***If you're feeling suicidal Dial 988***
The Journey by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.
I work with many people, mostly women in their 20s, who want to die. Not who have solid plans to kill themselves, but also not who just say they want to die because they’re temporarily intensely frustrated and don’t know what to do.
They think of dying as a logical response to a long lonely angry helpless lived life. They are tired of being misunderstood, wishing if not screaming inside for - yet unreachable by - maddeningly impervious to - others’ attempts to help, which seem bland and distant compared to the constant close sharpness of their pain and confusion, and eventually numbness. They are led and lost according to negative bias - and helpless guilt at burdening others with same. They are dizzy with spinning and denial of their feelings in an attempt to keep others attached, distantly and unstably so, but at least still somehow attached - the pretending leading to nowhere but disorientation and resentment. They are harangued by voices not (but now) their own that have intentionally or unintentionally shaped, in warped fashion, their personal experience and understanding of themselves and their worlds - voices of generations if not lifetimes before that have not dealt squarely with their own confusion, who desperately needed their own lives mended but instead passed threadbare coping/avoidance strategies forward to this person sitting in front of me who has no idea why she is coming apart, why she begrudges herself and everyone else so much, why she seems to belong absolutely nowhere all the time.
I am drawn to work with people wanting but not actively intending to kill themselves because at some point in our very hard conversations there arise glimmers of understanding that the assumption of their badness/wrongness is simply incorrect, not natural or true, and has been thickly heavily formed by others’ experience of their experience - layers ultimately insubstantial, not true, but held solidly in place by their own learned, thought true, self-doubt and self-loathing. Suicidal clients who end up with me have usually relied on treatment after treatment, book after book, relationship after relationship, therapist after therapist... They have helplessly hopefully wanted these messengers and methods - in and of themselves - to be “the answer” in correcting their (untrue) badness/wrongness. But without a clearer understanding of the lifelong tendency to trust others to the exclusion of self, these answers often serve to encourage further deference to others who know best, further compliance with conditions of body mind and place that are not chosen or driven by the client, that are irrelevant if not harmful to their experience and have been for a long time - conditions that need clarification and change, not acquiescence. And so patterns of self-doubt and helplessness/hopelessness return; the messengers and methods weren’t “the answer” and didn’t “work.” A new level of despair is reached.
The devastating finding that nothing external to the client can or should fix what’s not inherently broken but that needs attention and mining for sense, that nothing external to them can or should quiet their own voice, that nothing external to them can or should make them comfortable with where they are when Lost from Self or lead them to any place other than to Home in Self - not Other - becomes a pivotal topic and place for drastic change to occur.
How very many times I have said, “The good news and the bad news is that you are completely alone in your experience of yourself and your world, peaceful or chaotic as it may be. No one can or should join you in it because it is yours to know best and yours to offer and share and choose to abide or change. No one but you will ever be the ultimate expert on you. No one but you is capable of saving yourself from a life of interpersonal and internal dialogues marked by suggestions that you make no sense in and of yourself... that you don’t exist validly in your own experience... that you are essentially ‘dead to me’ where ‘me’ is everyone you know who cannot or will not understand you, who can’t or won’t find you logical and good exactly as you are, who cannot or will not support you and trust you to find and make your own way.”
The heartbreaking paradox - the suicidal client’s starvation for friendly loving guiding yet empowering company leads to desperate longing for incredibly close caretaking, for someone to inhabit and take best and complete charge of their experience, which is impossible and leads to rejections and abandonments that perpetuate the sense and story of being helpless and cut off, of being dead to everyone, and to the tragic sequitur of suicidal ideation and sometimes planning and follow-through. We have institutions* full of people who have come to believe that others know them better than they know themselves - said others having usually been the ones driven to the brink of worry and admitting the suicidal person to the hospital, and also the ones now authorized to be in clinical charge of the suicidal person at the hospital - and tragically it does get to the point where self-awareness is so discouraged that this has to be the case, that external caregivers do know best and must make decisions on behalf of the client.
For outpatient clients who have some stability and the healthy suspicion that their cycles of self-doubting dependence on others for certain direction and ongoing close care are a confounding problem, I say this:
“If you find someone who can meet you exactly where you are, who claims to be able and wanting to join you closely there, to correct or complete your sense of yourself, to save you, I will be afraid for you and for that person. You will both be disempowered and frantic in that enmeshed arrangement. That person will eventually let you down, and should for the sake of your supportable-but-separate integrity and power, thereby confirming your helplessness and chronic need for confirmation. You will live a co-dependent life with that person, both of you robbed of freedom and capacity for self-awareness and self-trust and interdependent love.”
When the glimpses of bittersweet aloneness arise and can be met/held, there co-arises the natural endlessly open possibility of the client’s own experience, own identity, own preferences, own aversions, own hopes and fears and fantasies borne of longing, own voice... No matter how and what all these are - whether they are adaptive or maladaptive when they show themselves - these versions of reality are THEIRS and theirs alone to assess and to follow or change with the reflective and unbiased help of an empowering other. In this space of healthy doubt and defiance of a habitually dependent deference to others’ experience of their experience, suicidal clients’ authentic experience of themselves shows itself, then - yes - all too quickly disappears, but then with practiced self-awareness and self-compassion and interdependently compassionate external support, shows itself again and again until it proves itself more consistently in big and small ways to be valid, trustworthy, and good.
Then the barriers to the suicidal sufferer’s long sought external fixes fall and those fixes - the treatments and therapists and books and partners - become multiple resources in a larger self-authored picture of health and enjoyment rather than corrections for badness or brokenness that are serially and fruitlessly emphasized and prioritized as “the answer.” With doors and windows blown open and the voices of others’ well-meaning or confused attempts to save or be saved or be saviors, to direct or fix the suicidal person or apply via strategies irrelevant to the suicidal person’s experience - when these other voices get quiet - there is space, there is warmth, there is air for the client’s voice to be heard and primary. There is a channel through which natural doubtless energy can emerge and find balance through interdependent connections that take remarkably little effort to strike up. There is healthful stress, give and take, negotiation, relationship. There is finally some sense of self and belonging fueling a want to live.
*To be clear, inpatient psychiatric treatment is crucial and good for people who intend or have attempted to kill themselves - they are often a step on the road to greater self-awareness and interpersonal confidence, with less intensive outpatient support like mine being appropriate eventually, with more stability, to help clarify and support conditions for remarkable change.