Their weaponizing your own empathy against you means you have to, within yourself, shift your empathy from ’emotional empathy’ to ‘cognitive empathy’.
Emotional empathy, for example, has you bailing out your loved one because you ‘know what a hard time they’ve had’, whereas cognitive empathy has you recognizing that they need boundaries/consequences for their choices in order to stop the cycle of damage they create, and therefore understanding that in this instance jail is the right place for them.