The Power of Ruthless Compassion: Redefining Kindness and Trauma Healing with Dr. Marcia Sirota |Ep. 72

Welcome to Episode 71 of the ANEW Insight Podcast, hosted by clinical psychologist, registered dietitian, and bestselling author Dr. Supatra Tovar. In this powerful and thought-provoking conversation, Dr. Tovar sits down with board-certified psychiatrist, author, and Ruthless Compassion podcaster Dr. Marcia Sirota to explore the transformative power of ruthless compassion—a concept that blends empathy with clear boundaries, emotional strength, and radical honesty.

Dr. Sirota, based in Toronto, Canada, brings over 25 years of experience in trauma recovery, mental health, and personal empowerment. Together, they dive deep into what it means to be kind without becoming a doormat, how to set boundaries without guilt, and why people-pleasing is often a trauma response rooted in early experiences of powerlessness. This episode breaks down how developing "ruthless compassion" can help individuals heal from trauma, reclaim their power, and stop enabling harmful behavior in themselves and others.

Listeners will learn:

• What ruthless compassion is—and what it isn’t
• How kindness differs from people-pleasing
• Why boundary-setting is an act of self-respect and love
• How trauma shapes coping mechanisms like fawning and freezing
• The role of personal responsibility in reducing suffering
• Tools like the "Inner Warrior" and "Wise Woman Within" for building internal safety and self-trust
• How to move from self-criticism to self-compassion using clarity, not cruelty

Dr. Sirota shares clinical wisdom, real-life examples, and philosophical insights to help listeners see that compassion doesn’t mean tolerating everything or giving yourself (or others) a free pass. Instead, she advocates for truth-telling, accountability, and empowerment as the core of authentic healing. Whether you’re a therapist, trauma survivor, caregiver, or someone working on boundary-setting, this episode will give you actionable strategies for reclaiming your voice and emotional safety.

Dr. Tovar and Dr. Sirota also discuss the overlap between complex PTSD and personality disorders, how fawning behaviors block authentic relationships, and why labeling trauma survivors without compassion does more harm than good. This is a must-listen episode for anyone seeking to understand how trauma affects identity, behavior, and healing—and how to rise above it through fierce, intentional self-love.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we explore Dr. Sirota’s book Be Kind, Not Nice and what it truly means to become a Kindness Warrior in today’s world.

📘Dr. Marcia Sirota’s  Social media channels:  https://marciasirotamd.com/, https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00DXGVO3A, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6i7Wq-bh3faMBvCc5F0fPg, https://podcast.reelmental.com/, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ruthless-compassion-with-dr-marcia-sirota/id1085239678, https://ca.linkedin.com/in/marcia-sirota.

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Thank you for joining us on this journey to wellness. Remember, the insights and advice shared on the ANEW Body Insight Podcast are for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making any changes to your health routine. To learn more about the podcast and stay updated on new episodes, visit ANEW Body Insight Podcast at anew-insight.com. To watch this episode on YouTube, visit @my.anew.insight. Follow us on social media at @my.anew.insight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads for more updates and insights. Thank you for tuning in! Stay connected with us for more empowering stories and expert guidance. Until next time, stay well and keep evolving with ANEW Body Insight!

Transcript

0:00 Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:01

She specializes in wellness, trauma, healing, creativity, enhancement, and empowering individuals to become kindness warriors. I love that. As the founder of the Ruthless Compassion Institute, Dr. Sirota promotes empowerment and self awareness. She is also an author of five books, including Be Kind, Not Nice. We had so much fun on your podcast and really did not want the conversation to end. So we're just bleeding over into my podcast and continuing on, but really delving into you. So I'm so excited to learn more about you. I would love to know what inspired you to go into psychiatry and how did this journey lead you to create the Ruthless Compassion

Dr. Marcia Sirota: 0:03

They were more emotional, psychological, addiction related. And so I started doing counseling and then I started learning more about it. And eventually I went back and did a residency in psychiatry and I really found my niche. So yeah, it was, it was an evolution cause I hadn't set out to be a psychiatrist, but it suits my personality very much. There are some things that, suffering just comes to us because of life, but there are things that we can do to suffer less. And I noticed that there are, there's this concept compassion that sometimes is misunderstood. Sometimes people think of compassion as tolerating things, as overdoing it, as everybody is good, nobody is bad, everything is fine, this kind of moral relativism it can be mushy, and I really like the idea of compassion, especially self compassion, but I thought that, our concept of compassion should have a little bit of backbone to it. And so I thought Ruthless Compassion was a very good combo because the ruthlessness is not about being cruel or harsh. It's about seeing the truth about yourself, other people in the world with real clarity. Really facing what's going on, because so much of our problems in life come from avoidance and denial. So facing the truth is the first thing about the ruthless part. The second thing about the ruthless part is, although we can have self compassion, that doesn't mean we give ourselves a free pass. It's not leniency. It's not self indulgence. It's saying, okay, there are some choices I'm making that are not correct, that are not working for myself or for others. There are some things that, suffering just comes to us because of life, but there are things that we can do to suffer less. And I noticed that there are, there's this concept compassion that sometimes is misunderstood. Sometimes people think of compassion as tolerating things, as overdoing it, as everybody is good, nobody is bad, everything is fine, this kind of moral relativism it can be mushy, and I really like the idea of compassion, especially self compassion, but I thought that, our concept of compassion should have a little bit of backbone to it. And so I thought Ruthless Compassion was a very good combo because the ruthlessness is not about being cruel or harsh. It's about seeing the truth about yourself, other people in the world with real clarity. Really facing what's going on, because so much of our problems in life come from avoidance and denial. So facing the truth is the first thing about the ruthless part. The second thing about the ruthless part is, although we can have self compassion, that doesn't mean we give ourselves a free pass. It's not leniency. It's not self indulgence. It's saying, okay, there are some choices I'm making that are not correct, that are not working for myself or for others. And so we are an instrument of positive growth and change for them as opposed to just an enabler of their bad behavior and someone who is teaching them through our passivity that their behavior is acceptable when it's not. So. I like the concept of Ruthless Compassion because it's a much more practical and effective way of being loving, but not a doormat.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:07

We are being absolutely loving and fully true to ourselves, and we're also being very specific with our loved ones, which provides them a framework and boundaries as far as how they interact with us. And I also think that's a loving, compassionate act.

Dr. Marcia Sirota: 0:08

The person in the position of authority who needs to have better boundaries and set better limits and make, have clear expectations and have proper consequences, right? And that's the most loving thing because our children, our pets, our friends will all feel more safe, securely attached and have clarity about what's expected of them and of their behavior. And they will have realistic expectations. So if we let our children get away with everything. And then they're going into school and they're completely wild and the teachers are going, what kind of a little hellion have you raised? We're not doing any favors for them or if we let them get away with things as teens and then they graduate and go to university and they flunk out or they finish university and then they can't keep a job because they don't know how to respect authority or buckle down and do their work. We're not doing them any favors. Well, this is historical, but we are socialized to be nice because, we've been taught and I think it's very wrongly and unfairly that the way we have value is to be pretty and to be nice and to be agreeable And we're not a bad person for saying no, for saying, this doesn't make me feel comfortable. I don't want this. I'm not going to do this. We're not a bad person for asking for what we need for saying, I need a raise. I need a day off. Like somebody might, push back and say, I don't like it, but we're not bad for expressing our needs and feelings and our limits. And we have to learn that even though the people around us might not like it, it's not a bad thing. And we also might learn that if we're surrounded by people who keep pushing back, maybe we need to choose different people to associate with people who will be perfectly fine with us having our needs and feelings and limits met. Sure. So, They have expanded the kind of characteristics of trauma to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn and the fawning part is about both doing too much in order to stay safe but also doing too much because you feel worthless and you believe that the only way people will love you or accept you or approve of you is by currying favor. There's two problems with that well, a few problems. The users will always take advantage of you. The kind people will feel awkward and uncomfortable because you're trying so hard and you're so desperate. And you're also inauthentic because it's not the real you, and the abusers, the bullies will take advantage and, look at you with contempt. So, even if you're not being exploited or abused, you're not being authentic, so you can't be loved for yourself. So all that fawning that you're doing, you're putting on this nice act, is not getting you true love because you're not seen for who you are. So the tragedy is you're expending so much energy, but you're not getting any real return on your investment. The best thing to do is just to be yourself, your quirky, imperfect self. There will be people who are capable of loving you. If they are capable and there will be people who aren't capable of loving you, but at least you won't exhaust yourself by, putting on this act. You won't get resentful because you're exhausting yourself and you're not getting what you want and you won't be setting yourself up to be exploited by the users or abused by the bullies. For people with trauma, they need to learn self love. And going back to what I was saying with ruthless compassion, of the problems with self exploration is that if we have a very strong inner critic in our head because we've internalized this negative message from our childhood, if we have trauma or any kind of abuse or neglect, we are afraid to see ourselves clearly because it's generally accompanied by this negativity like, oh, you're so stupid, you're so bad. But if we can have that compassion, and part of the ruthlessness here is ruthlessly rejecting that negative message because it's not the truth about us. It's just stuff people said to us or implied. And so if we can see the truth about ourselves without self criticism then we can heal our trauma and then we are less inclined to be people pleasers and fawning. That's a wonderful question. And I thing that I want people to understand is that when they were experiencing trauma, they were often young, helpless, unable to really understand exactly what was going on, certainly unable to fight back or assert themselves or set a limit, and not even able to escape. And whatever you did at the time to survive, it worked for you, but it might not work for you now. The things that you did, like the freezing and the fawning. So, as an adult, you have to develop self trust that you have an inner warrior inside of you that's powerful. And I often give them a visualization to do where they meet their inner warrior. I send them on a journey to encounter their inner warrior and the inner warrior can be anything. It can be a mythical creature. It can be an animal. It can be a religious figure. It can be a warrior woman. It can be any number of things, but you know, they often will have a very clear image of this very powerful creature that becomes their internalized warrior inside of their mind and they can call on that warrior when they're feeling unsafe or anxious or afraid. And so I have them really work with that concept of having an inner warrior so that they can build self trust. I also work on their inner wisdom so that everyone has an inherent inner wisdom. It can be safer and a lot safer. And we can also make choices that are safer. We can, use our judgment, our adult judgment, not our impulsivity. That's the child inside us. We can use our adult judgment to do things that are more likely to be safe and less likely to be risky behavior This is not safe. And that is not a sign of weakness. That's a sign of being shrewd. That's having a good insight and taking the right action, which is time to leave. It's not putting yourself in physical harm's way or even emotional harm's way. Sometimes the choice is to speak out and to say something. I got to hang up the phone or I got to walk away from this situation because this is not making me feel good and I don't need to expose myself to this. So it's not about violence. It's not about, being an angry person. In fact, I find that when you trust yourself to take care of yourself, you're a lot less angry because you have that calm of that self trust and that trusting your intuition and your inner wisdom. So you don't have to walk around being, with your dukes up being defensive and, always on edge because you really feel that calmness. Like I got this, and you can say to yourself, I got this.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:19

They can just reside from their authentic self. I love this. Now in your extensive background in treating trauma, what do you think are some of the most common misconceptions in trauma recovery?

Dr. Marcia Sirota: 0:20

Who knows, maybe in a few years they'll say, you know what it's the same diagnosis. Maybe not, but I like to think that a lot of people who have trauma have what's called CPTSD as opposed to, just being an annoying person because they lived through this trauma. And so if one of the misperceptions or misconceptions that is that, if you've had trauma, you turn into this raving lunatic, maybe what you can say instead is if you had trauma, it does affect the structure and the function of your brain. It does affect your impulsivity, your judgment, your insight. It does affect your relationships. It has quite a pervasive effect on your life, but it doesn't make you a bad person and it's not your fault. And if we can have compassion for these people rather than judgment, And if you can have some tolerance and understanding and some space, they can heal more and they can, go through the steps of healing of facing the truth about what happened to them, grieving their losses, letting it go and building self love and esteem. Then you can be a better outcome for everyone.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:22

It comes from some pretty extensive traumatic experiences that cause a person to develop coping mechanisms that are not necessarily societally friendly. So, I love that and I really am hopeful that , C P T S D, I wish that it was a DSM diagnosis because it really does need to be included. When we look at post traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Marcia Sirota: 0:23

Nowadays, my knowledge of this, one of the things I do, if I see someone who seems to have a lot of quote unquote personality traits, dysfunctional personality traits, my first question is, what might have happened to this person? And I want to find out, I want to learn, I want to bring curiosity to it and

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:24

It's usually people who have had things done to them and they haven't been able to process it or work through it. There may be perpetuating a cycle. And I think when people do that, it builds their compassion for those people. They can see, oh, this is not personal. This is something that is, deeply personal to that person. So you're going to be coming back and I hope everyone comes back for the second half of this amazing podcast. We'll see you then. With board psychiatrist, author, and Ruthless Compassion podcaster, Dr. Marcia Sirota. Join us next Time. Thanks, Marcia.