When Empathy is Not The Right Response

Gentler community members sometimes put pressure on leaders to make bad calls; here's what they're missing.

Your community needs sheepdogs*. Sheepdogs are people who can set boundaries to protect the sheep from the wolves.

Sheep sometimes judge the sheepdogs for being too aggressive, exclusionary, or unkind, for missing the nuances of someone's bad behavior, or for failing to offer someone enough chances.

Here's why they're often wrong.

While well-intended, and often possessing of other important, pro-social traits, “sheep” (community members who are averse to harshness) are often blind to:

a) the actual consequences of an individual's bad behavior on the community.

This includes everything from assault to consistently making the vibes worse at every social event. Some sheep are so focused on negative effects to the wolf that they don’t track the negative effects on the community, which can make a sheepdog’s decisions look unnecessary or cruel.

b) The fundamental costliness leadership decisions require.

If there's gonna be a cost to the wolf, folks understandably want to be sure it can't be avoided. Wolves are people, after all, and sometimes important community members themselves! Wanting reasons enumerated for kicking someone out is fair— some sheepdogs are overly reactive (or are wolfish leaders themselves, posing as sheepdogs). Publicly listing the reasons for a boundary— or doing it through a whisper network, as the case may be— makes everyone feel safer that they understand the rules of the community and won’t themselves be kicked out in some kind of witch hunt. This kind of legibility around decision-making is important.

That said. Sometimes the sheep, who are usually not in leadership positions, can’t see the entire chessboard. The best sheepdogs are already accounting for the unfortunate effects on the wolf in question, and are grappling deeply with one of the hardest facts of leadership; that making the most empathetic, fair choice you can for the good of all in a hard situation, a situation you didn't create, sometimes means somebody is gonna get hurt no matter what. When one person displays bad behavior & is unreachable on it, somebody will bear the cost. So while wanting reasons is fine, assuming that if there is a terrible costs to a wolf’s well-being, the leader must be being too harsh— that’s naive. It was the wolf, by his behavior, who created this situation in the first place. It is not the rest of the community who should pay the price.

c) Sheep are also often blind to how wolves will use "the popular kids are bullying me" trope to give themselves more opportunities than they deserve.

Falling for this narrative, as a sheep, is a form of neglect for your own community. The clever wolf will end up causing more harm overall to a community than was necessary. Protection from bullying is very important; but we must look at the facts to see if that’s truly what’s happening or if that’s just the wolf’s story.

This is a tricky call to make. My best advice is to write out just the facts of what has occurred, without interpretation.

d) Oddly, sheep get confused about how different they themselves are from the wolves.

Anxious sheep will project their own fear of being fundamentally unworthy of belonging onto the wolves, and thus try to protect them.

The mistake here is mixing up fundamental rejection with conditional rejection, and thinking "if anyone here can get fundamentally rejected without sufficient cause, I can too! After all, what if I am fundamentally unacceptable?”

But a good sheepdog looks at a person's *behavior* to make the call, not just whether their soul seems worthy of saving, or whatever. The rejection or boundary is always conditional on behavior.

f) Some (good) calls are illegible by nature.

As I mentioned, sheep may want the full justification to be laid out explicitly, and while this is noble and ideal, some instincts towards boundaries (in fact, often the best ones) exist in the realm of intuition.

This is tricky, and I'm going to say something controversial here-- I believe there actually is something valid and truthful a lot of the time in just not liking someone. Our intuitions know when something is off, especially seriously off. We owe people a shot to surprise us, but if they consistently confirm a bad feeling inside, while that's important to query (as, of course, it might be a projection of one's own trauma/bullshit), it's also important not to gaslight it.

We sometimes don't like people for very good reasons; we're intuiting personal characteristics in them that will lead to some kind of harm, and this is valid. It’s not always just "fickle whims of the popular kids" logic.

I will say, though— sheepdogs vary in discernment on this dimension, which is to say they vary in their introspective ability to tell the difference between their true intuition and emotional reactivity. Sheep should pick sheepdogs (leaders) who have good access to their personal intuition, and who have a commitment to and skill with identifying and examining their own emotional reactivity (this solution won’t be perfect, but it’s better than nothing).

g) Sheep are often operating in a secretly fixed-mindset worldview. This is actually really condescending towards the wolves.

Wolves are usually wolfish for reasons that should absolutely inspire pity— traumatic childhoods & unfair disadvantages resulting in bad social skills, confusion about boundaries, spiritual impoverishment, deep and painful unmet needs, etc.

That’s a fact. Sheep will see this fact and say “This deserves pity, care, and understanding.” That’s an interpretation. These can get conflated.

I'd argue we can respond to the same fact a better way. I’d argue that wolves can actually grow and change with clear feedback, & sometimes this desire to offer "empathy only" comes from a deep belief held by the sheep that the wolves are incapable of change. It often smacks, actually, of enabler logic: "He doesn't mean to hit me. It's just how he grew up."

Sure, and that's unfair. But it's on us to improve, if "how we grew up" is dysfunctional. It'd be nice if shitty childhoods we weren't responsible for didn't become our problem to solve, but….they just do. Otherwise, the community's waterline for acceptable behavior drops and we all suffer, and then our kids, too, will "just grow up like that."

It’s true that many wolves won’t change, no matter what they say— some because they don’t want to, some because they don’t know how— but it’s not always true, and it’s condescending and actually somewhat dehumanizing to assume wolves are incapable of learning how to be more pro-social.

Feedback for wolfish behavior can absolutely take the form of a fair, firm rejection from a community.

Lastly, while it's not a sheepdog's job to explain to a wolf nicely what he's doing & how to stop, if she can, it's always better. Providing specific, legible feedback is kinder and more useful to a wolf wherever possible. That said, it’s not a requirement for holding a boundary. If someone attacks me with a knife, and I defend myself by kicking his ass (or I just close the doors of my fortress, excluding him from social goods), it is a bit silly if he is then shocked and confused by my violence or closure of access. It’s reasonable to expect him to understand that if he attacks me, there will be consequences, and one can leave it at that. Simultaneously, we don’t always live in a reasonable world, and he just might not get it; if you have the bandwidth to simply, clearly explain it (one time!), do it.

h) Communities actually don't have endless resources— time, attention, emotional bandwidth, care— to pour into helping harmful members figure out how not to be harmful.

Again, it’s that anxious, condescending, self-projecting streak that makes some sheep believe a wolf's own behavior dooms the wolf for all eternity, and that therefore the only humane response to bad behavior is empathy/forgiveness.

Your community is not so special as to be the only place in the modern world where this person can gain the skills to be a positive contributor to a community. Sometimes wolves don't believe in their own ability to get help elsewhere, and will fight tooth and nail, often using deception, pity, guilt or threats, to stay in the community and not have to change.

If you don’t have the resources, the only true way to believe in them is to ask them to leave, and hope they get those resources (therapy, self-help books, financial resources etc to support self-growth) elsewhere. Their path won’t work for them, you, or the community, no matter how desperate they are to enact it.

All this said….sheepdogs are absolutely not infallible.

Sheepdogs should:

1) set boundaries in proportion to their perception of the harms (while balancing awareness of community resources).

2) always distinguish personal issues from community issues. You may have been harmed by the guy, but if he doesn't seem to be a threat to anyone else as a pattern, keep it between the two of you.

3) When making calls based on intuition, sheepdogs should be aware of the pitfalls both of projecting her personal baggage unfairly, and of gaslighting herself when she can't name explicit reasons, but knows something is off. One of the hardest calls to make as a sheepdog is a harsh call that will really affect someone's life, but is based on intuition; but these are often the most important ones to make. You don't want to be the leader who finds out a year later that a guy you had a bad feeling about assaulted some girl, and deep down you knew it would happen sometime, but you didn't want to appear too harsh too early. Take the blow to your reputation, if your intuition is strong.

4) If you make a bad call, own it, both to yourself and others. By self-identifying as a sheepdog, you’re taking on accountability for possibly making bad calls, and needing to answer for that. Don’t shunt that responsibility off onto anyone else, if you turn out to be wrong. Just explain to your community why you did what you did, that you see you made the wrong call, and ask them to give you a little grace. Either they do or they don’t, but you don’t get to have power without responsibility (unless you are a wolf).

Lastly, my advice for anyone who’s alarmed to see a community considering harsh boundaries with someone is to check your anxiety and see if it is about yourself, your own fear of rejection/not belonging. That doesn't necessarily make it invalid, but to be honest, it might. The risk of this anxiety is negligence, or putting pressure on leaders to be negligent and make globally bad calls.

Good luck to all of us as we try to build healthy communities in the age of atomization!

*A note on the language in this post— yes, I stole this vocabulary from a movie, which upon googling turned out to be American Sniper? But it's a useful, if simplified, categorization, and I don't mean it as any comment on the film (which I barely remember). After posting about this idea on twitter, I learned these terms are sometimes used as a metaphor on the political right to support particular ideological positions (i.e. police as “sheepdogs” against the wolves who are criminals). The political connotation carries a whoooole bunch of baggage that I definitely don’t intend— so if you’ve heard these terms before, consider this to be a separate set of concepts, with no explicit connection or political affiliation intended.