12/05/2025
Compassion has its limits…
WHEN IT’S TIME TO LET GO
Don’t spend too much of your precious energy trying to decode the “hidden motives” behind someone’s actions or words.
So often, we become fixated on WHY someone did or said something—believing that if we just understand their “reasons”, we can find peace.
But the truth is, we don’t always know. We can’t always know their motives, their reasons, or the unconscious pain driving their behaviour.
And often, they might not even know themselves.
They may be a mystery even to themselves—lost in their own unconscious impulses, tangled in unresolved trauma, wandering through the shadows of their own mind.
When someone’s behaviour confuses you, it’s so tempting to fill in the blanks—projecting your own assumptions onto them, searching for explanations, trying to find that elusive sense of closure.
Sometimes, this can be a worthwhile, even compassionate, exercise.
But there is a shadow side:
You can end up overanalyzing, caught in endless speculation, entangled in emotional drama that isn’t yours to carry—and losing yourself in the process.
It’s all too easy to trade your own clarity and peace for a desperate search for explanations.
Compassion is beautiful, of course. Trying to understand another’s struggles, trying to “work out” their confusing behaviors is deeply human.
But compassion has its limits.
There is a fine line between seeing someone’s pain, and excusing—or even enabling—their harmful behaviour.
When you continually try to have compassion for their choices—when you witness their suffering but set no boundaries, when you don’t speak up—you can easily cross that line.
You may end up offering so much care to them that you forget to care for yourself.
But their healing is not your responsibility. They are accountable for their actions, just as you are for your own well-being.
So what can you do instead?
Watch. Listen. Let their actions and words speak for themselves.
Your job is not to unravel someone else’s inner world. Your job is to understand yourself, protect your own peace, and love fiercely—but without losing yourself in the process.
Compassion means caring, but without carrying what isn’t yours.
It means staying open, but without abandoning yourself.
And it means allowing others to be responsible for their own healing, just as you are for yours.
Sometimes the most compassionate thing is to intervene, of course.
But at other times, the most loving thing you can do… is to let go.
And let them face themselves.
- Jeff Foster
