Kindness is not weakness. Unfortunately, many of us have learned to avoid practicing kindness out of fear of its misinterpretation.
One of the reasons for this reservation is the epidemic of people-pleasing that stems from emotional wounds that lead to this mass fawning as an adaptation.
Fawning is one of the four fight or flight responses. To be honest, it’s more of a reaction than it is a response. It’s a form of submission in an attempt to avoid the potential threat. In this case, the threat would be abuse or abandonment.
The tragedy here is because it works so well in avoiding threats, or at least minimizing the pain that may be inflicted by a threat, it becomes, unconsciously, a compelling behavior to adopt. More importantly, it’s effectiveness can blind us from seeing the gradual destructive impact it has on our mental health.
What it indirectly enables is the avoidance of authenticity out of fear of the consequences of being authentic. By fawning, we are compromising our integrity, and detaching from our authentic self.
The solution is not to avoid kindness out of fear of pain, but to embrace it in spite of the potential pain, and enforce our boundaries when our compassionate actions are misinterpreted as an invitation for abuse.
-Sam Qureshi