Thank you for your response. There is a lot of love and fierce truth in it, and I will certainly be thinking about your words for some time.
There are no easy answers here, and as you say everyone processes their pain in a different way. I tried to communicate my compassion and empathy for SOB and others who feel as he does, but I can see I’ve fallen short, on both the compassion and the communication. I believed I was displaying the same compassion that I’d hoped to make a case for, but I wasn’t, not fully. There’s a gap there that I’ll have to examine.
I’ve been operating from a certain paradigm that I still believe has merit, but you are challenging me to look deeper at it so if you have any thoughts to share I would appreciate it: Most people who object to empathy and compassion do so because they believe that to have compassion is the same as excusing behavior and/or opening themselves up to further abuses. After a lot of reflection on the matter, my response has been that one can have empathy while still maintaining boundaries. You can feel for the person’s pain while still holding them to account for their actions, and indeed the fullest expression of compassion would do exactly that, because enabling isn’t an act of love.
So in a case like this, where I feel compassion for SOB and those he speaks for, yet I also feel that his words don’t just express but also advocate a form of emotional violence, how do I hold the deepest compassion for the person while also maintaining a boundary to behavior that is destructive?