Three suicide relationships

Suicide pact relationship




Suicide relationship 2



Suicide relationship 3



A work in progress.



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The suicide relationship

My pommy mate Kahless mentions in her comment on the last post about suicide pacts. A suicide pact is a thing which most people find a really bizarre thing for people to do. Indeed that is one of the reasons why it gets the press coverage it does as my good friend Kahless directs us to here.

But as with so many things like this in psychology if you take a closer look it is not all that weird. It ends up being just a slight modification of normal human behaviour.

I refer to a thing called the suicide relationship. In one instance this can be a relationship where two people make a plan to suicide together and thus we end with what is commonly known as a suicide pact. However there are derivatives of this.

One of the ‘protective’ factors in suicide risk is if the individual has family or other close attachments in their life. Such as person is seen to be at less risk of suicide than the person who has no close relationships. Having close attachments makes for a more psychologically robust person.



However this can be very misleading and when making a suicide risk assessment one needs to enquire deeper into the nature of such relationships. For some people suicide is seen as every persons right to choose. Every person has a right to die when and how they want to. And this view can put up a substantive argument to support itself and it is a view held by a section of the community.

If a suicidal individual has a close attachment with a person who thinks like this then the protective factor in the relationship is not protective at all. In essence you have a suicide pact between two people where only one is suicidal but the psychology of the relationship is not all that different to a suicide pact where both are suicidal.

Now I am not suggesting that this non suicidal party in the relationship is an evil and uncaring person. They may have great affection and love for the suicidal individual. They may have seen their suicidal ‘partner’ go through great angst over a long period of time and there is an argument for the view that people have the right to choose when to die. Ongoing physical pain is no different than ongoing psychological pain.



There is indeed a further variant of this suicide pact relationship. In the relationship just described the non suicidal party ‘advocates’ suicide for the relief of the other. Under some circumstances the non suicidal party advocates suicide for the other so as to gain relief for self. This may seem abhorrent to some and a very selfish act but it is just natural human psychology.

For instance living with a suicidal person is a very emotionally taxing thing to do. It is a very stressful set of circumstances to live under. If a husband has been living with as suicidal wife for a couple of years and he can see that this is not going to change in the near future his own Free Child will want the stress to end and the only realistic way that is going to happen is if she dies. Thus in this way he has entered into a suicide pact with her as one part of his personality will ‘advocate’ for her suicide.

Now before you go away thinking how terrible this all is just ask yourself how you felt when a close loved one to you had a terminal illness and hung on and on for a long period of time. As the time extends the Free Child in everybody gets more and more vocal in wanting the other party to die because it wants the relief. Indeed even with the mother of a terminally ill child has a Free Child ego state that is wanting the child to die so it can have relief. It’s just human nature. How much that want is and how it is expressed consciously or unconsciously will vary from person to person but it will be there.



In doing a suicide risk assessment of someone who has been suicidal for some time then you know their close loved ones to some degree want the person to complete the suicide they keep talking about. Their Free Child has entered into a suicide pact relationship with the suicidal person. All of a sudden the protective nature of the close loved one is not so protective at all!

As we can see the psychology behind the suicide pact is not as weird as it initially seems as is so often the case with these things. Thank you my good friend Kahless for raising this issue.

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Sameness in relationships **

In relationships of any depth there is a natural tendency for both parties over time to become more the same. They will tend to become more like one another.

When any two people spend time together they will tend to model and introject each other. This is inevitable and indiscriminate and can not be avoided. Humans will instinctively do it whether they are aware of it or not.

This process is easily explained in transactional analysis

This shows how the wife models or introjects her husband’s personality into her own Parent ego state and of course he does the same with her over time. As mentioned before this process can not be avoided and will happen instinctively.

The copying relates to the behaviour, thoughts, attitudes and feelings of the other. All these parts of the others personality become our own after time. However husbands and wives do not end up as clones of each other and they do remain different over time. Of course the Parent ego state is but just one aspect of the personality and we all also have an Adult and Child ego state and these can be quite different between the two partners. However there is a tendency to sameness in the way described and this does not have to be an equal process.

Modeling can even occur between animal and human

People will tend to model more on those who are of more perceived potency and emotional importance. Thus the introjection between the married couple may be at different degrees. That is, one does more introjection than the other and generally speaking it is the more dominant party in the relationship who will be introjected more than the other way around.

This has been studied in some depth before and is presented in the DSM-IV by the American Psychiatric Association (1994) who discuss the Folie a Deux or a shared delusional disorder. In this case two people who are in a close relationship over time develop the same delusional belief system. There tends to be one dominant party and the more submissive party takes on the delusion of the other. This means that should the relationship end the more submissive party will tend to drop the delusion over time even though the submissive party probably has a tendency to have the same delusional beliefs.

Of course they don’t have to be delusional beliefs but can be beliefs or views about anything including religious views, political views, attitudes to neighbours, relatives, friends and so forth.

It should be noted that even after the introjection has taken place there are other potent psychological processes at work that further develop the sameness in a couple. The most obvious example of this is the phenomena of group think. In this situation when two or more people get together there is internal pressure in the group towards uniformity which leads the group to come up with same consensus that maybe false or not.

Group think can result in:

Illusion of invulnerability that can encourage excessive optimism and risk taking

Unquestioned belief in the group’s morality and goals which can result in the group members ignoring the consequences of their actions

Self censorship of deviations in the group’s beliefs and goals

Suppression of dissent by more powerful members in the group

Feelings of anonymity

Discount self responsibility

As two people talk and discover that they tend to have the same attitude or opinion about something this can give them a false sense of security as is described above. “If others think the same as I do then that makes my views more correct or right” is the reasoning behind group think. Thus if a husband and wife have introjected similar views from the other about something, group think can play a part in further fostering the sameness.

Most often this does not matter all that much if they are political views, religious views or dislike for their next door neighbours. However if the views will tend to incite racial hostility or religious persecution then there is a much more serious problem.

This can also involve similar views about suicide. That is, views like suicide is an OK solution to a problem, everyone has the right to choose and so forth. If they have introjected these from each other and then have a sense of group think, in extreme cases one can end up with the suicide pact. Both parties agree to suicide at the same time.

Even if there is no suicide pact it will make suicide a more easy choice for one of the parties in the relationship for the reasons just mentioned. Thus in working with the suicidal it is instructive to make an assessment of the relationships that the suicidal individual is involved at that time to see if any of these psychological processes are at work.

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