When betrayal turns your anger inward, the ultimate act of defiance is choosing to live and redirecting that fire
People often imagine suicide as the inevitable end point of despair.
The story goes something like this: someone becomes deeply depressed, the pain becomes unbearable, and eventually they decide they can’t take it anymore.
Sometimes that’s true. But it’s far from the whole story.
Like almost every important human behavior, suicide is complex. Reducing it to depression or emotional pain can leave us blind to some of the most dangerous pathways that lead people toward self-destruction.
One of the most common misconceptions I encounter is that dark thoughts automatically signal suicidal intent. They don’t.
For first responders, military veterans, and others who spend years immersed in trauma, intrusive thoughts about death can become surprisingly common. I’ve written previously for CRACKYL about how repeated exposure to death, fatal accidents, suicides, and horrific scenes changes the mental landscape. When your work repeatedly introduces you to mortality, your mind becomes familiar with possibilities that most people never have to contemplate.
That familiarity can be unsettling, but it is not, by itself, evidence that someone wants to die.
Our mind absorbs what it repeatedly encounters. The firefighter who has responded to multiple suicides. The deputy who has delivered death notifications. The paramedic who has pronounced teenagers dead. The combat veteran who has watched friends disappear in an instant. These experiences leave impressions that don’t simply disappear when the shift ends.
The goal is not to eliminate every dark thought. The goal is to understand them.
That is where meaning begins.
Much of my work focuses on helping people with the warrior spirit understand mental warfare. And sometimes people with a warrior spirit – to include many firefighters, can mistake an urgent thought for an order.
A thought is NOT a command.
A violent image is NOT an intention.
An intrusive fantasy is NOT a plan.
When we stop treating every disturbing thought as proof that something is wrong with us, we gain traction. We learn to recognize mental activity without surrendering control to it.
But there is another pathway toward suicide that deserves much more attention.
Rage.
Not ordinary frustration. The kind of rage born from profound moral injury.
I’ve spoken with several people who watched a colleague die by suicide only to hear leaders dismiss the death, shame the individual, or quietly move on as though nothing had happened. I’ve worked with others who were betrayed by people they trusted completely—people they would have taken a bullet for without hesitation.
Those experiences don’t simply create sadness. They ignite fury. And sometimes unchecked rage searches for somewhere to go.
Sometimes it turns outward through aggression or revenge fantasies and sometimes it turns inward.
- “I’ll show them.”
- “They’ll finally understand.”
- “My death will shame them.”
- “They’ll regret how they treated me.”
- “My death will force this broken system to change.”
These thoughts can feel strangely logical when someone is consumed by moral injury. The mind begins constructing a story in which death becomes communication, protest, punishment, or sacrifice.
This is where thinking becomes distorted.
The person is no longer evaluating reality accurately. Instead, rage narrows attention until only one storyline remains visible.
If I die, they’ll finally listen. If I die, the system will change. If I die, everyone will understand what they did.
Unfortunately, history tells us something different.
Organizations with poor leadership rarely become healthier because someone dies by suicide. More often, the same misunderstandings continue. Families are left carrying a thousand pounds of grief. Friends replay conversations for years. Coworkers wonder what they missed. Survivors inherit unanswered questions while others quietly absorb the message that suicide is an available solution when betrayal feels unbearable.
Suicide creates collateral damage that reaches far beyond one life. It also increases risk among those left behind. This is one of the cruelest realities of suicide loss. The act intended to communicate pain can unintentionally expose others to greater danger.
Rage is powerful fuel. It evolved to mobilize us against injustice and betrayal. But fuel without direction burns everything around it — including ourselves.
The work, then, is not to eliminate rage. It is to redirect it.
Ask yourself:
- What is this anger trying to protect?
- What value has been violated?
- What injury still needs a witness?
- What action would honor that value without destroying the person carrying it?
Directed in the right way, rage can build a movement. It can expose broken systems. It can protect the vulnerable. It can inspire courageous leadership.
But only if the person carrying that fire survives long enough to use it.
If you recognize yourself in any part of this, don’t ask whether you should stop feeling angry. Ask where your anger is pointing you. Is it narrowing your world until death appears to be a solution?
Or can it become energy for building something the people who betrayed you never expected — your recovery, your voice, your leadership, and your refusal to let injury write the final chapter?
Mental warfare is not about never having dark thoughts. It’s about recognizing when those thoughts have begun recruiting your deepest pain into a story that simply isn’t true.
Your death is not a gift to the people who love you. Your absence is not the reform a broken system needs. And your rage, however justified, deserves a better destination than being turned against the person who has already carried far more than anyone should.
***Shauna ‘Doc’ Springer, PhD** is a pioneering psychologist, award-winning Military Times podcast host, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychological trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, close relationships and the unique needs of the military and first responder communities. Doc Springer provides highly specialized consultation and confidential advising to organizations and public safety agencies that support protectors and defenders through her company THIN LINE ADVISORY. *
