Godwin’s Law is the slightly comical concept that, eventually, someone goes to bring up Hitler in a web based discussion. You will be talking about politics, sports, or pineapple on pizza—eventually, someone will bring Hitler into it. When that happens, the conversation is over. No one is listening anymore or debating in good faith. The word just shuts every thing down.
There are quite a number of words nowadays that may do exactly that. The words “woke” or “privilege,” to call a pair. I feel toxic empathy does the identical thing. It is either dismissed as an abusive concept or heralded as an uncomfortable truth that bleeding hearts need to deny. It’s grow to be a lightning rod, which suggests it’s not a phrase you utilize to signal that you just desire a conversation.
And I feel that’s unlucky. It’s unlucky because I feel there may be actually point being made here—nevertheless it’s barely misplaced. If we will defang the concept for a moment, I feel there may be a good argument being made; namely, that excessive or misplaced empathy can undermine each the person offering it and the person receiving it. It does this by distorting reality, stopping growth, and enabling dysfunction.
We might say that empathy is toxic if it absorbs emotions to the purpose of burnout or that it cripples you from calling out the self-destructive behavior in one other person. Imagine a young woman in emotional distress. She feels lost, confused about her identity, and struggles with self-worth. She abuses alcohol and medicines to numb her emotions, seeks unhealthy relationships for validation, and adopts an identity entirely based on her emotions.
A “toxic empathy” would tell her something like, “You must do what feels best for you, and if people don’t affirm your decisions, they don’t really love you.” Instead of encouraging her to hunt help or attempting to anchor her in God’s truth, toxic empathy validates every destructive decision she makes. It prioritizes feelings over truth, and as we will see, it reinforces victimhood as an alternative of calling to motion. The biggest issue is that within the name of “empathy,” we’re excusing or enabling sin.
If that’s all that is supposed by toxic empathy, I feel there are some valid points of critique there. But the phrase has plenty of luggage connected to it. It’s often used as a lazy option to reject emotional engagement, and I’ve seen it used to shame individuals who care. It can easily grow to be a weapon against kindness. In some spaces, it’s used to dismiss real mental health concerns and has grow to be a buzzword for culture war rhetoric (on either side of the aisle).
One of the largest problems is that it’s lost any type of meaningful definition. Some use “toxic empathy” to mean enabling bad behavior, others use it to mean absorbing an excessive amount of emotional pain, and still others use it as a catch-all for being “too soft.” Without a transparent definition, it’s easy to weaponize, making it difficult to debate its concepts constructively. For that reason, I don’t think it’s a helpful phrase. It misses the mark, in my view.
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