Assessment Statement
This Peace Assessment was prompted by Nathalie Martinek PhD’s article “Suicidal Empathy,” published through her Hacking Narcissism Substack: https://www.hackingnarcissism.com/p/suicidalempathy. The article examines the growing debate around what has been called “suicidal empathy.” Martinek’s reflection was shaped partly by articles from Lucy and Harrison Koehli on the same topic, as well as wider discussion surrounding Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy. Her central argument is that empathy may be receiving the blame for problems that are more accurately produced by poorly considered, distorted or premature compassionate action.
The distinction matters because the terms can sound more complicated than the underlying issue really is.
In simple terms, empathy means trying to understand another person’s experience. It involves listening, asking questions, checking assumptions and allowing the person to correct our understanding.
Compassion means responding to suffering or difficulty in a way intended to help.
The phrase “suicidal empathy” is used in contemporary debate to describe situations where concern for another person or group becomes so strong that people appear willing to compromise their own safety, interests or social stability in order to protect them.
Martinek argues that this may often be misnamed. In many of these situations, people have not actually taken the time to understand the person or situation deeply. Instead, they see suffering, react emotionally, assume they know what is needed and move quickly into protective action. She describes the harmful version of this as toxic compassion: care that may be sincerely motivated but becomes disconnected from truth, boundaries, accountability or the consequences for other people.
This assessment does not begin by assuming that either label is correct. It asks a broader peace-science question:
When does care increase understanding, safety, responsibility and dignity across a whole system, and when can care unintentionally redistribute harm, silence questions or become coercive?
The central finding is that the problem is not simply “too much empathy” or “too much compassion.” The deeper issue is whether care remains connected to discernment, sovereignty, responsibility, boundaries and real-world consequences.
Context
The debate matters because care is not confined to private relationships. The same dynamics occur in families, workplaces, schools, health systems, social movements, media and public policy.
Consider a simple workplace example. An employee becomes extremely distressed whenever their performance is discussed. Their manager feels sorry for them and repeatedly avoids difficult conversations. At first this may look compassionate. But unfinished work is then redistributed among other employees. Resentment grows. The distressed employee receives no clear feedback and therefore has little opportunity to improve.
No one necessarily intended harm.
The employee’s distress may be completely genuine. The manager may genuinely care.
But the response has reduced discomfort for one person by transferring the cost to everyone else.
That is the kind of situation this assessment is examining.
A similar pattern can occur in families. An adult son calls his mother after a serious argument with his partner. He is upset, angry and tells his side of the story. His mother becomes upset too and immediately contacts the partner, condemns them and informs other family members.
She may believe she is protecting her son.
But she has acted on one emotionally charged account before understanding the wider situation. The couple may reconcile the next day, while the family conflict created by the intervention lasts for months.
The emotional response was real.
It simply was not enough information on which to build a complete judgement.
This is the distinction at the centre of Martinek’s article and the wider Peace Assessment.
Core Dynamics
The first important distinction is between feeling something and knowing something.
When we see another person suffering, we may feel sadness, fear, anger or an urge to protect them. Those feelings can be useful. They alert us that something matters.
But they do not automatically tell us what happened, why it happened, who else is involved or what the best response should be.
Empathy becomes useful because it slows down certainty.
Instead of saying, “I know exactly what is happening,” genuine empathy asks:
“What happened?”
“How are you experiencing this?”
“What am I missing?”
“Have I understood you correctly?”
This process does not minimise suffering. It improves the quality of the information available before action is taken.
The second dynamic is the difference between support and rescue.
Supporting someone can mean helping them remain safe, listening, providing resources or standing beside them while they deal with something difficult.
Rescuing can occur when we begin taking over responsibility that still belongs to them.
A parent might continually pay the debts of an adult child because they do not want the child to suffer. In the short term, this looks caring. But if the pattern prevents the adult child from confronting spending behaviour or learning financial responsibility, the help may prolong the problem.
Compassion has then protected the person from an immediate consequence while weakening their longer-term capacity.
The third dynamic is harm transfer.
A response may reduce suffering in one part of a system while increasing it elsewhere.
That does not automatically make the response wrong. Sometimes difficult trade-offs are unavoidable.
The peace question is whether those trade-offs remain visible.
If other affected people disappear from consideration entirely, the field has narrowed.
3D–7D Peace Analysis
At the 3D level, the assessment looks at what happens in the material world. Who becomes safer? Who becomes less safe? Who carries the financial, physical, practical or organisational consequences? A compassionate intervention cannot be assessed only by its intention. Its effects matter too.
A school offers a clear example. Imagine a student who has previously been bullied and later begins hitting other children. The earlier harm matters and deserves support. But if teachers refuse to impose boundaries because the student has already suffered, the school may make other children unsafe.
A coherent response can hold both truths:
“You were harmed, and that matters. You are now harming other people, and that also matters.”
That response protects the child’s dignity without removing responsibility.
At the 4D level, timing becomes important. Many poor decisions occur when people feel they must act immediately because distress is intense. Sometimes immediate action is essential, particularly where there is a clear safety threat. But in many situations, a short pause allows more information to emerge.
The fragmented sequence is often:
suffering → emotional reaction → certainty → action
A more coherent sequence is:
suffering → pause → understanding → context → response
A pause is not automatically indifference. Sometimes it is what prevents care from becoming reactive.
At the 5D level, the assessment looks at relationships, belonging and sovereignty.
One of the most important ideas in Martinek’s article is ecpathy: the ability to remain emotionally connected without being absorbed by another person’s emotional state.
In simple language:
I can care about what you feel without assuming that I must feel exactly the same way, agree with every interpretation you make, or immediately act on your behalf.
This matters because healthy relationships require both connection and individuality.
A friend can say:
“I believe that you are hurt, but I would like to understand what happened before I decide what I think.”
That is not a withdrawal of care.
It preserves both empathy and personal sovereignty.
At the 6D level, language and interpretation become central.
Terms such as “victim,” “oppressor,” “abuser,” “protector,” “toxic compassion” and “suicidal empathy” can help us identify patterns. They can also become shortcuts that stop us looking at actual people.
A friendship group offers a useful example.
One person says another member has hurt them. The group immediately removes the accused person without asking what happened or allowing different accounts to emerge. Anyone who asks questions is told:
“If you really cared, you would support the victim.”
At that point, care has become connected to belonging.
People may agree because they genuinely believe the accusation. But others may agree because they fear being excluded themselves.
The problem is no longer simply compassion. It is coercion through moral pressure.
At the 7D level, the question becomes whether the entire system is moving toward greater coherence.
A peaceful system does not require everyone to agree.
It requires enough stability to hold complexity without dehumanising people.
Someone can have been harmed and still be responsible for later behaviour.
Someone accused of wrongdoing can still retain dignity.
A boundary can feel painful without being cruel.
A caring intervention can be mistaken.
A person can change.
A system becomes more coherent when it can hold these realities together rather than forcing people into fixed roles of victim, rescuer and villain.
The Peace Stabilisers
The 12 Peace Stabilisers—Honesty, Open-mindedness, Willingness, Forgiveness, Unity, Discipline, Faith, Responsibility, Love, Wholeness, Joy and Peace—provide a useful way of seeing where care becomes stable or unstable within this issue. Peace As A Science presents these principles as stabilising conditions that support coherence across individuals, relationships and wider systems.
Honesty requires us to acknowledge both emotional truth and factual uncertainty. Someone may genuinely be suffering without our first explanation of that suffering being complete. Open-mindedness allows new information to change our understanding rather than forcing reality to fit our first judgement. Willingness means being prepared not only to help, but also to reconsider whether our help is actually working. Forgiveness helps prevent people from becoming permanently frozen into roles created by past harm. Unity reminds us that belonging should not require forced agreement. A group that remains together only because dissent is punished may look united while actually becoming less coherent.
Discipline is especially important because it creates the ability to feel strongly without immediately acting. Faith supports the capacity to tolerate uncertainty long enough for a clearer picture to emerge. Responsibility keeps agency distributed appropriately: each person owns their part, rather than one person carrying everything or another being excused from everything. Love widens the moral field so that care does not apply only to the person whose suffering is most visible. Wholeness allows apparently contradictory truths to coexist: a person can be vulnerable and powerful, harmed and harmful, deserving of support and still responsible for their behaviour. Joy is less central to the immediate problem but can indicate whether a system has moved beyond permanent crisis and moral vigilance. Peace emerges when these stabilisers begin operating together rather than one value—such as protection—overriding all the others.
The stabilisers therefore suggest that healthy compassion is not simply kindness. It is care held together by honesty, discernment, responsibility, boundaries and an awareness of the whole field.
Fragmentation Indicators
Several warning signs appear repeatedly in situations where care loses coherence.
One is when strong emotion is treated as proof. Another is when only the most visible person’s suffering matters. Another is when asking questions becomes interpreted as cruelty.
Fragmentation also increases when vulnerability removes accountability, when one person’s distress is managed by transferring the burden to others, or when support becomes an attempt to control outcomes.
A particularly important warning sign is when care becomes a test of loyalty:
“If you cared, you would agree with me.”
That statement closes the field.
It turns compassion from an invitation to understand into pressure to conform.
Another warning sign is the absence of feedback. If an intervention repeatedly creates dependency, resentment, exhaustion, fear or new harm but continues because its intention is considered compassionate, the system has stopped learning.
Coherence Indicators
Care becomes more coherent when people ask before assuming, listen before acting, and remain willing to change their understanding.
It strengthens when all affected people remain visible.
It becomes more stable when boundaries are understood as potentially compassionate rather than automatically punitive.
It becomes more mature when vulnerability and responsibility can exist at the same time.
And it becomes safer when people can say:
“I care about you, but I do not yet know what the right response is.”
That sentence contains empathy, humility and sovereignty at once.
The strongest form of care does not require emotional fusion. It allows people to remain connected without surrendering discernment.
Peace Assessment
The article raises an important and legitimate concern about the way empathy is increasingly blamed for poor social or political decisions.
Martinek’s central contribution is the argument that many situations described as “suicidal empathy” may involve very little genuine empathy at all. Instead, visible suffering produces emotional identification, assumed understanding and rapid protective action.
This assessment broadly supports that distinction.
However, the phrase “toxic compassion” also needs to be used carefully.
Compassion itself is not poisonous.
The fragmentation occurs when compassionate intention becomes disconnected from other stabilising capacities: honesty, discernment, responsibility, sovereignty, boundaries and consequence awareness.
It is therefore more precise to say:
Compassion can become fragmenting when care is no longer connected to the whole system.
This also prevents the assessment from simply replacing one accusatory term with another.
The deeper finding is that empathy and compassion perform different functions.
Empathy helps us understand.
Discernment helps us decide what the information means.
Sovereignty allows everyone involved to retain agency.
Responsibility determines what belongs to whom.
Compassion motivates care.
Boundaries prevent care from becoming uncontrolled rescue.
Action changes the situation.
Feedback tells us whether the action actually helped.
Peace depends on these functions working together.
Intervention Points
The most useful intervention is therefore a simple change in sequence.
Before moving from suffering directly to action, introduce enough space for understanding.
A practical care sequence might be:
Notice → Listen → Check → Consider → Respond → Observe → Adjust
Notice the emotional response.
Listen to the person.
Check assumptions and missing information.
Consider everyone affected.
Respond proportionately.
Observe what actually happens.
Adjust if the response produces unintended consequences.
This is simple enough to apply in a family argument, a classroom, a workplace meeting or an organisational policy.
The second intervention is to preserve the right to ask questions. Genuine care should be strong enough to tolerate curiosity.
The third is to keep responsibility visible. Supporting people should increase their long-term agency where possible rather than permanently transferring responsibility away from them.
The fourth is to judge compassion partly by its consequences, not only by its intention.
UPT Summary
This assessment began with Nathalie Martinek PhD’s Hacking Narcissism reflection on the debate surrounding “suicidal empathy,” including responses to Lucy and Harrison Koehli’s writing and Gad Saad’s use of the term. Martinek argues that empathy is often blamed for outcomes that may actually arise when emotional concern moves too quickly into protective action without sufficient understanding.
The main fragmentation pattern is therefore not excessive caring. It is care losing its wider architecture. Strong emotion can become mistaken for accurate understanding. One person’s suffering can eclipse the experiences of others. Protection can weaken accountability. Support can become rescue. Belonging can become conditional on agreement. Good intentions can transfer harm rather than reduce it.
At the same time, strong coherence dynamics are available. Genuine empathy improves understanding by asking rather than assuming. Ecpathy allows care without emotional capture. Boundaries preserve sovereignty. Responsibility keeps agency appropriately distributed. Whole-system awareness prevents one person’s suffering from becoming the only reality that matters.
The overall peace assessment is that neither empathy nor compassion is inherently the problem. The critical issue is whether care remains connected to truth, responsibility, sovereignty, boundaries and consequences. If current debates remain focused on provocative labels, polarisation is likely to increase. If attention shifts toward the actual mechanics of care, empathy and compassion can become complementary stabilising forces.
From a peace-science perspective, the larger lesson is simple:
Care is not automatically coherent. Care requires architecture.
About the UPT Peace Assessment
A UPT Peace Assessment applies Unified Peace Theory as a practical analytical framework to examine the health, resilience and likely trajectory of a human system. Its purpose is to identify the conditions that strengthen or weaken long-term peace, stability and coherence, while keeping the focus on the issue being assessed rather than on the methodology itself.