When tolerance becomes complicity and resilience becomes self-abandonment: the importance of limits and consequences

Tolerance, resilience, and communication are generally presented as intrinsically positive qualities. We're encouraged to tolerate differences, become more resilient, communicate better, and continue to seek understanding, as if the problem in every dysfunctional relationship could ultimately be solved by adding more patience, more empathy, and more communication.

I believe this perspective is incomplete, because none of these qualities are particularly useful without discernment.

Tolerance can be valuable when it allows diverse people, needs, and perspectives to coexist without requiring uniformity. Resilience can help us overcome difficulties without being defined by them. Communication can create the conditions for understanding, clarification, and authentic connection. The problem begins when these concepts are treated as absolute virtues and therefore applied regardless of context, reciprocity, or consequences.

At that point, tolerance can become an excuse, resilience can transform into the ability to tolerate situations that probably need changing (it thus becomes a survival strategy, a dysfunctional coping mechanism), and communication can become an exhausting attempt to connect with someone who has no real interest in meeting us on that ground.

Communication requires someone willing to understand

I work in the communications field, so I obviously recognize its importance. I also believe that one of the most important communication skills is recognizing when communication has reached its limits.

We often assume that misunderstanding is primarily a language issue: perhaps we didn't explain ourselves clearly enough, perhaps we should choose different words, provide more context, tone down our tone, or try again. Sometimes this is true, and changing the way we communicate can completely transform the outcome of an interaction.

Sometimes, however, the problem isn't that the other person can't understand what we're saying. Understanding us would require them to question the interpretation they're supposed to maintain, the role they've assigned us, or, more fundamentally, something about themselves.

This distinction is important.

There is a considerable difference between communicating with someone who struggles to understand us and communicating with someone who needs to misunderstand us in order to maintain an existing psychological balance.

In the second situation, endlessly improving our communication serves little purpose, since the obstacle is no longer primarily communicative in nature. We're dealing with resistance.

The ego has a protective function: it organizes the identity, beliefs, and narratives through which we interpret ourselves and reality. When new information threatens that structure, the natural response isn't always curiosity. It can be denial, projection, distortion, or an attempt to force the other person to reconform to the familiar role that restores the previous equilibrium.

This is why some conversations seem to repeat themselves endlessly despite increasingly precise explanations. We continue to view the situation as a communication problem, while the other person, more or less consciously, views it as an identity problem.

You can't convince someone to want to see something just by talking.

There's a widespread belief that greater empathy and improved communication can resolve almost any relationship conflict. I find this belief particularly dangerous when it places the responsibility for the bond almost entirely on the person who is already making the greatest effort to create it.

Communication requires reciprocity, even when that reciprocity is imperfect. It requires at least a certain willingness to receive information that might contradict our current interpretation, to tolerate discomfort, and to consider the possibility that our perception may be incomplete.

Without this availability, communication becomes progressively less useful.
You can explain your intentions, clarify your meaning, acknowledge your mistakes, listen to the other person's point of view, and adjust your behavior when appropriate. What you can't do is force another person to examine the psychological function their interpretation of you is serving.

At a certain point, continuing to justify yourself can even reinforce that dynamic.

If someone repeatedly devalues you, distorts what you say, or demands constant validation while refusing to address the insecurity that generates that need, your constant availability may become part of the mechanism that allows that behavior to continue. You may believe you're being compassionate, patient, or emotionally mature, while in reality, you're shielding the other person from the consequences of their choices.

This is where boundaries become relevant.

The border resolves that contradiction.

It gives the other person a more accurate picture of what their choices actually produce.
They might not like that image. They might interpret it as rejection, cruelty, selfishness, or a lack of empathy. They might still refuse to examine their own behavior. A boundary doesn't guarantee awareness, and consequences don't automatically lead to change.
However, they create the possibility for change by eliminating our participation in the mechanism that prevented it.

Unconditional love does not require unconditional access

This is precisely where, in my opinion, the concept of unconditional love is often misunderstood.
Loving someone without trying to control their identity doesn't logically imply supporting every expression of who that person chooses to be at that moment. Accepting that another person has the right to make their own choices also means accepting that those choices have consequences, and that we have the equivalent right to decide on our own participation.

Otherwise, what we call unconditional love becomes strangely unidirectional: one person is free to act on their own wounds, fears, needs, and unresolved patterns, while the other is expected to demonstrate love by absorbing the consequences.

I don't consider this love. I consider it a suspension of discernment.

If I sincerely recognize another person's autonomy, I also recognize their responsibility for their choices. Constantly protecting someone from the relational consequences of one's behavior can therefore become a subtle way of denying their autonomy.

We cannot simultaneously insist that adults be responsible for themselves and then treat every consequence of their choices as something from which they must be protected.

Sometimes allowing someone to lose access to a relationship they continue to devalue is the clearest information we can give them.
What he does with that information remains his choice.

Resilience is only useful when we ask ourselves why we need to be resilient.

I have similar reservations about the way resilience is often talked about.

Resilience is useful when it helps us adapt to difficulties that can't be immediately avoided or changed. It becomes much less useful when it's celebrated as the ability to endlessly tolerate what should instead be questioned, confronted, or left behind.

I'll be brutally honest: resilience, as it's often praised, feels like a trap set by manipulators to entice victims into tolerating certain abuses.
I think, instead, that resilience should be an exception and, possibly, an investment on which there must be a return: I resist and adapt for a while, wisely, and in return I get something (first and foremost, ideally, an escape from the difficult situation that required the temporary "sacrifice").
I call it the ROI of resilience: instead of asking “how much can I bear?”, ask “Why am I putting up with this, how long and what should it allow me to achieve?”.
Resilience without ROI is, therefore, merely a useless sacrifice, convenient only for some manipulative narcissist. It may be convenient for an abusive partner, but also for an employer, a dysfunctional family, an organization, or even a social system that prefers to teach people to adapt rather than change the conditions that make that adaptation necessary.

Being able to survive in a dysfunctional environment does not make that environment healthy, and increasing our capacity to tolerate it does not necessarily represent growth.
This distinction applies to relationships, families, workplaces, and even entire social systems. If the only solution proposed for a harmful environment is to make individuals more resilient, the responsibility silently shifts from the system that causes the harm to the person who suffers it.
The same mechanism manifests itself in interpersonal relationships. Instead of asking ourselves whether a dynamic is mutual, respectful, and sustainable, we ask ourselves whether we could become more patient, less reactive, more tolerant, or better at managing our emotions.
These may all be useful questions, but they are not the only ones.

We also need to ask ourselves whether continuing to adapt is actually the appropriate response.

Resilience is functional when it increases the future capacity to escape, change, regain autonomy, or achieve something that justifies the cost incurred. It becomes dysfunctional when it primarily serves to make an unsustainable situation more sustainable, without changing its conditions.

Discernment involves the recognition of incompatibility

Not all conflicts indicate dysfunction, and not all incompatibilities necessarily need to be resolved (I also discussed this in the article Conflict or Incompatibility? The Ego's Deception).

Two people can have different values, levels of awareness, priorities, needs, or ways of relating, without either being intrinsically wrong. The insistence that every difference must eventually be resolved can itself become a form of control.

Sometimes understanding the other person more deeply leads to a deeper connection. Sometimes, however, it leads to the recognition that the relationship can no longer continue in the same form.

Both outcomes can represent successful communication.

We often consider effective communication only when it preserves the relationship, but this presupposes that preservation should always be the goal. Instead, I believe the purpose of conscious communication is to clarify reality. Once reality becomes clearer, the appropriate decision may be to connect, renegotiate, distance, or separate.

Clarity does not guarantee us the outcome we prefer.

This is why, for me, discernment is more important than tolerance understood as an abstract value. Discernment requires us to observe what is actually happening, rather than automatically applying a moral rule that tells us what a "good," loving, resilient, or empathetic person should tolerate.

It also requires us to examine our own egos, as remaining in a dysfunctional dynamic can fuel an identity as much as create one. We may need to feel needed, to be perceived as understanding, to offer help, to prove that we are different from the people who hurt us, or to maintain the belief that sufficient love can ultimately change the other person.

At that point, our tolerance is no longer exclusively about them.
It also tells us something about ourselves.

Boundaries give reality something that words cannot express.

There is a point where another explanation does not add any new information.

You've expressed yourself. The other person has received enough information to understand how their behavior affects you. They may disagree with your interpretation, and they have the right to do so, but disagreement doesn't obligate you to continue participating in the same dynamic.
The next piece of information may then have to come from reality rather than another conversation.
Distance can be information. Reduced access can be information. The end of a relationship can be information. None of these outcomes should be used strategically to manipulate the other person into changing; in fact, the moment a boundary becomes a technique to elicit a particular response, it ceases to be an authentic boundary and becomes another form of control.

A boundary concerns what I will do in response to a situation I can no longer participate in. What the other person does next is theirs.

They might use the consequence to question themselves, recognize a pattern, and change. They might repeat the exact same pattern with someone else. They might construct a narrative in which you are entirely responsible for what happened.
Your interpretation does not determine whether your limit was legitimate.

There is a particular kind of maturity in accepting that another person's path may have consequences you cannot prevent without sacrificing yourself, and that their evolution is ultimately beyond your control.

Communication is of fundamental importance, but communication also involves knowing when there is nothing more to explain (“if certain things could be understood, they would not need to be explained” is a great truth).

Tolerance has value, but only when we remain capable of recognizing what we are tolerating and why.

Resilience has value, but only when it serves our capacity to live, rather than merely increases our capacity to endure.

Love has value, but love without discernment can easily turn into participation in someone else's unresolved dynamics.

Sometimes the most respectful thing we can do for another person, and for ourselves, is to stop interfering with the feedback their choices are already producing, and to accept the incompatibility, instead of exhausting ourselves trying to tolerate it.