consequences of the guilt and shame you feel for being “selfish” for not meeting their needs. When you grow up, you will also repeat this pattern in your adult relationships because this is how you learned to get any amount of love or attention. It was not healthy love, but it was better than being ostracized and criticized (or worse) in your family home. Children also need to feel safe, loved, and to belong and be accepted, so making sure these needs are met might mean they learn to people please to get these needs met. In their adult relationships, they get to be the ones who “forgive no matter what.” Even though they may have been raised by someone who was similar to the example above, they may not necessarily become the one who is restrictive and controlling or belittling, but instead they become the one who is “approachable” and “chill” even if they are being take advantage of. They are the one everyone goes to when they have problems, but no one ever seems to want to help them with theirs. So, they decide not to have problems and to just be the “strong” one for everyone else. As soon as they have a problem, they watch the people they have supported and helped scatter like cockroaches in a light-filled kitchen. And boy do those suckers run FAST! This person also will continue on in this pattern if they do not have self-awareness or do their inner work.
Depending on your reactions to your abuse, you can become someone who attacks yourself, who attacks others, who retreats and avoids conflicts, or who fawns and people pleases. Anything goes, really. These are fight or flight reactions your nervous system expresses in order to somehow activate away from the abuse and trauma and keep us safe. When we stay in a situation where we feel like, unless we are doing everything we can to help, to fix, to rescue, to make the other happy even when we are not being treated well and we are not very happy, we make the mistake of telling ourselves, “Be kind anyway.” And who exactly are we being kind to? It’s certainly not us. We self-abandoned as children to make sure we did not get abused worse. And now, as adults, we are repeating the pattern with people who treat us the way our abusive caregivers treated us. Have you stopped to notice this in your life?
Now, you get to change this pattern. You get to be free of being in any situation that leaves you feeling empty, lonely, hurting, sad, and like a bad or selfish person. You get to step away from feeling wrong for who you are, how you feel, what you say, and what you do. You are a grown up now. You don’t need to be treated like a bad child in your adult relationships.
Adult relationships work best when both people have done their inner work. They have done therapy, trauma recovery coaching, or some kind of self-work. When two people join together in wholeness it happens because the two people have healed their toxic patterning from their childhoods and they love themselves and accept who they are to a pretty great degree. There is no perfect. No one is perfect. But people who are whole enough to be able to show up consistently, honestly, not wanting to play games, be as transparent as possible, have each other’s backs, validate one another, and who choose to openly communicate and not hide their flaws from their partner are in a special place for real and true love to come in.
Your caregivers did the best they could. There is always a time and place for true forgiveness if you choose to give that. But, please know that you were hurt. And you having compassion for yourself now will allow you to have even more compassion for those who hurt you. After you heal your wounding, you learn that nothing is personal. But when we jump to forgive our abusers too soon without taking into account our own pain from what happened, we lose the opportunity to truly heal ourselves. Healing and loving ourselves is our main job on this planet. This is the only way we can live in harmony as a species. Pretending your caregivers were perfect and never hurt you only hurts you and your future generations. It keeps you in denial and away from your true feelings and your true self. It will keep you feeling lonely and isolated, too.
Being kind is a beautiful gift that should not be dismissed. However, “being kind anyway” when you are being harmed is not kind to you and allows your abuser to continue abusing. It is a way to dismiss and bypass your true feelings and pain. Hold your abuser accountable so that he or she can get the help they need to love themselves and stop abusing if they want to. It is their choice. Know that all of us are capable of changing and growing if we decide to do so. It is not your responibility to take away your abuser’s pain simply because you love them. They are causing you pain because they don’t love themselves and when people don’t love themselves, they can’t truly love anyone else, including you. This is only attachment love, not true love.
Come and find your freedom to be happy again! Contact me today for help with this!
