THE SHADOW WE CALL KINDNESS IN WOMEN
Adriana Tanese Nogueira
Psychoanalyst | Instituto AELLA
adrianatns@icloud.com
There are women who move through life believing that kindness is a form of protection. That being understanding, patient, and available creates a kind of moral shield against harm. It doesn’t. At best, it creates a blind spot.
Most wounds are not born from what is openly violent, but from what settles into the invisible: what is left unsaid, what is tolerated, what is dismissed as “it wasn’t that bad.” The problem with the invisible is not that it doesn’t exist, but that it governs without being questioned.
We call love what is fear of loss. We call empathy what is an inability to sustain conflict. We call kindness what is often nothing more than a refusal to see.
Evil rarely arrives in monstrous form. It tends to appear polite, reasonable, sometimes even fragile. And it thrives precisely where it encounters moral naïveté — the comforting certainty that good intentions automatically place us on the right side.
The problem is not only deliberate harm. That is easier to recognize. The most dangerous kind is the harm that does not recognize itself as such: harm born of naïveté, omission, and false goodness. It does not require intention in order to operate — only enough unconsciousness to be left unattended.
There is a soothing belief that if there was no malicious intent, then no real damage was done. This is false. Evil exists independently of intention. It is concrete, discernible, and it produces effects. Pretending it does not exist does not neutralize it; it strengthens it. Where there is no ethical vigilance, it organizes itself.
People with little self-awareness, fragile ethics, or spiritual cowardice release destructive forces without realizing it — not out of explicit cruelty, but out of an inability to sustain responsibility. The good we fail to do, whether out of fear, convenience, or accommodation, does not vanish. It quietly adds itself to the evil already in circulation.
There is an active shadow in human relationships. It manifests in the body before it takes shape in reason: a persistent unease, a weariness without clear cause, a resentment that grows in silence. Ignoring it is not a spiritual virtue. It is involuntary collaboration.
The invisible is the territory where these forces hide. And nothing ignored in that territory remains neutral. What is not seen, felt, and named returns as fate — turning against us.
Only when a woman is willing to look at this territory without disguise, in herself and in others, does she stop being governed by the invisible. And only then can she choose the good not out of naïveté, but out of consciousness.
