I have been trying out other podcasts lately, just to get a range of inputs into my thinking, and recently listened to Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast, Episode #723 — 15 Lessons from 2023.

In that episode, he described how pleased he was to have come up with the concept “toxic compassion”. According to Williamson, “Toxic compassion is the prioritisation of short term emotional comfort over everything else, over truth, reality, actual long term outcomes, flourishing, everything. It optimises for looking good, rather than doing good.”

Today, we're going to delve into the role emotions play in compassion and their profound impact on compassionate decision making and action. There is an intricate and delicate dance between our feelings and the choices we make. And sometimes, believe it or not, our apparent compassion can do more harm than good. But there’s a lot of nuance to this, so, let’s get started!

TARGETED PLAYLIST LINK:

Compassion in a T-Shirt

LINKS:

Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast
Episode #723 — 15 Lessons from 2023.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDUhSjjUvKI

Seligman et al. (2017). Dental anxiety: An understudied problem in youth.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2017.04.004

Penney and Kirk (2015). The Health at Every Size Paradigm and Obesity: Missing Empirical Evidence May Help Push the Reframing Obesity Debate Forward.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4386524/

Professor Jonathan Haidt’s website
https://jonathanhaidt.com/

Twenge et al. (2022). Specification curve analysis shows that social media use is linked to poor mental health, especially among girls
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691822000270

If you would like to learn more about compassion focused therapy, you can find Dr Stan Steindl's book The Gifts of Compassion here: https://www.amazon.com.au/Gifts-Compassion-understand-overcome-suffering/dp/1925644480

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Chris Williamson, toxic compassion, jordan peterson, compassion, wisdom, strength, courage, commitment, empathy, sympathy, emotions