Selfish Empathy, Noble Ruthlessness

Part 3 of How To Fight Your Family

This is Part Three of the series “How to Fight Your Family.” Once they’re uploaded, you can read the first installment here, the second here, and the fourth here.

In Part One, we discussed five principles for fighting wisely. They are:

1. Be Prepared

2. Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally

3. Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

4. Fight to Win

5. Integrity Is A Win You Can Always Guarantee

In this essay, we’ll be exploring the third principle. Enjoy.

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Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

Instinct and Virtue

It was inevitable, when empathy became a weapon in our eternal culture war, that its existence and utility as a virtue would one day become contested. We bludgeon others with accusations of heartlessness when we perceive them to be lacking in empathy, and we glory in our own performative refusal to empathize, when we’ve determined it would be “suicidal” or overly self-sacrificing. Never mind that the concept has a slippery, nebulous multiplicity of definitions, or the wide gulf between its folk version and its refined, skillful form (a characteristic it shares with all other virtues.) Culturally, we are surrounded by empathy’s many proponents and detractors, each of them outraged and accusing, each in the grips of a darkly-amusing certainty that precludes true connection with the other.

So let’s get precise: the definition for empathy that I will use in this essay is the ability to semi-accurately model what another person is feeling, both cognitively (rationally) and affectively (emotionally, to guess what they are feeling, and feel it along with them.) It’s a refined form of sympathy - the simple, natural human fellow-feeling, but a more primitive form of compassion, a holding of space for another’s suffering.

In most cases, I don’t believe that weaponizing empathy is an example of fighting wisely. Neither is foregoing it completely. I do believe that engaging empathy in a selective, discriminating manner is a necessary component of skillful confrontation - especially when you are deeply bonded with your opponent, as with your family or spouse. And most importantly, I believe that engaging in true empathy - not a performative sympathetic distress, nor a self-destructive abandonment of one’s own needs and boundaries - is crucial for generative conflict - the kind of fighting that strengthens and sustains relationships over the long run.

It takes real effort, moral imagination and education to master empathy. And it takes real courage, because it means confronting a harsh reality about the human instinct to fawn. Fawning - a nervous system response to stress - is a basic building block of our social behavior that greater society misunderstands as healthy and prosocial. Perhaps less well-known than its more famous relatives, fight and flight, it’s a fundamental human behavior in which we attempt to placate and please those we perceive to be powerful. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere. It’s an unremarkable feature of social relations: being a bit over-polite, laughing a little too loud at other’s jokes, being a little too attuned to the emotional fluctuations of others, especially those we perceive to be important. It’s the foundation of charm, and pervades every thin, rushed apology, every insincere forgiveness, every flattering exaggeration and elision of flaw we use to ingratiate ourselves to the successful, or soothe and inflate the egos of those we pity.

Most of us find that fawning feels gracious and even magnanimous to engage in, and (temporarily) pleasing to receive from others. Shaping it toward a useful institutional end is a critical component of American early childhood socialization, and when it develops over years in the context of rigid hierarchy, it becomes an extraordinary social tool, wielded by the highest of high society, the most alluring sexual icons, and the most dynamic executives, lawyers and politicians.

But because it is based, at its root, in fear - and because all boundaries in consciousness, fundamentally, are made of fear - fawning is always and everywhere a near enemy of the truth.

The Compulsive Fawner

Fight Wise is, first and foremost, an assertiveness training course. Most of the people who take it are constitutional fawners, which is to say, this is their most common, habitual response to social stress. Most of them have experienced that, in times of extraordinary stress and difficulty, the reality-distorting nature of fawning becomes profoundly self-defeating. Automatic fawners cave when they don’t need to, abandon their own interests and positions in order to please others, and struggle with powerful anxiety at the thought of someone they love being angry or upset with them. They talk themselves out of communicating their needs, and may even come to stigmatize and hate their own needs, rather than risk displeasing the people in their lives. At its most extreme end, when it becomes neurotic, fawning can mean accepting responsibilities we are incapable of discharging, seducing people who we do not truly want to have sex with, and even making life-altering relationship choices we don’t truly desire, for reasons we can’t bring ourselves to understand.

Women, in particular, find fawning easy and natural, for a variety of cultural and biological reasons. We socialize them to prefer this response to fear, and it’s also, often, the most graceful response to situations involving their frightening physical differential with men. (Unfortunately, women often fawn without understanding the self-destructive way it recapitulates the dynamics of childhood in their adult relationships, and can accidentally distort the concept of maleness in their mind as something rigidly, globally superior to themselves.)

But fawning is not purely a gendered phenomenon - anyone with a sufficiently frightening parent or older sibling likely learned to fawn in the pre-memory years of life. They were incentivized and trained, however unconsciously, to develop an attunement to the heightened emotions of more powerful people. This means that longtime fawners have often developed an exquisite skill for empathy. They have an extraordinary, preverbal ability to model what another person is feeling, and can predict potential relationship ruptures with incredible precision.

You might expect such a prodigious empathy, so widely distributed in the population, to produce an army of saints. And perhaps it would, if it were not also poisoned by ancient anxiety: a profound relic of early attachment system damage that precludes the ability to trust. Because compulsive fawners head off most conflict before it can erupt (and tend to end the rare conflicts they can’t avoid with spectacular, pent-up wrath), they are rarely able to master the advanced stages of relationship conflict. They don’t experience the special repair, growth and sacred bonding that uniquely strengthens relationships in the wake of a healthy breach. And so they struggle to both fight and remain in connection at the same time, with both themselves and their opponent. They don’t learn to establish the durable boundaries - and healthy respect - that carves out the distance at which they can best deepen into intimacy.

This is the great irony of empathy that is poisoned by fear: its possessor is damned to obsess over extraordinarily intimate minutiae of their loved ones’ behavior, but never to experience that intimacy for themselves. Because they vastly over-privilege others in their lives, and refuse to fight on their own behalf, they never achieve the closeness and depth of love that only comes about in the wake of well-bounded, wholehearted emotional violence.

Each person who can’t bring themselves to trust in the repair that follows rupture has a different reason that brought them there. But to an individual, almost all of them become masters of the art of people pleasing: Making themselves gentle, attractive, pleasing, overly generous, sometimes even seductive, all in the service of peacemaking and self-protection.

Let us set aside a few things here: that fawning often requires a litany of flattering lies and half-truths - a compromise of one’s own integrity, a betrayal of one’s perception, and abandonment of the self. That, beneath the veneer of kindly diplomacy and self-sacrifice is a Machiavellian sensibility that placates the temporary intensity of an emotional person - who may or may not be righteously upset - in order to wrest a quiet control over them. And finally, let us set aside the fact of fawning’s general ineffectiveness. Or have you not yet noticed that people-pleasing does not, in the long run, ever really please people?

In a more conciliatory tone: All human beings fawn, as a consequence of our hierarchical nature. It is a Jurassic behavior, preserved over the aeons by our oldest and crudest brain structures. One could call it an original sin, if one were religiously inclined. The evils it causes are not consciously undertaken. They are the inevitable results of this instinctive response, and the entire interconnected context of savoir-faire that springs from it. That is, the subtle dishonesty, pleasantry and faux-selflessness that constitutes much of the foundation of social reality. Nietzsche called this slave morality, and David Foster Wallace called it the water that we swim in. Unconscious social masking - reflexive, pre-emptive fawning - is so widespread, so unremarkable, such a part of our daily collective rituals that, perversely, we can feel inauthentic when we are not inauthentic in this way.

And yet, widespread as it is, fawning is not prosocial, not authentic, not virtuous. It is chemically identical to a growl. And it is certainly not sustainable - one can only wear a mask of vulnerability in a relationship for so long, until the burden of self-suppression ferments into resentment and becomes a hidden, roiling rot.

A Noble Ruthlessness

Empathy is a crucial component of nobility. This is not a religious encomium, this is a truth that warriors have lived by for millennia. There is nothing weak about the ability to imagine one’s self in another’s position - this is the ancient foundation of the military sciences, the fundamental skill of strategy. Sun Tzu is clear in The Art of War when he writes, “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

No, what separates empathy from perfidy is a secret, saintly vitamin that vitalizes common fellow-feeling into genuine compassion: ruthlessness. It’s perhaps a strange thing to read, that ruthlessness is required for true kindness. Doesn’t that word mean precisely the lack of pity, the lack of compassion? Well, yes, and perhaps this is how you know that it’s true: in proper mystical fashion, it’s precisely the union of opposites that constitutes the Real. The loss of compassion bounds compassion, and therefore gives it definition. There is no differentiation without boundaries. And so we come to it: Without strategic, skillful ruthlessness, one’s sympathetic feeling toward other humans is unbounded, quite literally deranged, in the old psychoanalytic parlance. Without boundaries, empathy becomes poisoned with anxiety, and reverts to its more primitive, perverse, manipulative version.

Skillful compassion, then, requires a noble ruthlessness. More plainly: a willingness to inflict small ego injuries in the service of preventing great relationship wounds. It’s the willingness to speak a hard truth that causes another person temporary pain, thus sparing them long-term suffering. It’s the willingness to discipline an unruly child, the courage to enforce a boundary, the stark honesty to dispense with insincere pleasantry and have a difficult conversation that lets the truth come to light. It’s the ability to cleanly, pitilessly end a romance rather than drag it out, disappear, or end the affair in another messy, cowardly way - thereby making it far easier for both parties to heal and move on.

Ruthlessness is the ability to feel the fullness of sympathy, and do the right thing anyway. To be selfish with your empathy - to stop considering the other person’s emotions and needs in one situation, in order to preserve your ability to be compassionate toward them in a larger or more important context. Those of us who are constitutional fighters (I’m a hothead at heart) struggle with an enormous burden of guilt when we stop to consider the needs and feelings of others, and so we often selfishly suspend empathy out in order to fight effectively. We go into “killer robot mode.” This sometimes remains necessary when our opponent is intransigent or dishonest, or the stakes have risen high enough.

But compulsive fawners tend to do the opposite - they tend to be so attuned to others’ distress that they automatically repress their own needs, sometimes before awareness of those needs has even broken through to consciousness. They subconsciously transform the person before them into a much more powerful figure, placing them on a pedestal, or ascribing imaginary capabilities and responsibilities to them that they don’t have (and likely would never willingly take on.) The fawner starts perceiving their own needs and requests as unreasonable before they’ve even been asked to compromise.

In short, they harbor a deep-seated belief, internalized long ago, that the price of love is to abandon themselves, and they begin unconsciously preparing to pay it. It doesn’t matter whether someone has demanded this of them or not. The nervous system has its long-held shape, and if the impulse doesn’t break through to consciousness, the energy will flow into the neurons that offer it the least resistance.

This means that, in order to surface this, we must open up a space around the fawn response - a brief gap in between stimulus and response where we can choose a noble ruthlessness instead of a suicidal sympathy. To accomplish this, we must learn to stand, steadfast, in the sense of the self.

How To Fight As A Fawner

The fawn response is a special kind of nervous system response - one that activates both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems at the same time. At low levels, this can be fine, and even feel pleasant - hence how a people-pleaser can go years or decades without realizing that their behavior is a problem for them. It’s often extreme situations that tip them off that something is wrong. Extremely high stress that causes a hyperstimulated reaction in both the PNS and the SNS creates a dissociated feeling of unreality - also known as a dorsal vagal state. From the inside, this feels surreal or strange, perhaps like you’re watching yourself in a movie, or playing yourself with a hidden video game controller. You may start to think of yourself in terms of “us" - the disembodied entity that feels like “I” and the embodied entity that feels like “me.” You might have thoughts like, “this isn’t happening to me,” or have the pervasive sense that what you’re saying and doing isn’t coming from you, but from a mysterious elsewhere. And - crucially - this will all feel quite disturbing.

The first and most important step in learning to control the fawn response is to learn how stand firm in the sense of yourself at the beginning of the conflict, long before you approach a dorsal vagal state, and to never, not once, willingly leave it. This means your attention is on your own experience - your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, and anytime you catch yourself lost in another person’s experience - whether trying to manage it or simply to analyze it - you gently return your attention to yourself.

This will mean some ruthlessness at the beginning, as you learn to balance your attention on yourself and others. It may come as a surprise and a shock to the people in your life who are used to the overly apologetic, deferent, meek version of you. You do not need to manage this in them. Let your first act of noble ruthlessness be letting your adult loved ones be adults. They can take it.

When it comes to holidays with your family, especially at first, it is more important to be present, rooted in yourself, than to be empathetic. If you can empathize with your parents and siblings without losing your sense of self, do so. If you can’t, do not focus on their needs. Be willing to be clumsy and cold about this if necessary. If you must consider others’ needs, do so rationally, or not at all.

This is not a license to be antisocial or cruel, or to pursue your own wants at the expense of others. Rather, it’s a choice to prioritize your integrity, and the integrity of your loved ones, over your other competing needs. This is the compassionate application of ruthlessness: being willing to settle for no one getting their way, for no one being pleased, so long as everyone walks away whole.

Take nothing that isn’t yours, give nothing that isn’t theirs, hold fast, and trust the repair that inevitably follows rupture.

Standing In The Self

Beyond the upcoming holidays, recovering your sense of a whole, present, centered self may take months or years of dedicated practice. This is made much more difficult by the present of smartphones and other ubiquitous distractions that pull us into hyper-absorbing, hyper-stimulating out-of-body experiences. The fascination of entertainment induces an artificial hysteria in us by offering us an artificial transcendence that quietly simulates the defense mechanism of repression. The average American now willingly chooses to lose themselves in distraction and ignorance for many hours per day, almost none of which they will later remember. We now spend the majority of our lives distracted, dissociated and repressed, and only experience brief moments of presence with the actuality of our lives.

I will not sit on a Substack throne and lecture you about the dangers of screen time. I am, myself, absorbed in media for many hours a day, despite my devotion to meditation and self-work. I only raise the point in case it was not obvious to you that every inessential moment spent in dissociated, distracted screen absorption is working against your efforts to put the world back together, to stand firmly rooted in your sense of self. So to the extent that you can, try and improve the quality of your transcendence, rather than trying to quit cold turkey. Instead of only distracting yourself with short-form video, add in some classic movies. Instead of only endless social media scrolling, try to read longer form writing that genuinely engages you. Instead of only watching Netflix, take yourself and your friends out to an art museum, to a concert, to the symphony. Find a beautiful monastery, a beautiful church, a lovely garden to spend time in and dream. You’ll find that higher-quality forms of transcendence naturally bring you to presence, instead of dividing you against yourself.

Once you’ve brought as much presence and quality as possible to your digital life, there are three practices that will help you firmly root in your sense of self:

Za-Zen

To attain the physical sense of centeredness, once again, meditation will be the foundational skill. Tai Chi is especially good for this, if there is a good studio nearby. If you have the time, and there is a nearby Zen school that teaches the ancient, traditional Rinzai method of za-zen, which unifies the mind with centeredness in the gut (not all of them can), that’s the real shortcut.

I can’t teach you Tai Chi via Substack, but I can describe traditional za-zen. Though it’s best learned from the masters, if you can’t find one, simply follow these instructions and meditate in this way:

1. Sit somewhere comfortable, with your back straight, not leaning against the back of a chair or couch. If you can sit cross legged on the ground, do so. If not, put a pillow on the edge of a chair and sit with your knees below your waist. This is a stable, comfortable position to sit in for a long period of time. Lower your head so that you are looking at the ground a few feet in front of you. Keep your eyes gently open.

   Gently rest your attention on your gut, just below the navel. As you breathe, feel this part of your body rise and fall with your breath. If you can’t feel anything yet, go ahead and place two fingers there to stimulate the sensation.

2. Anytime you are distracted by thoughts, gently return your attention to the sensations just below your navel as you breathe in and out.

3. When you can feel somatic signals from below your navel without physically touching the area, begin the following practice: Inhale and feel every tiny moment of your gut expanding. Try to get especially intimate with the feeling of fullness and warmth that forms when your navel is fully expanded, at the top of your breath.

4. When you exhale, silently count the breath. Don’t think the word “one” quickly and then let yourself get distracted. Stretch the count out for the length of your breath, like “onnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”, until you’ve fully exhaled. Do this on every exhale, starting over every time you get distracted, or when you reach the count of ten.

5. Remember that meditation is not a practice of avoiding distraction, but noticing it and gently returning to presence, over and over again.

6. Try to keep your gut mostly extended while you exhale, by very gently pushing out your abdomen muscles. (It will deflate a little as you breathe out, but don’t worry about this for now, as long as you can get some extension.) At the same time, gently flex your pelvic floor - the muscle in your perineum, between your anus and genitals. Do this until the combined sensation of gut extension and pelvic flexion feels identical to the full, warm feeling you have at the top of an inhalation. These should be very subtle, gentle flexes, and it may take several sessions to get this just right. Release your muscle tone at the top of the breath, then repeat.

Do this for 30 minutes a day until you have mastered it. It may take you weeks, months or years - stay with it. When you have mastered this, you should maintain a consistent feeling of warmth and fullness in your gut throughout both inhalation and exhalation. This is re-connecting the body to the breath. By counting the exhalations slowly, all throughout the breath, you re-connect the breath to the mind. And by gently returning your attention to your gut when it wanders, you re-connect the mind to the body.

The purpose of this method of meditation is to create a consistent, collected, unified sense of self. By meditating this way every day, you’ll soon build an unshakeable feeling of centeredness in your gut that you can take away from meditation and into the daily activities of your life.

Social Mindfulness

When you are in the middle of a fight, or simply feeling anxious in a social situation, you may find that you can’t control whether or not you fawn, and struggle to stay present. If this is the case, it’s a sign that you need more practice. Release trying to control what’s happening and just try to stay aware. Recognize that if something is happening compulsively, even absent any other physiological symptoms, that you are triggered beyond a “threshold of regret”, and won’t be able to consciously re-assert control without retreating and regulating. Do what you can in the moment, then journal extensively about it when you get home. Learn everything you can about your instinct to fawn - the triggers, the sensations, the preludes to self-neglect that lead you to over-apologizing, enmeshing, fixating, seducing, or whatever your particular flavor of fawn may be.

The middle ground for practice standing in the self, between za-zen at home and a pitched fight with your family, is any group social outing in a venue that isn’t too loud - a bar, a house party, a night out at dinner with friends. If you can make time for 10-20 minutes of practice on these evenings, you’ll make excellent progress very quickly.

I have found that the best way to train my sense of self in a social setting is to sit in the group, smile often, but don’t say too much, and quietly note the sensations in my body as I listen to the conversation around me.

Just as in meditation, during this practice period, notice any time a thought comes up and grabs your attention. When you notice that it has, take a step back from it and recognize it as a thought. Neither good nor bad, just part of a constant process occurring within you. Not something that you are, something you have access to, when it’s useful to you.

NB: When I was coming to understand my own nervous system, I liked carrying around a small 3x5 Moleskine journal and a nice pen in my back pocket, rather than taking digital notes. I could easily record a few bullet points of data about my experience without the indignity of pulling out my phone in a social setting, and I find that it’s much easier to stay mindful and present with the experience of physical writing than with a phone. Plus, the experience is just a little more beautiful, and that doesn’t hurt.

Slowly, you’ll build enough awareness to recognize that you don’t have a single fawn process, but many of them, that take different forms across contexts and relationships. And each one has a different trigger. At first, don’t try to intervene with willpower. Awareness is usually enough to naturally gain influence, and then the ability to gently redirect individual processes. Forcibly wrenching your behavior or suppressing thoughts will work in the short-term, if necessary, but aren’t skillful or sustainable in the long term.

Once you have opened enough space around a process to see it arise before you immediately believe it or act on it, you will have the power to make a decision on whether or not you want to fawn. (It may still be your best option, if you haven’t yet learned skillful alternatives, or the stakes are high, but don’t let this become a rationalization.) When it’s safe, you can practice shifting your automatic habits away from fawning and toward down-regulating your nervous system so you can make a calculated decision. You’ll do this with intentional nervous system operation, just as we discussed in Part Two.

However, because fawning is slightly a different variant of nervous system activation, often coming with a degree of self-abandonment, you’ll need to do more than just soothe the autonomic nervous system. You’ll also need to bring your felt sense of yourself back online, by manually reconnecting your senses to the present.

Grounding

To do this, you’ll need to ground yourself in what Zen calls the true human body - the present moment, as you perceive it, right now. I have found the 5-4-3-2-1 technique very useful for this:

Take mental note of five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste, or remember tasting. This engages and connects you to all of your senses, bringing your attention to your own experience, where you need it to be. There’s not always a socially graceful way to do this, so you may need to excuse yourself to do it, but with enough practice, you’ll be able to do it automatically.

Once you are grounded, maintain a practice of keeping your attention on yourself, silently noting and naming feelings in your body, and taking distance (or “de-fusing” from your thoughts.) If you don’t have words for your emotions yet, simply note the sensations you feel - tension in the chest, warmth in the throat, tightness in the back, etc. In a social situation or a fight, this will make you less of an engaged conversation partner, and may be impossible, at first, in a confrontation, or an environment that’s too stimulating. There’s no sense wasting time on a poor practice, so use discretion on when and where to train.

Putting the World Back Together

These three practices - za-zen, social mindfulness and grounding - train the same fundamental skill: sensing the self, noticing when you’ve entered a different reality tunnel and lost touch with your center, and gently guiding yourself back. The more you master this, the easier and more fluently your sense of self will remain engaged, first when alone, then in connection with others. Soon, you’ll simply remain centered and present in awareness at all times, even when you are in conflict. And when the day comes that you notice your sense of self remaining warm, firm and grounded at the same time that you deeply attune to another person’s experience, you will know that all of your mindfulness, your diligence, your selfish empathy and noble ruthlessness have paid off. You will have made the world whole where fawning once fractured it. You will have healed.