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| FOR THOSE WHO HAVE TRIED CHAPTER 14 |
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After thinking about who might read this book I realized that at least some of you may have already made a suicide attempt. Maybe you are sitting in a hospital dayroom with fresh stitches in your wrist. Or maybe you are at home alone. Maybe no one knows that you have just tried to end your life. I can't know your circumstances, but because I have some idea of what you might be going through, I want to talk with you about what you have tried to do and what I think it means to have done it. From a statistical point of view, many experts believe that once you have attempted suicide, you are now at a higher risk of attempting it again and, maybe one day, of succeeding. If I can, I want to try to reduce that risk to you. Since I cannot know what has happened in your life that brought you to the decision to end it, I cannot talk about these things except in the most general of terms. So what I want most to do is to talk with you about what you might be going through in these hours and days after you have tried to kill yourself and to help you understand that, once you have tried to die by suicide, it does not mean that you must or will try it again. Your Reactions Many people who have unsuccessfully tried to end their lives feel as though they have, as in everything else lately, failed again. Some of them are angry with themselves. They feel confused and guilty. They feel stupid and foolish and as though, even though they tried to do the one thing that would make things better, they ended up making things worse. More than one person who has recently attempted suicide has said to me, "I've really made a mess of things now, haven't I?" To be candid, sometimes they have. I will talk about some of the possible consequences of an failed suicide attempt in another chapter, but for now I want to focus on what you might be going through and what you can learn from what has happened. Most everyone I have talked to has felt, in the hours right after the attempt, frightened by what the act itself. In the days or hours just before they made the attempt, many of them felt some sense of control over their immediate future, as if they finally had mastered the situation that seemed so impossible. Some of them felt a certain calm or serenity in the final hours before they tried to end their lives. But after their attempt had failed they suddenly felt that sense of control slip away, as if they were once again thrown back into the chaotic world they had just tried to escape. They found the world had not changed for the better, and sometimes it seemed even worse. Then, as they began to accept the fact that they did not die, they became frightened by the power of their own emotions - emotions that could push them to an act of self-murder. Some people have reported a sense of relief at having survived a suicide attempt. Many have told me that they were glad they didn't die after all, that they were glad they thought to save themselves at the last minute or that others were there to rescue them from their attempt. Still others have felt just the opposite. "Why did they bother to save me?" Mary said. "I wanted to die. Why couldn't they just let me go? Couldn't they see that's what I wanted?" Mary had taken a lethal overdose. Had it not been for the heroic work of the doctors and nurses she would have died. She was angry with the hospital staff. She swore at them. They had foiled her plans and forced her to live. Until I met Mary, I had never known anyone who was so insistent on killing herself. She had made up her mind, made her plans, and carried them out. Only by a stroke of luck (a neighbor dropped by to borrow a TV Guide) had she been found unconscious and rushed to the hospital. In the weeks that followed Mary's suicide attempt, she remained angry - angry at herself, angry at the people who had saved her, angry at the judge who ordered her to see me, angry at me for trying to convince her life was better than death, and angry at the world in general. But in time Mary came to understand her anger; its source, its meaning, and learned that she could turn her anger into energy for positive change. Mary's anger, in the end, was the thing that saved her. In many ways Mary had a right to be angry with life, but only with help did she gradually come to understand that she was not to blame for all the things that had gone wrong in her life. In time she began to see that killing herself was only one way she could deal with her anger. There were other, more productive ways to use anger and, as we worked together, she found ways to retarget her anger and to express it in healthy, purposeful directions. Many months after her suicide attempt Mary said, "I guess I was mad at the wrong person. But that doesn't mean I'm not still mad. This is still a pretty lousy world.” These many years later, I still get a Christmas card from Mary. She's still angry, but at least she no longer blames herself for everything that goes wrong. For some, one suicide attempt is enough. One brush with the real possibility of dying is enough to jar the person into a new plane of reality. Many people have recovered from their suicidal crisis and attempt, decided that the reason they thought they wanted to die was not a good enough reason, and then gone on about the business of living with a bold new vision of what life could be. As one young woman told me after attempting to kill herself over the loss of a boyfriend, "To think, I almost killed myself over that bum!" For others, though, the first suicide attempt becomes a haunting memory, a set of negative thoughts that hound them each time they find themselves hurt or depressed or lonely. They have attempted the ultimate solution once and, having tried it once, they sometimes feel compelled to try it again. This, in my view, is the curse of the self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy is, simply, a belief that one has a certain destiny and that, no matter what else you may do, you are bound to live out that destiny. If, for example, you believe that you will one day die by your own hand and you never challenge that belief or seek to change it or discard it, then that belief hangs there somewhere in the back of your consciousness, waiting until just the right set of circumstances. Then, when the chips are down and the desperation begins, BOOM! Here comes that old thought: "I must kill myself!" A philosopher once said that the thought of suicide is a great consolation; by means of it one can get successfully through many a bad night. This observation is an example of how thinking about suicide can be both a relief and potential enemy. Thoughts of suicide are a relief for all of us to know that we have the power to end our own suffering any time we wish, but such a thought becomes an enemy if we believe such an idea carries the force of our own self-imposed law. It is as if one is saying, "I know that if things get bad enough, I can always kill myself.” This is very different from the thought that "I know that if things get bad enough, I must kill myself!" So even though you may have tried suicide once, it does not necessarily follow that you must, sooner or later, take your own life. If life is a play and you are the scriptwriter, then who says you can't change act III? Who says you can't rewrite the ending to your own play? Simply put, and even though your life has been running like a Greek tragedy recently and your suicide attempt is proof positive of that fact, it doesn't mean it has to end that way. You might, as I frequently do with my clients, ask yourself a question, "Who's writing this play anyway?" The Reaction of Others I want to talk briefly about how others may react to your suicide attempt. And I want to do this so that, if you have recently made an attempt, you will know something of what others might be feeling or thinking. First, there is no single or predictable reaction to a suicide attempt. Some people will show immediate sympathy and understanding. Others will be angry with you, as if you have done something to hurt or embarrass them. Some may be ashamed of you, ashamed that you could have done something so terrible to yourself and against God. One reaction is almost always predictable: you will have frightened those who know and love you. How they handle their fear of your life-threatening act will vary, but you can bet that because you made an attempt to end your life, they have been put in fear - a fear that is partly out of their concern for you and partly out of concern for themselves. "He didn't really mean to hurt himself,” the father of a teenaged boy said. "He was just fooling around.” The boy in question had attempted to hang himself and was found just as he was losing consciousness. But there was no question that he had made a suicide attempt. The father, out of his need to deny that anything could be wrong with his son or himself or his family, hoped to deny to himself and anyone who would listen that everything was not fine. Denial is a major psychological defense against fear and anxiety and all of us use it at one time or another. Unexamined and unchanged, the denial by others of your suicide attempt is never helpful to you or them. It is as if someone has said, "You did not really try to kill yourself. Why don't we all agree to forget the whole incident?" This conspiracy of silence does no one any good and, if anything, only increases the likelihood that the reasons you sought to end your life will remain a mystery - except to you. If you go along with those who hope to "forget" the whole thing you will be left alone with the very same problems you had before and, therefore, the very same thoughts about how to correct them. So if there is a time for you to break out of this conspiracy of silence, now is the time to do it. If you must, go outside your family or your circle of friends and find someone who can understand what you have tried to do so that, with objective help, you can find a better solution than suicide. Some of those around you will deal with their fear by becoming angry with you and blaming you for what you have tried to do. They may say something like, "Look what you have done to me!" Or, "How could you be so stupid?!" Maybe this is the reaction you expected to get. Maybe you were mad at them and your suicide attempt was a way to let them know just how mad you were. Maybe you set out to prove that whoever is mad at you really didn't love you anyway and, now that you have tried to kill yourself, you have proof for your belief. I don't know. But I do know that if that is what you set out to prove and have now proved it, then I hope one test of their love is enough and that you don't, later and again, feel the need to test them again. The Best Outcome What I hope has happened (or will happen) for you if you have attempted suicide, is that some change will take place in your life, some positive change. The reasons people attempt suicide are many, but I think all who try have some hope that by dying or threatening to die they can bring about some change in the way things are. They hope to end their suffering, their pain, their loneliness, or to stop the steady flow of losses in their lives. Their attempt to suicide had a reason and, at least in their minds, a good one. So if you have attempted to end your own life I hope that good things will now begin to happen. I hope that now that you have survived the crisis, you will see this is a time to look to new beginnings, new possibilities, new opportunities, and new relationships. An attempt on your own life need not, automatically or in that awful power of the self-fulfilling prophecy, lead to another attempt. Rather, I hope that your suicide attempt can be an opportunity for a new start, a rebirth if you will. Terry, a good friend of mine who attempted suicide when he was a young man, said to me when he learned I was writing this book, "Paul, I didn't start to live until after I'd tried to die." I won't pretend that everyone who has tried to die by suicide can just jump up running and change life in the twinkling of an eye. Few can do this. But with help and time and a realization that life can be more than it has been, I have no doubt that you can find at least some of that which you seek. Be it love, or success, or happiness, I am certain of at least one truth: these things are only available to the living. |
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