Psychedelics and Compassion Overload

When feelings of empathy, compassion, and self-compassion are augmented during psychedelic experiences, they are typically seen in a positive and even therapeutic light. Feeling empathy increases our social abilities, and compassion seems to have a direct positive impact on mental health, like reducing anxiety and relieving depression symptoms. So, these traits may very well be part of the mechanisms that contribute to the effectiveness of psychedelics in treating various mental health issues.

Compassion overload is what you might call too much of a good thing. Depending on dose, set, and setting, intense compassion can feel overwhelming and challenging, even after the trip is over and especially in cases where little action can be taken to relieve the suffering. Still, such experiences can serve as keys to understanding, holding complexity, transformation, and empowerment.

Empathy and compassion are close but not identical terms, and their shared and different components can be explained in several ways. Generally, empathy relates to being able to understand and share the feelings of others, while compassion adds an active dimension, or at least a motivation to alleviate the suffering of another. In this constellation, empathy is part of compassion.

Another way of differentiating between the two relates to feeling with someone or feeling for someone. Being empathic is feeling with someone, for example, when you feel the sadness of a friend or pick up on someone’s anxiety. In the case of compassion, or feeling for, you recognize someone’s feelings or situation and care for them, without necessarily feeling what they feel. Another difference lies in the scale of emotions, where empathy can relate to any emotion, and compassion typically relates to suffering. The word compassion originally comes from the Latin ‘com’ and ‘pati’, literally “to suffer with”.

We know that psychedelics amplify emotions in general, and both empathy and compassion have been related to the psychedelic experience more specifically. Emotional empathy can be related to enhanced openness and to the blurring between self and other. While research on this matter is still quite young, according to a recent literature review, emotional empathy is amplified by psychedelics, “allowing us to share in the joy, sorrow, excitement, or pain of others”. Depending on set and setting, this can result in an emotional overload. Think, for example, of feeling empathy for someone who is experiencing grief or anxiety during a psychedelic trip. Extreme identification with such feelings can be overwhelming. 

Empathy has a cognitive component as well, which is the mental capacity for understanding others’ thoughts and emotions. This aspect of empathy allows us to comprehend various perspectives and can help in fostering mutual understanding and respect. According to the literature review, psychedelics do not have a significant effect on cognitive empathy. So, strong emotional empathy does not imply cognitive understanding, potentially making the situation even more difficult to handle.

As the scientific investigation of compassion gained more ground in recent years, a scientific definition and a measuring scale were developed around the term. Gu et al. break the concept of compassion into the following five dimensions: “(a) recognizing suffering, (b) understanding the universality of suffering, (c) feeling for the person suffering, (d) tolerating uncomfortable feelings, and (e) motivation to act/acting to alleviate suffering.” As this definition reveals, suffering is a key component, and feeling compassion means dealing with “uncomfortable feelings”, with or without the involvement of psychedelics.

Compassion is a complex and delicate feeling to deal with. On the one hand, practising compassion facilitates an ability to stay with difficult emotions; on the other, being exposed to suffering over a long period of time can have a depleting and even demoralizing effect. People whose work exposes them to suffering on a regular basis, such as health care professionals, human rights activists, and social workers, might experience compassion fatigue, a cumulative physical, emotional, and psychological effect resulting from the long-term exposure to trauma and suffering. 

On the immediate level, if you feel overwhelmed with empathy or compassion during a psychedelic trip, it is important to let the feelings be. Resistance often aggravates the situation, and avoidance may lead to challenges later on. Staying present and calm, you may be surprised to discover your capacity to contain and accept difficult and even contradicting feelings. If you feel ‘full’ and cannot contain them anymore, they may overflow in the form of tears or burst out as sighs, screams, or tremors. Allow it. 

If the overload was triggered by someone or something in your physical environment, some people may feel a need to approach and talk to that person if that is possible. Others may rather take a break from the source and talk to someone else instead. It is important to remember that there is no urgency and to try to tap into your own needs. If you are at a festival with a harm reduction support tent, going there can help in changing not only the setting, but your own set from the one offering compassion to its object. At a ceremony, people can be affected by others crying, mumbling, expressing emotions in other ways, or even by feeling their energy. Here too, a short break, some fresh air, or talking with a guide can help.   

Experiences of intense compassion need time to settle, which means that integration is very important and personal. For example, it may be that you felt deep empathy, without understanding specifically what had triggered it or how to interpret what you felt. With compassion, you don’t necessarily go through all its dimensions during the psychedelic experience, and may have to complete the process later on. It may take months, in some cases years, to realize what was processed and to process things that were realized during the trip. Efforts on the cognitive level, like getting a full understanding or figuring out the best way to help, can wait until you are no longer in an altered state. Whether you do that alone, with friends, in a group, or with a professional, time is no luxury; it is essential.

There is a story which is usually attributed to Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who spent 33 years as a political prisoner in Chinese jails and labour camps. Upon his release, he met with the Dalai Lama for a long conversation, and was asked about the horrors of his imprisonment and torture. The biggest danger, he said, was that he would lose his compassion for his prisoners. This is because his survival depended on his state of mind, which, if not compassionate, would probably be one of anger, resentment, and hatred.

Most of us cannot even fathom a cultivation of compassion at this level. In daily life, we often reserve our compassion for people who are clear victims of some situation. We have less compassion for those (partly) responsible for their own suffering, and little to no compassion for people who inflict suffering on others. Thus, moral judgment stands in the way of compassion. During a psychedelic experience, compassion can go beyond that judgment and be felt toward people whom we usually label as ‘bad’ or even as ‘the enemy’. This quality stands at the heart of the work of Ripples Collective, a non-profit working for peace-building and collective liberation for Palestine and Israel.

The project was born out of psychedelic studies led by researcher Leor Roseman, where Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and artists took ayahuasca together, focused on collective and personal healing. Carefully designed, the process included collaborative preparation and integration, where participants could openly discuss personal, collective, and inter-generational traumas on both sides, and feelings such as fear, grief, and despair. These transformative psychedelic journeys were then translated into a collective liberation ritual performance for wider audiences, using storytelling, music, dance, theatre, and art to arrive at a shared feeling of humanity, solidarity, and empowerment.

When such forms of intense compassion arrive spontaneously during an unguided psychedelic experience, they might be felt as overwhelming emotionally and cognitively. They call for accepting and going beyond what we normally conceive of as paradoxes, like pain and blindness towards it, the coexistence of compassion and fear, and the banality of evil. Imagine an orchestra playing a symphony of dissonances. Your usual self would instinctively shut your ears to protect them from the sordid sounds. A psychedelic may offer the opportunity to stay and listen, to hear the aching squeaking of each instrument, and contain the symphony of clashing sounds. While difficult, it opens a window and sheds light on parts of ourselves and the world which we usually prefer to keep in the dark.

Annabelle is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to Sam via email at [email protected]