One of the largest things I've scaled back on in the past year is using empathy to justify behavior.

Empathy can be used to understand how people derive decisions/behavior, but isn't always a good metric for justifying behavior.

I can reasonably understand a person's backstory to connect to their actions, but at the end of the day if those actions are harmful, I'm not going to try to logically try to make that person seem innocent or absolved from their behavior.

The tradeoff of being over empathetic is that you absolve responsibility and accountability.

This isn't me being heartless towards a person.

You can be sympathetic to a person's circumstances while also demanding accountability.

For what it's worth, I used to play mental gymnastics over this.

A person punches me at a tournament or says something racist to me

"oh he might have had a bad day. I shouldn't be upset about this. He's just a human being"