HOW I SURVIVED SUICIDAL EMPATHY

Toxic Compassion Is Real... And It's A Killer

"Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich.

The most dangerous thing in the UK right now is a white liberal with a victim complex and a degree.

This Substack Note, shared by Paul Embery, grabbed my attention.

“Yeah,” someone commented. “I’ve only just heard about suicidal empathy.”

“What is suicidal empathy?” I frantically typed into ChatGPT.

(That’s a lie. I didn’t use the question mark at the end because I’m lazy.)

Suicidal empathy: The tendency to feel another person’s emotional pain so deeply that it leads to intense psychological distress, emotional exhaustion, or self-neglect — sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal oneself.

Oh my God, that’s what I had, a voice inside me uttered: Suicidal empathy.

Did I think about killing myself? No. So I don’t mean to sound flippant about people struggling every day with suicidal thoughts. That’s not what I believe suicidal empathy is excatly. It’s absorbing the pain of the world so intensely that you can scarcely function.

Mine was ecological angst that controlled my life. I’ve always had a heightened fear of the natural world. I remember thinking, as I sat in my stroller as a toddler, If this wind gets a little stronger, it could blow me away — and no one could do anything about it!

In the 2010s I could feel the climate changing. (I don’t want to get into a debate on climate change — it could have been ANY of the environmental disasters we face.) For example, I kept seeing MORE plastic being produced, even though I remember being told as a child, Plastic takes 500 years to break down… that’s why we’re dealing with it. Hah!

Then I got pregnant — and the concern took a turbocharge. The entire pregnancy I was terrified. Oh no, what world is this child coming into? A world where his first taste of breastmilk will be peppered with microplastic?

For the next four years, I lived in a sweet-and-sour experience. Over the moon with the miracle of my son — whose arrival softened my bitter heart — and yet harrowed by anxiety over the state of the planet.

How can I enjoy life when his life might not be so easy? It was like having a dripping tap right next to you, and you can’t turn it off. Never able to truly relax.

How can we be sending our dead clothes to Africa? How can we sell our trash to resource-poor countries? What is wrong with us?

I was consumed with concern for the resource-poor and the next generation. I felt their pain as if it were mine.

I remember thinking, If people cared more… then I could care less. But because no one cares… I have to care for everyone else.

Talk about egomania.

Many activists unconsciously place themselves at the centre of the crisis (“I must fix it”), which paradoxically reinforces the ego — even as they believe they are dissolving it.

I knew this was becoming extremely unhealthy when I felt physical pain in my frustration over people flying here, there and everywhere. And during a conversation with a friend, I burst into tears:

“You see,” I said, “for me, if I think about the root of this… I feel it as a personal attack on my son. On his home.”

In a therapy session I said, “I have this unbearable feeling that all of this is my fault.”

I had… suicidal empathy. Toxic compassion.

What eventually moved me out of suicidal empathy was a desperate need for life… for positivity, for fresh air. I needed to do something with this pain, and my natural thought was… Let’s do something positive.

I tried different campaigns — let’s plant trees, let’s encourage regenerative farming… let’s protest with positivity!

As an agnostic, I think I tried to create my own religion. Let’s all plant a tree a week! Imitating the weekly church coin collection. And for the images for my podcast The Eco Enthusiast, I quite consciously tried to give a church-vibe — even though I had no respect for religion (at the time).

With the environment, I learned two things quickly: our negative bias and busy lives make it nearly impossible for us to do anything that isn’t directly related to what we want or need right now.

I attended two protests here in Madrid… but couldn’t get many — or any — people interested.

“How can I encourage others to go when I don’t even want to go?” I said to my husband, holding my sign on one precious Saturday I was sacrificing for the cause.

I was obsessed with the environment. You couldn’t find a more interested and activated person… and even I didn’t want to go to the protests.

Why? I kept asking myself.

Because I soon realised… it’s death.

Asking people to sit in the street on their Saturday instead of living life with their family is death.

Yes, people are angry. Yes, people are scared. Yes, this is a frustratingly slow — and also head-spinningly fast — corrupt world.

And yes, this is life and death.

But what I’ve learned in my forty years is… that’s the nature of life: death.

Life is always life AND death. A complete package.

Screaming LIFE! at someone over and over and over again — is, funnily enough… death.

Life and death is dangerous, frustrating, and it gets to the point where it will kill you.

We suffer.
We die.
This is our truth.

I’m not here judging my suicidal empathy, like I can feel many conservatives doing right now. I don’t believe I would have found God if my care hadn’t been so intense and unbearable — if I hadn’t killed my ego with it.

To me, all of this is part of The Way. But I would have loved for my pain to have been shorter — for my benefit, my husband’s, and everyone around me… even though, in many ways, they weren’t aware of it.

You learn to hide anxiety that the world doesn’t understand. You slowly crawl inside yourself and die.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti

I lived by this slogan. Or should I say… I died by this slogan.

Yes, I thought, it’s no measure of health. I’m in a state because LOOK AT THIS PLACE, look at these sorry excuses for people.

But the statement itself is the sick one.

Have you ever found a society that wasn’t sick?

Life is chaos. Our job is to be as healthily adjusted to any situation we find ourselves in — and then move it with positivity and hope toward where we would like it to be.

We do this with forgiveness and faith — concepts that were foreign to me for most of my life.

Another moment that stayed with me was when I was trying to activate people — men in particular. Why aren’t these men freaking out like me? Obviously they don’t care… not like me. Not like women. Men need to be more like wome—

Then I stopped myself. Men need to be more like me? In a deep, cry-in-the-corner, hyperventilating state?

Do I really want my husband to be in this anxious state? Absolutely not.

And not wanting my husband in this state made me think… Why would I want myself in this state? Why would I want anyone in this horror show? Why would I not want them to have a huge dollop of hope?

I used to think surrender meant resignation. A sort of limp acquiescence to suffering. But what I learned — slowly, painfully, with clenched fists and a racing mind — is that true surrender is an active release. It’s not a retreat from the world, but a reorientation of how we meet it.

When I was in the grip of suicidal empathy, I lived as though the weight of the world was mine to carry. I was trying to control an uncontrollable thing: the direction of history, the actions of strangers, the fate of the planet.

But control is a myth. It’s a story we tell ourselves to feel safe.

And when that myth breaks down — when we know we cannot save the world — it feels like despair. But it doesn’t have to be.

There is a strange kind of liberation in surrendering to what is.

When I let go, not in apathy, but in trust, I started to find space again. I could breathe. I wasn’t abandoning care — I was relocating it.

Instead of carrying the entire burden of the future, I began to ask: What is mine to carry today? What small act can I do in love, not fear?

I began to feel held by something larger. A rhythm. A pulse. A kind of sacred order beneath the chaos. Life, death, rebirth. This is the natural cycle of everything: ecosystems, civilizations, relationships, even identities.

I had been fighting death — fighting endings — trying to hold everything in place.

But maybe death isn’t the enemy. Maybe death is the compost.

Maybe that’s where real life begins —in making peace with the mess. In singing even when no one joins you. In living with awe and grief and joy — all together, all the time.

We have teens now who are terrified of AI, ecological crisis, Israel, Hammas, school, the housing crisis and the people who don’t remember their correct pronouns and won’t confirm that a man doesn’t have to have a penis. The whole transmovement psychosis has come from, I believe, suicidal empathy.

As someone who has come out of this, I can say the best way to move someone (or a society) out of this perpetual suicide is love, faith, and holding a rock-solid sense of the truth.

Forever reminding them that forgiveness, faith, and transcendence are waiting here for them…when they’re ready, finally ready, to come back to life.

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Thank you for reading.

John William Waterhouse - The Soul of the Rose