Confusing Love & Kindness with Softness

There’s a pitfall that many people fall into when it comes to wanting to be loving and supportive: they confuse love with softness. 

Just today, in a session with a client, we were talking about her difficulty being authentic with her father. She said, “I want to be supportive,” but she was in disagreement with how he was handling a situation. She felt like she couldn’t really tell him what she was thinking.

She’s not unique by any stretch of the imagination. The way she was talking about wanting to be loving and supportive included phrases that I frequently hear from a lot of people. Such as…

“I feel like I’m being mean”

“I want to be supportive”

“I don’t want to hurt their feelings”

Today, I invited my client to explore how she might be conflating supporting with agreeing. She was thinking that she needed to agree with him in order to be supportive. But agreeing when you’re feeling differently is neither kind nor loving. 

This client also said something that so many of us do in an effort to be loving — a fawning response many overfunctioning women know well. She said, “I try to couch the things I say to him.” In our conversation, she reflected on how that softening can often totally dilute the core message. 

How often do you water down what you really want to say? Do you ever notice that the other person still has no idea of how you’re really feeling? 

If this ever happens to you, you’re confusing softness with kindness. You are calling it love but it's more likely a form of self-abandonment — an invalidation of your experience , and possibly even worse, an enabling of the other person’s behavior. You want to be “supportive” but you don’t name the problematic behavior.

The classic example of what love actually looks like is the heart-breaking tough love that relatives of people with severe addiction often have to resort to. It is not supportive to give an addict money for “food”. It is not supportive to not tell them they need to go to rehab for fear that they will be angry with you. Telling them what they want to hear, giving them money, and agreeing with them, is neither kind nor loving. It is far more loving to say, “I’m sorry, it breaks my heart but I can’t give you money. But if you’re ready to go to rehab, I’ll drive you. I’ll take you to dinner and get you there.”

I use that example often because it is easy to grasp that saying or doing the thing the other person wants is not necessarily loving. Whereas being in integrity with yourself and saying the tough thing is significantly kinder and more loving.

Let’s think of Yin Love and Yang Love.  I use the Yin and Yang symbol so often in my practice, I created a hand drawn illustration of it so I can show clients while we talk about it. 

Yin is the feminine principle. It’s also the polarity of going inwards, of softness, of nurturing and rest. Yang is the masculine principle, and therefore would be the opposite polarities: going outwards (vs. inwards), of being firm (vs. soft), of structure (vs. nurture) and of activity (vs. rest.)

Yin love is the soft variety that you typically associate with love. It feels cushy, yummy, and nurturing. It makes you hot soup and listens to you. This is the quintessential mothering energy. Yin tends towards connection and merging with.

Yang love is firm and not often as readily associated with love. Firm love is supportive, strengthening and encouraging. This is the essence of fatherly love. Yang tends towards individuality and differentiation.

Soft love says, “I’ve got you”.

Firm love says, “you’ve got this. You can do this.”

Neither one of them is better than the other. They are both necessary. Sometimes we need to be held and sometimes we need to feel competent and autonomous. The firm kind of love helps us feel that someone believes in us and sees us as being strong. Firm love boosts our confidence in ourselves.

Out of balance, soft love or yin love could tend towards coddling and enabling. It can make people feel helpless and dependent… Think of the snowflake young adults who emerged from helicopter parenting! When parents treat their children like little delicate porcelain dolls and they remove all obstacles ahead of their children, those young adults enter college and completely fall apart.

Out of balance, firm love or yang love can tend towards harshness and insensitivity. It can make people feel alone and lack compassion for themselves and others… Think of the age old “boys don’t cry” message. Those men grow up suppressing all emotion. How much it harms generations!

As always, healthy love lies in the middle; and for women, it often  requires developing the ability to set boundaries and practice more firm love. 

With my client today, we practiced several ways to stand in her love for her father and to speak with total kindness. She practiced saying something like,

"I love you and I want to support you. I will always be on your side, AND I also don’t agree 100% with how you’re handling this. There are some pieces here that you can take responsibility for and it will help you in the long run if you do.” 

When she arrived at this, she could see that she could be completely honest and be kind. That she could be in integrity with herself and still express her love and support to her father. That she doesn’t need to agree in order to stay connected, and that she doesn't need to soften or couch what she wants to say — she can hold a boundary and still stay loving. 

It’s also really important to mention the following: a lot of times when people are struggling with “telling the truth”, what’s really going on is that the words they want to say contain some form of judgment or evaluation of the other person’s behavior. Notice how in the example above, my client doesn’t say anything judgmental of her father.

If you have a “truth” that you’re struggling to express, take a moment to examine whether what you’re really thinking and wanting to say is actually a judgment of the other person? That judgment is getting in your way and there is no elegant way to express a judgment that won’t land as an attack. (But this alone could be the subject of a full communications workshop.)

There’s one more thing about out of balance softness that you may have never thought about: When you are struggling to find the firm love you need to offer someone, you are very likely (inherently) seeing them as weak.  And maybe they do act weak and helpless, but you don’t help them if you join in their narrative of weakness. 

Again, think about the coddling parents that never left space to challenge or stretch their children’s belief in themselves. If you treat someone as incapable and fragile, you do them a disservice. 

And a final thought. Firm love supports and helps in taking action with and not for the other person. You help them help themselves. You support them by walking alongside them in taking action… BUT if the action they are taking is not one you believe is truly supportive, you might be more helpful standing aside.

What do you think? 

Do you succumb to soft love and have a hard time saying the thing you’re really feeling or thinking?

Do you worry that you’ll sound harsh or mean if you do say what you think?

Do you worry that you’re not supporting someone you love if you’re not backing them up 100%?

You might have an overfunctioning “Good Girl” in you who struggles with people-pleasing and setting boundaries. If so, you may want to check out the Good Girl Reset that is starting soon!