I’ve been seeing lately several examples of “Tough Love”. The concept is that you want to make someone improve, but instead of encouraging them and offering constructive feedback on how they can improve, you berate and abuse them (not only verbally sometimes) about how bad they are.
The logic behind this (if one can call it that) is that the person in question will be motivated to improve on their own, and will “toughen up” in the process, making them more resilient to such behaviour in the future. Now, if you have a brain you can probably see some issues here.
First let’s say we blatantly ignore the fact that not every person functions the same, and is not motivated in the same way. Even then, what you get is a person that has indeed improved in whatever it is they were doing, but at what cost? They will end up cynical and unhealthily suppressing their emotions, which in itself will cause a whole other range of problems I’m not even going to mention here.
But more importantly, this “Tough Love” almost never actually comes from a place of love. It comes from a self-perpetuating “if I had to go through this, you have to as well”. It comes from a power play kink and in general is a very selfish attitude to providing feedback. Because actually providing useful feedback that will make a difference is difficult, and you have to make an effort for it, whereas just dismissing someone as useless or stupid is easy and quick. You don’t have to think about it, and you can vent your frustration in the process, a win-win! Both wins are for you of course.
I have seen several examples of this in practice. First, in education. Underperforming students (how “performance” is actually measured in education is a whole other can of worms) are treated not just like undeserving of education, but actively offensive to the concept. Of course if you treat them like that you are going to end up with them obstructing lessons, and causing problems.
You can see how this concept has been driven into our collective conciousness by taking an example from pop culture: Whiplash. Now there were good things about this movie to be sure, and I can’t really be sure if the authors condone the teacher’s attitude or not. But it does glorify tough love as a concept, by presenting us with a “successful” example. When confronted with his approach, the teacher attributes it to “his duty to society” to produce the next great musician. This is actually a common theme with proponents of this approach (and other problemantic behaviours), advocating that “society” is who is benefitting in the end. But in fact it is their own purely selfish motives to be seen as great, as important, and crucially, as powerful.
Another example where I saw this first-hand is the army. Here there is also another excuse for it, as actually being in an active warzone is an extremely stressfull and taxing situation to be in, and you have to be mentally and physically resilient enough to withstand it if you’re ever deployed. In that sense, there is somewhat of an argument to be made about this approach, but it has to be done by people who understand why and how, to people who also understand why. It is a difficult job, and should not be handed to anyone who just likes being in charge. Extensive proper psycological evaluation should be obligatory for everyone involved.
A last example where this kind of attitude is glorified is for anyone working in a kitchen. There I do not have personal experience, and I do not claim to know how to properly run a kitchen. But I know that abuse is never mandatory, and choosing it over clear and direct communication is simply lazy.
In general, if you ever find yourself in a position where you have to guide or instruct people, especially if you are working in education, don’t be lazy. We are all people in the end.
