maladaptive altruism
the devouring hands of good intentions
This post is an adaptation of an essay I wrote for university coursework, reworked for my poetry audience. You can read the original academic essay here.
Humans, strange creatures that we are, love to dress up sacrifice as sainthood, to etch empathy into the walls of morality and call it divine. Altruism—the art of giving without getting—should be a holy thing. A selfless thing. A body offered up to the altar with no expectation of salvation. But even altars, when fed too often, become nothing but graves.
Some say altruism is merely genetic insurance—an evolutionary gamble to keep our bloodlines dripping into the future.1 The impulse to throw ourselves onto swords, to hold up the sky for someone else, is just biology playing at nobility. But what happens when generosity festers beyond reason? When sacrifice becomes pathological? When the “need” to “give” mutates into something twisted?
“Anything in excess is a poison.”
Theodore Levitt
This essay is about that poison—the place where kindness curdles, where selflessness becomes self-destruction. It’s about giving until you’re hollow and finding that the hollowing isn’t noble—it’s lethal.
Maladaptive altruism wears many faces, each more twisted than the last: protective, defensive, masochistic, and malignant.2
Protective altruism
the vigilante’s fever dream, a holy martyrdom with no god to anoint it
This is the sacrifice Hollywood loves to celebrate—all noble and chest-thumping heroism. But when it goes too far, self-sacrifice becomes a phantom limb, severed from necessity, feeding on imagined martyrdom. The officer who plants evidence to save a life, tipping the scales toward justice. The parent who shelters their child from every hardship, leaving them brittle, untested—the shield that suffocates.
Defensive altruism
the lover who stays too long, mistaking suffering for salvation
A dance of giving and getting, built on the warm fuzzies you anticipate receiving in return. But somewhere along the way, the giver loses more than they bargained for—their heart, their mind, their sanity, all slipping through the cracks. They give and give until they’re all hollowed out, bones carved into currency for another’s comfort. This is about the giver who stays in the wreckage of an abusive relationship, mistaking endurance for virtue. The one who drowns, believing it is love to sink so someone else can breathe.
Masochistic altruism
the saint who licks the knife, the prayer whispered into the mouth of a loaded gun
Pure toxicity. This form of pathological altruism wears the face of a saint but feasts on suffering. The hunger for pain, the addiction to martyrdom—the one who burns themselves out because they cannot help it. The sacrificial lamb, over and over and over again, even when it is completely unnecessary. Victimhood tastes sweeter than healing, and suffering is proof of goodness, of worth.
Malignant altruism
the sugar-coated noose, the gift that glows like a curse
The most insidious: generosity as a leash. The lover who smothers, the partner who twists sacrifice into a cage. “Look at all that I’ve done for you,” they say, tightening the noose as they bind you in debt. They dress manipulation in ribbons, call it devotion, and demand gratitude in return.
All four forms of pathological altruism stem from the same warped perception of what it means to help, to give. The hands that give, trembling with the need to be needed. The heart that bleeds, convinced its suffering sanctifies it. But evolution designed prosociality to lift us up, not bury us in wreckage. So, what went wrong?
Studies have linked pathological altruism to childhood wounds—an insatiable need to heal the broken as a way to repair the self. Sometimes, the pathological altruist seeks to fix, and sometimes, they seek to hurt first—to get ahead of the inevitable. They cannot see the venom laced in their kindness. They believe themselves saints in a world of sinners, and yet, their giving takes. Their path—paved with good intentions—leads to pain. Their giving isn’t a gift; it’s a chain. A manipulation.
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
Pathological altruism makes victims of us all, even when we think we’re doing good. It is a slow suffocation, a snake wrapping itself around the giver’s throat, whispering, This is devotion. The giver suffers. The receiver suffers. Sometimes, they trade misery like dance partners, spinning in and out of each other’s ruin. A cop plants evidence with a steady hand, convinced he's stitching up the world’s wounds. A woman stays in a house with breaking windows and a man who smells like rage because the children need their father. A lover buys gifts with sharp edges, ties generosity to chains, molds kindness into a gilded cage. The line between savior and oppressor thins, frays, disappears. Until all that’s left is the leash, coiled tight.
It is not enough to know that self-sacrifice can rot. We must trace its decay to the roots. It grows in the cracks of neglect, in the damp corners where love was once withheld. We are taught to give, to pour, to press ourselves into the hands of others until we are nothing but remnants, but we are never taught to take. Never told that we can carve out space without apology. That we can say, “I matter, too,” without it feeling like treason. We glorify depletion and call it virtue. We burn ourselves to embers and wonder why we are cold.
But the body has a language of survival, and it speaks in boundaries. Healthy selfishness is not greed—it is the air mask you strap on before the plane goes down. It is the locked door when the world is asking too much. It is knowing when to stop before you dissolve, when to hold back before you fracture. True kindness is not found in the endless hemorrhaging of the self. It is found in balance, in the quiet, unshakable knowing that you cannot give from an empty hand.
Because in the end, pathological altruism is not love—it is hunger masquerading as holiness. It is a bottomless pit, swallowing both the giver and the given. It is love, rotting. Love, bleeding out in the name of righteousness. But perhaps the truest kindness is not in how much we give, but in knowing when to let go. When to stand back and allow space to breathe. When to keep a little for ourselves. Love should not be a wound we keep reopening just to prove it bleeds. Love should not destroy. It should sustain, nourish, endure.
And maybe, just maybe, those who have spent their lives giving will finally understand that they, too, deserve to take a little.
Funder, D. C. (2019). The Personality Puzzle (8th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company
Oakley, B. A., Wilson, D. S., Madhavan, G., & Knafo, A. (2011). Pathological Altruism. Oxford University Press.
🙏🙏🙏 big nervous system dysregulation. So well drawn out. Lots of pathological altruism in my family. Freeing myself from it. Healing my NS.
And can I say I love that you adapted an academic essay into a lyric essay. 🖤🖤
A beautifully insightful read! Thank you!