this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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i don't understand how empathy can be toxic.....
Neither does the woman who defined the term and wrote a whole book about it.
Ruinous Empathy is an interesting concept, but unfortunately much like toxic empathy (but without the obvious malintent from the start), it's mostly used by psychopaths in positions of power to justify their antisocial behaviours in environments that generally forbid it.
Like the second you get a ping of sorry for some illegals of the wrong colour. You chastise yourself "No! this is wrong!!!" and use the daily mantra from Fox to clear your mind: Barack Hussain Obama is guilty!
/S
It absolutely can be if you let it get out of control. I still struggle with it in fact. It can cause emotional burnout, wreck your mental health, things like that. To be fair, even the "good" version of this gets weaponized to ignore causes that someone might not want to care about without "being a bad person" all the time. Think the "I have to prioritize my own mental health" types who only seem to have energy for issues that directly affect them. Again having limited emotional energy isn't the issue, being disingenuous about it is.
But that's not what this freak is talking about. What this freak is talking about amounts to "Empathy is reserved for the in-group. If it impedes our efforts or contradicts our dogma, then it's toxic empathy," basically.
People with higher levels of empathy are good targets for abusive and manipulative people.
As an example there's my mother who feels empathy for everyone, paedophiles and rapists included, and even acts on these impulses e.g. signed a petition to ask for charges against one to be dropped. I would say she's misdirecting her empathy to a toxic level...