Excessive compassion

What is excess compassion?

Excessive or extreme empathy

Excessive or extreme empathy can be diagnosed as a disorder. The DSM-V labels hyper-empathy as a characteristic of personality disorder.

Any behavior that makes it harder to relate to other people, causes suffering, and prevents you from living a normal life needs a diagnosis and some kind of adjustment or even a "treatment".

Hyper-empathy syndrome occurs when you are too in tune with other people's emotions and mirror them to the same intensity. In other words, you care too much to the point where you cannot even regulate your own emotions to the point of being overwhelmed or even emotionally disabled by negativity. This is when to “To perceive is to suffer.”

This can lead to catastrophic consequences for the individual if there is excessive empathy. It can lead to compassion fatigue.

People think it is impossible to overdo kindness or compassion, but it can put a tremendous amount of stress on the individual but also on society. Experiencing your own tension as well as the pain, anxiety or trauma of others can be extreme. And it can compromise your own health—and also degrade your ability to give.

In the extreme case, there is something called Dark empathy. This is characterized by emotional distancing disguised as charm and a pretense of understanding, often by sociopaths who are agreeable and seeming to be compassionate, but for some emotional or financial gain. Dark empathy is related to the dark triad personality traits. The dark triad refers to the malevolent personality types of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Subtle but harmful empathy

We can be manipulated by the media, the religious, friends, or even politicians to feel empathy for one group and not another. They can make you think you are virtues by favoring people as a group for unreasonable reasons.

An individual can be swayed to think something is moral and virtuous through empathy. That can lead to, by passive cruelty, giving license for bad behavior under the guise of being compassionate.

Empathy burnout is common when individuals spend to much of their emotional energy relating deeply to the problems and experiencing undue stress. This can cause them to neglect basic compassion for others and even themselves. This can lead to aggression.

Excessive empathy in society

Too much empathy can affect your moral decision-making and can lead to bias. That bias can narrow our perception so we do not see the consequences of doing what we want to think is helping but causing harm.

In Exodus 23 we are warned that if we have bias to the poor in court we may do more harm than good, as we saw in Sodom where their system failed to strengthen the poor, even turning them into perfect savages.

The free bread of Rome destroyed the once thriving civilization by degenerating the masses, despite the fact the Roman people were warned of the consequences by Prophets, and men like Polybius and Plutarch. David even knew that what FDR and Augustus Caesar began to undermine the Republic. The Great Society of LBJ eroded the black community.

Not holding people, especially children, to account for bad behavior will weaken and degenerate them.

Spare the rod spoil the child and the excessive compassion of the devouring mother is, in fact, about the biblical precept of the boiling a kid in its mother's milk.