On Toxic Overprotectiveness
Stay away from people who diminish you under the guise of protecting you
I recently cut ties with someone I once thought I was going to be friends with forever.
The warning signs were subtle at first. He kept calling me “too nice”. He made frequent (I thought joking but later discovered quite serious) statements about what “real men” should and should not do. He talked as though he needed to protect me.
I later learned “too nice” was code all along for “I think your kindness comes from a place of naivete”. My kindness comes from empathy for pain, because I have experienced a great deal of pain: I was an unhappy child (my mother’s assessment), struggled to fit in for as long as I can remember, was frequently invalidated by my mother for neurodivergent traits like stimming, was beaten regularly for being a picky eater, was outed as queer at 14 in a conservative high school, was cheated on and gaslit in one of my first relationships, was the target of a retaliatory and career-threatening false accusation of sexual harassment from someone I had once loved and trusted (retaliation for whistleblowing), experienced PTSD for years and, tipping point, experienced an unwanted sexual advance followed by abandonment from the therapist I had being seeing for 1.5yrs to cope with the PTSD. If you are curious how I coped with that, I wrote about my journey to healing in the article below:
Despite this being my history, my now-former friend secretly assumed that I was “too sensitive” because I hadn’t seen enough pain. He justified these assumptions on the basis that he could see that I have a positive relationship with my parents now and my family has financial privilege now (even though he grew up with extreme financial privilege his whole life; in his home country of Iran, people recognize him by his surname; he was so spoiled he didn’t even know how his laundry was getting done in Iran; my family was never that wealthy and one generation ago my Dad’s family was in a village; also, for most of my life I believed that my father would throw me out of the house if he was upset enough with me because that was what he would threaten to do, and as a child in India I was well aware that being disowned would lead to a fate worse than death). He had more than enough pieces of information to realize the picture he had of me might not be correct, but I guess his conceit and ego couldn’t handle the idea that empathy, kindness and sensitivity could be cultivated because of pain, not in spite of it.
This condescending view he had of me came to light when he told me that, when it came to the damage I experienced due to my therapist coming on to me, he thought I was making a big deal out of nothing. He literally said “people do these kinds of things when they love each other — I got dumped suddenly by my first girlfriend, it happens”. It turns out that girlfriend dumped him because he openly disrespected a personal development program that she had found transformational. How he managed to draw an equivalence between getting dumped for openly disrespecting his girlfriend and getting abandoned in your most vulnerable moments by someone who has a literal duty of care to you…escapes me.
Oh, and he kept telling me to forgive that therapist, because he read about 30% of the article I wrote above (that I wrote specifically to make sense of and explain what happened), and he concluded that my problem was that I hadn’t forgiven her (seemingly he is unaware that you can forgive a reckless driver who left you with multiple broken bones and still be in pain from the broken bones). In fact, he kept repeating that I should accept that “people do these kinds of things when they love each other”. When I said I had a higher standard for love, he retreated to his attitude that I probably hadn’t seen suffering (at this point, he even knew I was beaten regularly as a child, which came as a big shock to him when I told him even though it is extremely common in India). When I pointed out the absurdity of his claims, he made increasingly cringey claims, like he desperately wanted me to validate his invalidation. And he kept repeating that “people do these things when they love each other”.
See, I am aware that people can do harmful things when they are trying to suppress or cancel out love. But the negative emotion that they have chosen instead of love is the cause; the cause is not love. Claiming that the cause is “love” is an attempt to minimize the negative emotion.
In fact, I am all too familiar with this dynamic, because I felt intense rage towards him after these exchanges. And believe me, as someone who was beaten regularly as a kid, I contain demonic levels of rage (many others who saw violence growing up know exactly the rage I am talking about; consider yourself privileged, not virtuous, if you have never had to manage such rage). I have enough experience, though, to recognize that I was enraged with him because I was still attached to him, and I was using the rage to forsake that attachment. If I was not attached to him, then his words posed no danger to me, and I would not have experienced anger.
Funny how, in the moment, we may think we are angry at something because it is “obviously invalid/untrue”, and may even keep repeating to ourselves arguments for why it is invalid/untrue, but underneath we are angry because we perceive that thing as having the power of something that is true. I say this because anger is always a response to a perceived threat; if we truly perceived something as having no power, we wouldn’t be afraid of it. Untrue things get the power of something that is true when they come from someone whose opinion we value, so what we really need to confront is why we still value that person’s opinion.
Thus, instead of lashing out at him like my rage wanted to do, I just severed contact. He wanted to understand why, so I gave examples to him of a pattern of extremely condescending behavior (not just to me) and said “in my experience, condescending and suffocating people like you do not change easily, and tend to poison others from the inside out. I am protecting myself by keeping my distance from you”. Then I blocked him. I chose my words so that, after all his talk about how he needed to protect me, he would realize that he was the one I needed protection from.
Let this be a lesson to all of you who think you are “protecting” people or offering them “tough love” by invalidating their pain: eventually, they will realize that the best way to protect themselves is to yank away your position as someone they let into their life in the first place.
