When Compassion Becomes a Liability: Psychological Safety, Accountability, and Sex Workers

This reflection comes from something that unfolded in my general population group. I’m writing it with sex workers in mind because we are often the ones holding the container— tracking nervous systems, absorbing projections, and staying regulated when others cannot. We notice shifts in mood, expectation, and projection, and because of this capacity, we often tolerate psychological unsafety far longer than we should—whether in relationships, families, community spaces, or healing containers. That said, this is a lesson everyone can benefit from: most of us have been around someone whose psychological unsafety we didn’t want to abandon, and it’s worth noticing the cost of staying too long.

The Pattern

It usually starts with care.

Someone enters a space dysregulated, defensive, or fragile. We sense it immediately. We slow down. Explain more. Offer reassurance. Adjust ourselves.

When nothing changes, we try harder.

Over time, effort turns into frustration. Frustration turns into exhaustion. Exhaustion turns into self-doubt.

The more important question is simple: What does it cost me to stay here?

Projection Has Impact

In this group, feedback regarding the container agreements was offered calmly, in the present moment. One of the most important container agreements we have is to own our assumptions by calling them stories rather than making definitive statements about what someone else is doing or intending.

When asked to bring her shares into tighter format, this one participant repeatedly experienced it as “attack” or “blame.”

This wasn’t actual harm being caused — it was projection.

Unowned feelings of shame, insecurity, and inferiority were being externalized and placed onto others. The group was implicitly asked to manage emotions this participant couldn’t yet hold.

Sex workers know this dynamic intimately: boundaries we try to uphold are received by the other as cruelty, accountability is received as punishment, internal collapse becomes our responsibility. That isn’t intimacy— it’s non-consensual emotional labor.

When Unsafety Becomes the Center

The impact on the group was immediate. The room tightened. People became cautious. Authenticity felt risky.

Not because individuals lacked the capacity to hold complexity, but because the container quietly reorganized around one person’s psychological unsafety.

Here’s the hard truth: when a system centers the most dysregulated person, everyone else pays the cost.

The more advanced participants in the practice considered leaving because they were tired of managing someone else’s projections. This is imbalance, not compassion.

Not Every Space Is the Right Space

If a group gathers to play basketball, and someone can’t dribble, the game stops being basketball. It simply means it isn’t the right space right now.

Not every container can hold every nervous system. Not every relationship can hold accountability. And sex workers are not obligated to stay in spaces that erode their clarity or self-trust.

Boundaries Are Care

I eventually asked the participant not to continue in the group. This wasn’t punishment—it was protection: of the group, the work, and the participant, who deserves environments aligned with their current capacity.

Sex workers are often conditioned to endure endlessly— but endurance has a cost. When the same people are always paying it, something is wrong.

Compassion does not require absorbing projection. Inclusivity does not mean collapsing standards. Care does not mean abandoning reality.

Protecting spaces that allow real psychological safety—even when saying no is uncomfortable—is survival, dignity, and relational maturity.

Sex workers are allowed to choose relationships and containers that meet them in accountability—not just consume their capacity. That choice, too, is care.