Few pieces of advice sound more naive on first hearing than "be kind to unkind people." In a fourteen-minute episode of his Happiness Podcast, Dr. Robert Puff, a Ph.D. who has written thirteen books and writes for Psychology Today, takes that line head-on and argues that it is not naive at all. His premise is that cruelty is rarely a free-standing character trait. It is almost always the visible surface of pain, and the person who lashes out is often the one most trapped by it. Puff makes three connected claims: unkindness leads to unhappiness for the person who practices it and for everyone near them; the urge to "strike back" perpetuates suffering instead of resolving it; and compassion toward the unkind is difficult but learnable, with a clear logic behind it. Along the way he offers a simple method for seeing the pain beneath hostility, a way to express anger without hurting anyone, and an analogy from animal rescue that makes the whole idea concrete.
The episode is short, conversational, and built almost entirely on Puff's own reasoning and anecdotes rather than studies or citations. That makes it worth reading as a practical philosophy of response: what to do when someone has hurt you, and what kind of person you become by answering them.
Puff opens by voicing the objection most listeners will feel. The line is usually attributed to Ashley Brilliant, and Puff admits the instinct it provokes. Shouldn't unkind people receive "our wrath," "our criticism," even "our hatred"? If someone behaves badly, how will they learn to stop by being treated gently?
His answer rests on a single diagnosis. "What it has to do with is the fact that unkind people are very unhappy. That's why they're being unkind. So, do we really want to hurt someone who's already hurting? What would that accomplish but creating more pain for them?" (Puff, Happiness Podcast, about 0:46 in the video)
The second half of the argument concerns the person doing the responding. Puff points out that if unkindness leads to suffering, then answering an unkind person with unkindness simply extends the chain. He describes a "vicious cycle" that "can go on and on for an entire lifetime." Anyone listening to a podcast about happiness, he suggests, already knows the stakes: hurting people is one of the quickest routes to an unhappy life, including for the one doing the hurting.
This reframing matters because it moves the question from "Does this person deserve kindness?" to "What does each response actually produce?" Puff's view is that retaliation is not a neutral act of self-defense. It is an investment in more pain on both sides.
Puff's central teaching is that unkindness is usually a defense. People who behave cruelly, in his account, have often lived through tragedy, been mistreated by others, or endured events that left them bitter. Their hard behavior is an attempt to protect themselves from being hurt again. "In many ways they're trying to protect themselves by not letting others hurt them, but in the process their biggest enemy is themselves." (Puff, about 1:57)
He acknowledges that popular culture often shows cruel characters escaping consequences without remorse. Puff's response is to ask viewers to test that picture against real life. Think of someone you would describe as cruel, he suggests, and in a kind way, look into their history. Ask people who knew them. Find out what their childhood was like, what they survived, and what losses they carried. He is confident of what that process will reveal: "I guarantee you there's going to be a lot of suffering and pain there." (Puff, about 2:24)
Puff is careful to note that not every person who goes through a difficult childhood or painful experience becomes unkind. Some do. The distinction he draws is between the wound and the response. The wound is shared by many people; the cruelty is what some of them build around it. That is why he refers to these behaviors as walls, and why he says that when the walls are mean, they still come from a place of hurt.
Once you begin to see the pattern, the logic of "I hurt others because they hurt me" becomes clear to Puff, and he has heard it often. He describes people telling him they will hurt others even worse than they were hurt, "cuz no one's going to mess with me." His reply is blunt. Such people may succeed in keeping others at a distance, but "they're not going to find happiness down that path. And neither will we." (Puff, about 4:43)
The phrase "an eye for an eye" is, for Puff, the simplest and most dangerous solution people reach for. It feels like justice, and it feels like protection. He summarizes what actually happens: "In the process, the pain just continues. And what they don't realize is their pain is causing more pain. Instead of healing that pain, they're perpetuating the pain and staying stuck." (Puff, about 3:15)
This is the heart of his argument. Pain that is answered with pain does not disappear. It gets passed to a new person, who then has their own reasons to respond in kind. Puff's view is that the only way out of the loop is for someone to stop feeding it. That is hard, and he does not pretend otherwise, but he argues that it changes the trajectory of the relationship and of the people involved.
He also points to the isolation that results. Cruelty may keep people from hurting you as much as they did before, Puff concedes, but "you will not find happiness, and you probably will be alone for the most part." (Puff, about 6:26)
Puff does not ask anyone to suppress what they feel. He takes the opposite approach. If you recognize unkindness in yourself, he says, the first step is to see it as a defense mechanism rooted in your own past, and the remedy is to spend real time healing from that pain. He lists concrete avenues: psychotherapy, books on healing the heart, and "working on finding good ways to express your anger and still be kind." He notes that the last phrase is the title of one of his earliest books, How to Express Your Anger and Still Be Kind.
The principle he returns to is simple: pain can be expressed without being aimed at people. He recalls that during graduate school he earned a black belt in karate and used a punching bag to work through what he needed to work through. "I didn't hurt other people. I just punched the punching bag." (Puff, about 6:01) He suggests the same range of outlets for others: walking, screaming into a pillow, journaling. The point is not the specific activity but the separation of feeling from harm.
He is equally direct about the stakes. "Hurting people with your pain is the path of unhappiness. Period." (Puff, about 6:35) The sentence is short, but it compresses his whole argument into one choice: you can heal the pain, or you can pass it along.
Puff admits that the tricky part is not understanding that unkindness is unproductive. It is mustering kindness toward someone who is being unkind to you, which he calls "a very hard task to do." He then offers an image that he says makes the difficulty worth attempting.
He describes videos of dogs that have been beaten and become frightened and aggressive, and of patient people who, over time, help those dogs become loving and gentle. "There's great stories about animals that have been abused and become very scared, very vicious, and yet through the love and patience of another person, they end up becoming beautiful creatures." (Puff, about 7:03) The analogy is pointed. A dog that nips at anyone who reaches for it is not evil, Puff suggests; it is suffering. If we remember that, we can respond with gentleness rather than retaliation.
He applies the same logic to people. If you remember that the person being cruel right now is doing it because they are in pain, it becomes easier to respond without matching their hostility. Puff is clear that this does not mean always turning the other cheek. He says we don't have to give an eye for an eye, and we don't necessarily have to turn the cheek either. The aim he describes is to show them kindness. Gentle, consistent kindness, he suggests, can sometimes break through the barriers people have built, and they let you in a little, and they get a little better.
Crucially, he does not promise instant results. "Being kind sometimes we don't see any effect to it for another person who's unkind, but I believe everything has a consequence." (Puff, about 8:16) His reasoning is that when you refuse to retaliate, the other person no longer needs to be defensive around you. They may not change in the moment, but they may think about their behavior later, once they realize they were not met with the attack they expected.
The practical lessons of Puff's episode are clear enough to apply without a theory of human nature. First, when someone is unkind to you, try to hold their behavior next to the likelihood of pain behind it, without excusing the harm. Second, notice your own urge to strike back and ask what it will produce. Third, if you are the one behaving cruelly, treat that as information about your own wounds and seek help for them. Finally, when you do respond to an unkind person, stay calm and kind, and accept that the effect may take longer than the moment you're in.
Puff's tone throughout is that of a teacher who respects how hard this is. He does not claim that kindness will always work or that the unkind will always soften. What he claims is narrower and, in his view, more honest: that retaliation reliably adds to suffering, that cruelty usually has a history, and that a steady, gentle response is the one path that doesn't make the pain bigger.
If this idea resonates, the most useful next step is to test it on a specific person in your life, the way Puff suggests. Pick someone whose behavior you find hard to bear, learn what you can about what they have lived through, and then notice how your own responses shift. You can also explore the broader body of Puff's work, including the Happiness Podcast, where he has covered related themes at length, and his book on expressing anger while staying kind, which takes up the self-healing side of this argument in more depth. Keep the questions he leaves behind: What is this person protecting? What am I adding when I respond? And what would kindness make possible here, even if I don't see the result today?
For more on the Happiness Podcast and Dr. Puff's books, visit happinesspodcast.org.
