Here the questioner defines it as wise compassion rather than compassion that can perpetrate an issue or pattern by not reflecting necessary movement for growth. I’m a bit less clear on the definition given, but the question about tough love is quite pertinent for many people today. The late, great teacher Chogyam Trungpa, who founded Naropa, the Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado, used to call upon his students to distinguish between what he called enlightened compassion and idiot compassion, the latter being an ungrounded sense or feeling that comes up in people who do not truly understand compassion.. It’s something they tend to project but it may not be very grounded.

In many ways, people have the same split in terms of what they consider love. What you might call idiot love is a notion that love is only soft and fuzzy and nothing else. In other words, to take someone on about their behavior or their attitudes these people feel is not really love. They call it something else. However, this kind of love does not make for very deep relationships, does it? And if one feels that love is only supportive and is eternally non-confrontive, then we must inquire about the fruits of this kind of love. What has been called “tough love” generally refers to loving someone enough that you would actually risk their rejection of you in order to reflect the nature of their behaviors or perhaps their attitudes. It’s not just being argumentative, as some people have seen it, but it really involves some level of risk on the part of the one who is offering this love.

For example, most parents would prefer to speak to their children in voices that are warm and soft, offering encouragement and support all the time, and they would also prefer nonviolence in their relationships with their children. However, assume a young child, perhaps who is lost in his own internal world of imagining, wanders into the street. Further, imagine that the parent notices that a car is coming down the street. Now his or her response to this critical situation is to fly into the street and grab the child, pushing him or her to the curb on the far side of the street, and perhaps in so doing the parent knocks the child down and maybe even falls on top of the child. Now to the child, this seems like a pretty violent behavior or set of behaviors on the part of the parent. Or perhaps in the parent’s fear for the child, she or he yells at the child or pushes the child roughly to get to the other side of the street.

Once again, this can be seen as pretty violent behavior to the child. In falling, the child might scrape various body parts and maybe gets a bloody nose and some painful bumps and bruises. Clearly in such a situation, simply calling to the child in a loving voice might not spare the child a disastrous complication. Thus the tougher approach actually turns out to be the more loving approach.

In the same way, during the often rebellious stages of adolescence, the more loving stance might be the tougher stance. This is particularly true when the adolescent needs a reality check on their acceptable or not-so-acceptable social behavior, or particularly if there is substance abuse involved. This same kind of tough love, or the approach of tough love, can be seen when people have enough courage to confront other adults, perhaps friends or relatives, whom they love but who may be alcoholic or addicted to drugs. It turns out that an active, direct, perhaps confrontational approach shows more love for the person than does simply sitting by and letting the person destroy himself or herself.

As most of you know, avoidance of the proverbial elephant in the living room doesn’t invite change. Rather, it invites more of the same behavior as well as a silent type of collusion between the parties in whatever the problem area is. Most of you probably know people who are on a spiritual path and sometimes, for their own selfish reasons, want to avoid conflict at all costs. This may feel like the smoother path, but it can also be a pretty costly path. If you are around someone who is engaging in behaviors that you can see are destructive, either to that person or to others on the scene, then you really must ask what would love do in this situation? Indeed every situation must be carefully considered on its own merits rather than generalizing some standard and trying to apply it to everyone else in the form of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.”

But it is important to notice whether your response to another person, particularly one in a precarious place, is coming more from love of the other person or love of your own comfort zone. Indeed, always ask what would love do. Try to look beyond simply what might feel the most comfortable for you, and then apply both love and skillful means, and through them chart your course of action. Yet, try to do so from a point of calm neutrality somewhere within your heart. If you get activated and begin interacting from some emotional charge that drives you, then you're coming from a false notion of yourself. It seems as though we’re talking about that a lot this evening. Actually the self always bears watching. That’s just a given, friends.

Then you might find that there are situations where someone needs to hear the hard truth, and you realize that none other than yourself will offer it to them. So you ask, what would love do? That question is kind of a provocative one, but I’d like to suggest that you let that question be your constant companion and that you look deeply within for the right answer. Don’t just necessarily take a feel-good answer, go deeper than that, and then you’ll have your answer, you see?