The Lighthouse: Self-RespectA Reflection on Holding the Line When Compassion Becomes Surrender

Lighthouse

When I was in high school, I was on the block for the 50 or 100 free and one of my teammates (Kevin Timony) yelled out that I looked like a bear. “The Bear!” lasted maybe for another meet or two, but I liked the nickname a lot.

It never stuck, but the animal did. I fucking love them. Big, grumpy, and solitary but also kind and gentle in their own way.

Bears do not make great pets nor blanket metaphors. There is always some asshole in the crowd that yells, “Why not a scorpion?”

Lighthouses, we can do a lot with that.

I don’t even know when the first lighthouse was built. I think ancient Greece had a great one, but I am rusty on my history.

The Lighthouse has not changed much since its creation. It is a symbol of safety and hope. It is a beacon of light to guide you away from danger to safety.

Lighthouses are engineering marvels—designed to stand tall and strong in the worst the earth can offer.

All of us are managing our own lighthouses. We all have the ability to create safety, stability, and hope.

It takes a lot of work. As Steve Pressfield points out, that work starts the moment our eyes open in the morning; he calls this resistance, and we therapists like to call it avoidance¹.

I am going to stick with Steve’s term resistance, though.

We start to develop resistance as children. The universe takes a mind of curiosity, adds our experiences, and we start to worry. How we learn to respond to that worry creates our attachments within different environments.

We all start out as little lighthouses—tiny little beacons of hope.

As we get older, we have to do more and more work to keep that light going, overcome our resistance, and if we can manage our lighthouse, flourish.

Any light any of us shine attracts new people, new connections to our island where our lighthouse stands.

And this is the paradox of the lighthouse: who can access the island on which our light shines.

The Lighthouse is tough enough to maintain. When we allow the wrong people on our island, we become distracted. Cracks are missed, mold grows, and we pull ourselves away from the goal—to be us, our true, genuine selves.

When you first figure out that you are a lighthouse—in my youth, I would let anyone on my island. It was a beautiful beach, and I thought, The more, the merrier.

As I have grown into this world, as I have gained experience, I have learned to control the one area I have always had control over—access to me, access to my lighthouse.

With every new experience, every new connection and interaction, the shoreline changes. What was once a beautiful white sandy beach now has jetties and rocks.

Life shows you that you can’t have everyone on your island. Not everyone should be given full access. Not everyone deserves our support.

So you start building jetties. Maybe you surround yourself with them, make it impossible for anyone to get on your island.

And some of us, sadly, have had it so bad that we don’t understand how to build a lighthouse of our own. They never learned the value of their light because they never empowered themselves to come out of the dark.

When we see them come within our light, we look at them with empathy and compassion—the same empathy and compassion that keep our lighthouse working.

We begin to feel this urge, this roaring storm inside of us, compelling us to leave the safety of our lighthouse, our island, to save them from the perils of the ocean that surrounds us.

And with that, most of us learn that lesson, as true as time: we get burnt. Our light fades, our structure crumbles, and we start to build our jetty.

And maybe we learn that lesson. We learn our strength is on the island.

Maybe we don’t learn the lesson—that not everyone is allowed on the island, that access is earned with respect and compassion, the same respect and compassion we show others.

Empathy.

Empathy is the grout that holds our Lighthouse together, but it is also what pulls us away from the job we have to do—create our own happiness.

Empathy is the ability to feel the storm without getting swept away by it. It’s what allows us to connect—to understand another person’s pain, to see through their eyes for a moment. But empathy isn’t the same as self-sacrifice.

Real empathy doesn’t mean abandoning your post to pull someone from the water; it means keeping your light steady so they can see the shore.

It’s presence, not rescue.

Compassion, not control.

The moment empathy turns into obligation, we’re no longer helping—we’re drowning beside them².

Empathy, Jung might say, is where our light meets another’s darkness—and that’s dangerous if we’re not conscious of it. He warned that when we identify too much with someone else’s suffering, we become possessed by it—what he called participation mystique³. We lose our boundaries, our sense of Self, and mistake merging for connection.

That’s not compassion; that’s fusion.

Jung believed real empathy comes after shadow work—after you’ve met your own pain and learned to sit with it without running⁴. Only then can your light reach someone else without burning you out. The goal isn’t to extinguish your fire to warm another; it’s to keep it alive so others can find their way home.

Too much empathy, Jung would say, pulls us out of our center. When we spend our energy feeling for others instead of with them, we’re no longer grounded in the Self—we’ve drifted into identification. The psyche doesn’t tolerate that imbalance for long.

It reacts.

The reaction can look like exhaustion, resentment, or even rage—all signals that we’ve crossed the boundary between compassion and self-abandonment⁵.

Jung saw this as the shadow knocking at the door, demanding recognition. That’s the moment most of us either double down on people-pleasing or finally learn to let go. When we stop confusing empathy with responsibility, we rediscover something stronger beneath it: discernment.

The ability to care without collapsing. To shine without burning.

Jung would say that “empaths” and “takers” are two sides of the same unconscious coin. The empath identifies with goodness, compassion, and light—but often at the cost of denying their own shadow, the part that wants to say no, to set limits, to protect the Self.

The taker, on the other hand, lives fully in that shadow energy—the hunger, the entitlement, the need to feed off others’ light. One disowns their darkness; the other disowns their conscience. And so they find each other.

It’s not coincidence—it’s psychic magnetism⁶. Jung called this enantiodromia—the tendency of opposites to attract until balance is restored⁷.

The empath unconsciously seeks wholeness through the taker, and vice versa, but the relationship burns out because it’s built on projection, not awareness.

Real self-respect starts when the empath stops mistaking sensitivity for sainthood, and the taker is forced to face their own emptiness. That’s individuation—the painful but necessary process of reclaiming what we’ve projected onto others⁸.

The empath learns to say, “I can feel your pain, but I am not your cure.”

Jung would say that true compassion sometimes looks like watching people crash into the rocks. You feel it—every scream, every splinter of wood—but you don’t leave your post.

Because the moment you abandon your light to save them, you both go under. That’s the hardest part of individuation: learning to bear the ache of someone else’s suffering without confusing it for your mission to fix⁹.

The Lighthouse doesn’t swim into the storm; it endures it. Its job is to shine, to warn, to witness. Some will see that light and steer toward safety. Others will ignore it and vanish beneath the waves.

That’s not your failure—that’s nature. Your responsibility is to keep the flame steady, to guard your island, and to allow access only to those who help you maintain the structure or are willing to build their own.

Maybe that’s why I always liked bears. They know when to hunt and when to hibernate. They know when to stand up and when to disappear into the woods. They don’t beg to be understood—they just exist, unapologetically themselves.

That’s what the Lighthouse learns, too. You stop chasing the ships. You stop leaving the island. You realize that keeping your light burning is an act of self-respect. The ones meant to find shore will find it.

The ones who don’t—they were never your responsibility.

So you tend the flame. You repair the cracks. You honor the storm but no longer live inside it. That’s what growing up feels like—not cynicism, but clarity. Not isolation, but integrity.

You become the Bear again—grounded, strong, patient. A creature that knows when to guard the cave and when to emerge.

The Lighthouse stands. The Bear rests. And between them, you find something that finally feels steady—not because the sea has calmed, but because you have.

References

1. Pressfield, S. (2002). The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Black Irish Entertainment.

2. Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-Compassion: An Alternative Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

3. Jung, C. G. (1953/1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

4. Jung, C. G. (1959/1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

5. Jung, C. G. (1960/1969). Civilization in Transition (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

6. Fordham, M. (1958). Jungian Psychology: A Basic Introduction. Basic Books.

7. Jung, C. G. (1959/1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.

8. von Franz, M.-L. (1964). The Process of Individuation. In C. G. Jung (Ed.), Man and His Symbols (pp. 157–254). Doubleday.

9. Jung, C. G. (1959/1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.