The misconstruing of empathy for what wasn’t intended

When a person misinterprets kindness for an interest that’s not intended, boundaries are needed, yet unfortunately these are often misconstrued as manipulations.

It can come as quite a shock in both situations: having your kindness and care misinterpreted for a more substantial love and having your love blunted, leaving you confused and unwanted.

Empathy plays such an important part in response to the hurt felt by the other, but if that empathy is also misinterpreted or manipulated, there’s not much chance of a shared understanding being achieved.

Empathy is a crucial building block skill for investing in and for maintaining any relationship.  Those who have no capacity for empathy — those who care only for themselves — have no capacity (or desire) to give or receive love in the way the average person would accord as safe.

The misconstruing of empathy for what was never intended speaks more for the receiver’s desires and needs of the relationship than anything else.

It speaks to the possibilities of personality disorders when people seek to entrap people who are simply being kind; of manipulating a person because needs weren’t met, needs which can’t be safely met.

Few people would want to meet the needs of love where there’s coercive control at play.

And that’s just the thing, there are people out there, people in our lives, who seem to look to exploit every opportunity that might even look like an opening.  Behind every response it seems is manipulation, and it’s so normal to feel completely exposed in that situation.  Some people seem completely incapable of giving and receiving love in the way that is safe and acceptable.

Some of the signs of this are the smoke and mirrors we deal with in our interactions with them.  They never provide clarity, everything is murky, and they will put it on us if we challenge them on it.  A classic tactic of abusers is to use ambiguity for their own advantage — “Oh, I never meant it that way!”

In other words, it can only ever be the other person’s fault.  Where there’s no capacity to accept individual responsibility in one, it leaves a pretty lopsided relationship.

In the ideal world, we should be able to give our empathy and be empathetic without feeling being exploited for it.  But the reality is, a lot of the time people will exploit our empathy, and a common example of this is when a person exploits the opportunity to consume time in conversation about themselves.  All we wanted to do was to demonstrate that we care.

At the worst end of demonstrating our empathy for others, we are coerced into agreeing on things and doing things against our will, which only serves to force us into a war against ourselves.  We either implement boundaries and suffer the wrath of a person who manipulates that situation for “betrayal,” or we submit and go along in the wrong direction.  See how doing the right thing in these situations turns out to work against us with a vexatious individual?

For some people, there is no way of relating with them, because they cannot respect our boundaries, those boundaries which would make of the relationship something workable.

For people like this, who exist for their own gratification, those who see that others exist for precisely the same purpose, there is no relatable arrangement.  We are wise to remove ourselves from the situations as much as possible, but this is very hard when they are family, or they are people we cannot easily remove ourselves from.

Fortunately, situations like this equip us to notice the red flags in future, but this doesn’t necessarily help us when we are challenged by a present situation.