Compassion Can Also Be A Trap

Women who learned early on to protect their mother at the cost of their own feelings often feel compassion which is in fact empathy mixed with fear. This prevents them from making space for their feelings and big emotions and ask for their needs. It's how the mother wound sets compassion as a trap. Even if you're a therapist, as Polly in this post, you'd be surprised how it can feel like compassion is competing with your right to feel anger. This post explores how that pattern forms, how discover genuine self-compassion, and what becomes possible when you finally allow your own emotions to matter.

Many of the women I work with have a wild and caring heart.

They’re empathic, deeply sensitive, and wide open to life.

Growing up undermothered, you had to be that sensitive.

Ironically, even if you were accused of being too sensitive, I’m sure it was also what protected you.

Instead of living your life, you had to utilise your beautiful traits and resources to:

🐦‍🔥 Read the emotional weather in a chaotic, dysregulated home

🐦‍🔥 Pick up on other people’s feelings to avoid getting physically hit or emotionally punished (or to know when to hide)

🐦‍🔥 Know other’s needs—before they even know them themselves—to secure love or belonging

I’m also sure that you are a compassionate person.

But what many women see as compassion is often really empathy mixed with fear.

And I would love nothing more than for you to discover what true compassion is—like Polly did.* Polly is a gifted psychotherapist who supports people in the last stages of cancer. She’s no stranger to holding big emotions in her work..

When she started feeling big emotions like anger or disappointment in our sessions, she’d immediately switch to explaining how tough things were for her mum.

She had to replace her anger with compassion as if her anger meant she was a bad daughter and an inconsiderate person.

 I wonder how familiar this is to you? I want you to know you’re not alone.

As long as we’re dependent on our mother, our survival instincts take over when we witness her inability to offer us love, a sense of safety or a trustworthy relationship.

Perhaps you witnessed your mother:

🐦‍🔥 Swallowing her anger until it turned into silence, sadness, or depression

🐦‍🔥 Being stripped of her own agency—by her partner, by the home, by life

🐦‍🔥 Needing you to offer her tending, soothing, or protection

🐦‍🔥 Unable to meet your big feelings, because she couldn’t meet her own

So your psyche did what every sensitive, intelligent child’s psyche does:

It tried to keep everyone safe—even when it meant abandoning your own feelings.

These are the foundations to compassion.

But if, like Polly, you still struggle to give your emotions, your needs or grief a compassionate space without immediately explaining them with “my mum did her best”—there’s a good chance that this compassion is actually a rupture in your capacity for giving space for yourself and your right to have your needs met.

The mother wound creates a rupture in our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with life itself — a rupture that starts in our relationship with our mother.

Growing up with an emotionally abusive mother, Polly had no space for her own feelings or for the confusion that came with her mum’s erratic, unpredictable and contradictory behaviour.

So she resolved—unconsciously—to direct all her compassion toward her mum.

Her compassion became her trap—each time she tried healing her mother wound with other therapists either guilt, regret and self-loathing blocked her way.

I offered Polly a gentle and safe way to “taste” her own big emotions when they showed up—and when the narratives that explained her needs away came along, she would consciously “park them aside” for a few moments.

Like taking tiny licks of an ice cream, Polly’s belly began filling with the sweet relief of finally releasing pent-up emotions.

The true meaning of compassion is being able to be with suffering—yours or others.

In compassion there’s no competition between differing needs.

Often, when I say in a 1:1 with a woman something like, “You can hold both compassion and anger at the same time,” or, “You can love your mother and still hold her responsible for the hurts she inflicted,” she experiences a huge relief.

It’s as if the child within you hears something that in your younger years was not an option—and it ends the inner competition between compassion and charged emotions.

The survival instinct to choose compassion for your mother over your own needs and feelings ends and so is the guilt for asking what you need in your current relationships or the fear of a consequence when you express your needs.

The absence of guilt and fear is replaced with self-compassion.

This is why, rather than single sessions, I offer longer passages of 1:1 healing journeys.

Genuine compassion takes gentleness, space and time to grow organically.

Disentangling from many years in which your feelings were enlisted to accommodate someone else’s needs—especially someone as important as your mother—requires time and space for your subconscious without pressure or friction.

Polly told me that making the decision to work together once, rather than renegotiating it each time brought a relief. Once we started the process she had a container she could relax in and lean into.

The best way to experience this for yourself is to actually get on a first free call with me.

I always start my work with a free 1:1 chat so you can taste what it’s like to work with my somatic approach: not rough digging in with talking, but creating an invitational relationship where your feelings unfold naturally and your capacity to hold both compassion and alongside other feelings feels emboldening and fresh.

This is the one-before-the-last email I’ll be sending with an invitation to take advantage of my current 1:1 rates before they increase on Monday, December 15.

Last day to schedule a free call is Friday, December 12th.

My current 1:1 rates increase on the 15th.



YOUR NEXT STEPS:

🍁 Schedule a free call via the link below & receive a confirmation email in your inbox

🍁 Reserve 40-60 minutes so we can create a safe space for sharing and exploring your immediate next steps

🍁 If we’re a good fit: I’ll invite you to purchase your package by December 14 to lock in current rates

🍁 Book your first session: right away or by end of January 2026

INQUIRE NOW

P.S. Want to replace self-abandoning to pleasing with genuine compassion? Book your free call here and take advantage of current 1:1 rates before December 15.

P.P.S. Want to learn how the three mother wound efforts stand in your way of experiencing true compassion? Listen to my free private podcast, BirthRite.

* Polly is a pseudonym.

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Shelly's is a trauma-informed, certified Hakomi therapist helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother discover the hidden impacts of the mother wound 👉 so they can thrive in their lives & careers