Processing Suicide
Mar 20, 2011 at 12:59 PM What if I fall and hurt myself?
Would you know how to fix me
What if I went and lost myself?
Would you know where to find me
If I forgot who I am,
Would you please remind me oh?
-Rosi Golan "Hazy"
This journey of life is beautiful, frightening, energizing, exhausting, inspiring, hopeful, gigantic and moving. Each day my breath is taken away by the sparkles of each moment and how it's woven into the story of my life. Some of those moments have jagged edges and stains but when sown into the whole picture I see what a lovely piece of art it truly is.
All these moments of trial, of meaning, of hope and of hopelessness make up an entire picture and piece of work that is me. Some obviously more defining than others but each piece matches up to create a complete image. It's strange to look back now. All the things that used to cause me so much pain and anguish are just pieces now that complete the whole. I am very fortunate that I am in this place now and I protect it with everything I've got...but it's so worth it.
Working at the hotline has brought up a lot of things for me. None of it is what I expected it to trigger in me. And when I say trigger, I don't mean triggering me into a flashback or something like that. It's more that when I am done my shift I have this surge of thoughts and feelings that I hadn't really spent any time of value on. I knew that it would of course bring of feelings about my father and it does do that, on a regular basis. But what I didn't really expect was for me to reflect on my own times of feeling deeply and unmanageably suicidal. One might think that would be obvious but honestly I didn't think I had strong feelings either way.
What I have realized is that my brain processed those times of hopelessness and helplessness as traumatic. I have now become really curious about this from an academic perspective. I wonder how many people that have had a prior suicidal experience find it traumatic enough that when they feel themselves falling into depression or suicidal thinking again they begin to relive it on an emotional level and the anxiety they are experiencing is a part of that? The majority of people that I speak with on the hotline have had multiple attempts or at the very least had suicidal thoughts many times with great intensity. They express great anxiety over their thoughts and how out of control they feel because in the past it led to many scary things. Of course there is the other group who has passed that stage and are so resigned to ending their lives that it sounds painful for them to speak, breathe even. I guess I just wonder about that aspect of mental health treatment. Most of the therapy around a suicidal person has to do with crisis stabilization. Is it something most practitioners come back to? To discuss the frightening nature of the thoughts and impulses experienced while suicidal? Even some of the most secure therapists have a difficult time talking about suicide, especially after an episode for fear that it may push a client to consider it too deeply again. As a crisis counselor we are trained to talk about suicide and death at the most graphic levels because many people just need to put it out there without feeling shame. Even with the training and the countless hours of talking about suicide and death that we've done it doesn't quite take the sting out of the moment when a caller tells you exactly what their plan is to kill themselves is in graphic detail. I imagine for a therapist that this would be something that would be increasingly difficult to handle as they became more connected with their client over time. Anyway, it's something I am interested in and want to do some of my own research on the topic to see what has already been studied and if it's not extensive already I'd like to research it when I return to school.
In my own thinking and journaling about my times spent suicidal I still find it miraculous that I am here. Somehow I endured those days, weeks and months to come out on the other side. At this point I have a hard time even considering that I could ever find myself back in that ever again. I never thought it would be possible to be this content in life and even when it gets tough, nothing could ever push me to want to end my life as a way to cope. There is far too much stuff up ahead of me. The future is enough of a motivation to me to push forward through anything and currently my "anythings" don't even come close to the stuff I used to deal with. I don't know what it is or how to describe it but it's almost as if my brain is wired differently now. Don't get me wrong, I still get cranky and irritated even though I am all "Life is so flippin beautiful" and some days I would rather just hang out at home and hide instead of going out into the world. But even when I am at home vegging, I am still in love with life. I always know that the next minute, the next hour or the next day is new and doesn't have to remain the same. I have much more patience for myself and I am in tune with what I need to move forward. It's more simple than I could have ever dreamed.
RD and I spent some time talking about this topic last week. I'm always interested in hearing her perspective on some of the craziest moments in the past several years. I am so blessed that she was there for me through countless nights of being on the edge of life or death. She'd stay on the phone with me from the minute I left work until 3 or 4 in the morning when I would finally fall asleep for a couple hours. She was present with me in ways that no one else has ever been and to hear how incredibly disturbing things were for her experiencing my suicidality I am both broken-hearted but eternally grateful that she was there, supporting me and holding me up. We both remember some of the most terrifying nights when niether one of us thought I would make it another minute and yet she remembers more of the details than I do. It's nice to have someone be able to help me piece it back together because what I remember mostly is my physical presence and the sickening feelings I had in my body. The details outside of that can get pretty hazy.
The other side to all of this now is how I am able to understand Therapist a little bit better when it comes to being the helper of a suicidal person. I am lucky in the sense that I don't know the people that call me. I am not connected to them personally even if I can empathize with them. I can talk to a person for 20 minutes or several hours but I still am not really all that connected to them. Sure I feel for them, sure I am caring for them and yes sometimes I feel deeply saddened by what they are going through but I don't know their life, their personality or even what they look like. There is a ton of distance between them and me. So when they tell me in graphic detail what they are planning to do to end their life I don't see some image of them in that way. Therapist on the other hand knew me, knew all of me and cared very deeply for me. She would be on the phone listening to me panic over my impulses, sometimes she would be talking me through the aftermath of an attempt or at the very least an episode of SI. Sometimes she'd be listening to me driving away from somewhere that I had been thinking about ending my life in great detail. It must have been a painful experience at times and my gratitude for her presence in my life at that time has increased (if possible).
At the end of the day though, no matter how intense the hotline is or how drained I feel I am so grateful that I am in this place in my life which is a place in which I have plenty of emotional resources to be able to give back all the support that I have been given.
Reader Comments (4)
I think it is traumatic on a person to feel so hopless they either attempt suicide or fixate on wanting to all of the time. I know for me that when I have any feelings even remotely similar to that place in my life, I freak out a little bit inside. The longer I go without truly feeling suicidal and the more times I have where I feel bad and it doesn't end with me feeling suicidal, the less scary those feelings get that I'm headed back to that awful place.
I hope you do get to do this research and can open all of our eyes (clients and therapists) as to the benefits and cons of processesing feelings that go along with sucidal ideations and attmepts during and after the fact.
Thanks for sharing your heart - the good and the struggles!
Very moving blog post.Keep the good work up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9MW-6PY44M
Thomas
Very profound!!
And yes, I consider the times when I was very close to completing suicide very traumatic. And when my depression begins to escalate, I panic. It scares me because I know how I can slide to a point of no return and feel barely present enough to stop it. I never want to live that again! It is safe to say that I am hypervigilant
Lothlorien
Very thought provoking post! It was just what I needed...thanks!