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Idiot Compassion and Wise Compassion: Which One Are We Reaching For?

 



As a clinical psychologist, I spend a lot of time sitting with people who are struggling because of something a well-meaning person did for them. Not to them. For them.

There's a term in the literature for this. It's called idiot compassion; it comes from Buddhist psychology and means compassion that prioritises someone's immediate comfort over their long-term wellbeing. It feels like kindness. It looks like kindness. And it is almost always motivated by kindness. But it's also motivated by a human need to not feel helpless.

As parents of teenagers, we are particularly vulnerable to this. Our teenager comes home and something has gone wrong. Maybe something has happened in their friend group, or they couldn't answer the maths question, and something in us shifts into problem-solving. We reassure, we rationalise, we problem solve. They seem okay and we feel better. This is the short-term gain.

The cost of idiot compassion is the subtle message it sends our teenagers over time. The message that they needed to be rescued. That they couldn't handle it on their own. That we didn't trust them to.

Psychologist Wendy Mogel, who spent decades working with adolescents, talks about how over-involved parenting quietly communicates to teenagers that the world is a place they can't manage without us. Which is the opposite of what we're trying to do.

Wise compassion is the alternative, but it is much harder.   Especially with teenagers, especially when they are genuinely upset, especially when they are being rude. Wise compassion is essentially staying in the room without taking over the room. It's tolerating their distress without trying to resolve it. It's saying something like that sounds really painful and not following it up with a solution.

Research on adolescent development is consistent on this. Teenagers who are allowed to navigate difficulty, with a regulated adult nearby, build genuine resilience.  The capacity to face something hard and discover they didn't fall apart. Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset points to the same thing.  Struggling and persisting through difficulty is precisely how our teens develop the belief that they are capable. We cannot give them that belief by protecting them from the very thing that creates it.

A helpful question might be: Whose discomfort am I managing right now — theirs or mine?

 

 


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