Suicide Therapy Archives

So far

Where to start?
I guess I could start at the beginning and tell you all about the traumas and PTSD, my failings and grievances.
I think ill start by telling you where I am now.

I live in the forest on Orcas Island, in the middle of a nature preserve. I am surrounded by the eagle, the deer, the owl.
I’ve been here for 9 months now and each day I awake to a new wonder, the unfolding and ever changing splendor of nature.
Recently I adopted a 12 year old shepherd/husky mix, she spends the days napping and chasing birds or the occasional raccoon.
Over these 9 months I have witnessed the land go from Fall to Winter to Spring. Seeing the forest slowly go from a vibrant green to a sullen grey as winter arrived only to emerge now in a vibrant explosion of verdant green. This makes me think of how life is somewhat the same. We go from times of joy and happiness, to times of pain and suffering and if we can just sit be with ourselves in the times of pain and suffering and listen to life, we can yet again come back to times of joy and happiness. Its in the darkness that we begin to understand the dichotomy of existence, that we find the light.

Over the course of my 53 years I have been an addict, an alcoholic, and suicidal, among other things. I came out of the grips of addiction in my late 20’s, many years later I went to rehab for alcohol addiction, 6 years ago I had decided that taking my own life was a good solution to life.

I had arrived in a place where life didn’t make sense anymore, where the pain and suffering was too overwhelming to even bear any longer. I wrote “suicide letters” to the people who I felt needed an explanation, I had put my financial affairs in order, so that my 2 young sons would be taken care of. In a few days I would end it all.

Then a curious thing happened.

I could not get the thought out of my mind, that if what I was experiencing was real, then wouldn’t everyone eventually commit suicide?
I accidentally found a “suicidologist”, yes there are therapists who only deal with suicidal ideation, this was a surprise to me.
I filled out the online form on the website I had found and 20 minutes later I received a text on my phone from a “suicidologist”, I’ll call this person “F” . This was a Wednesday, I had an appointment Saturday with death. He said he could meet me Friday. What did I have to lose?

In short, I didn’t make it to my Saturday appointment with death. I’m still here. I see and experience myself and the world in a very different way. I am alive. Finally.

Over the course of 4 months I saw “F” twice a week, each session was 2 hours long. During that time we delved into the depths of my soul, we peered into the darkness, we examined the light. For so much of my life I had always been rewarded for being logical and analytical. These were the swords I had fallen upon. Using play, curiosity and imagination was the prescription I was now given.
It was up to me to fill the prescription.

During many of my trials and tribulations I felt utterly alone, shut off, isolated, mired in my own despair.
Each time I hit “rock bottom” I somehow knew I needed help. There was a small voice in me that said “reach out, ask for help”
I am so glad I listened.

I have been at MCG for 14 years now. Looking at that number I am surprised, its half of my professional career. During my tenure at MCG I have had to use FMLA twice, once for alcohol addiction, once for when I became suicidal. Of course I could feel shame and guilt over that. But I don’t, I feel nothing but gratitude. The management team at MCG has always “had my back”, they have supported me in whatever I was going through. MCG has created a family, a support system, a place where we all support each other without judgement. MCG is a model for how to create a caring workplace.

I feel that I have been given a gift. My own life.
In my spare time I work with people who are struggling, who can find no way out. If I can help just one person alter the course of their life, that’s all I ask for.

I’ll end this with a quote.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away” – Pablo Picasso

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Alone, Isolated, Depressed

As we fall further into despair we isolate ourselves, we stop socializing, we withdraw from the community. When we do this the meaningful feedback and conversation we partake in diminish as well.

The only voice we hear is our own. What are the conversations we have?

Life is miserable

I am a bad person

No one would notice if I were not here anymore

I am stuck and nothing will ever change

Nothing I do is successful

Our internal conversations become louder and more frequent. They feed on themselves and we start to spiral down further and further into darkness. We have no other point of reference except the stories we keep telling ourselves. Ask yourself, where you first heard those conversations, whose voice they were in? I would guess the answer is the voice was your own.

We need a new story, we need to change our point of reference. What if you started changing the story?

Life is fucking wonderful

I am a good person

Things can change

I am successful

Now I am guessing that as you read this you may be thinking that I am full of shit. That it’s all a bunch of BS. I would have said the same thing a few years ago. I would have shaken my head and said, “you don’t understand, my life sucks”. Oh, it did suck. It was a miserable mess and I had no way out. I also realized that whatever I was doing wasn’t working. Why should I keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result? I realized that where I currently stood was leading to only one thing. I looked at it this way, if what I am doing now isn’t working, why not just try something else, something new. Maybe I could change my point of reference, my story. And you know what? It worked.

You become the character in the story YOU tell YOUrself.

What story are you telling yourself?

Remembering

re·mem·ber /rəˈmembər/ verb: Have in or be able to bring to one’s mind an awareness of (someone or something that one has seen, known, or experienced in the past).

Herein lies the thing, How can you bring something to your mind when you have no awareness of it? How can you remember when you can’t remember?

How can you remember something when you don’t even have any inkling of what it was, no awareness of something else?

Most of the time, our awareness is very limited to what we experience and have experienced. We use these experiences to weave the tapestry of life we exist in. What if there are other threads, other colors, other materials that we are not aware of, that we could use?

This is where I stood. I had stood in this place since I was in my early teens, for nearly 35 years. I believed that my life was a miserable, suffering, dark thing. This limited the materials I had available to me to create the tapestry of my life. Why couldn’t I see anything else?

Trauma, either self-inflicted trauma or real trauma, it doesn’t matter. Trauma colors everything we see. If affects us deeply. It may be that we did experience something traumatic, something really horrible, that happened. We also may have self-inflicted traumas that we aren’t perfectly clear on.

Enter the concept of the CSO (Compassionate Self Observer)

F asked me who I had loved. Who did I have a great relationship with when I was young? I told him it was Pete, my maternal grandfather. F then asked me to describe him in words

I choose: Kind, Loving, Intelligent, Caring, …

Then F asks me who the opposite of Pete is, in my life. This is the NSO (Negative Self Observer)

I tell him Jill (Name changed to protect the innocent). F asks me to describe her in words.

I choose: Mean, demeaning, angry, upset, belittling…

Then, F says to me that the CSO is actually who you are and the NSO is what you do to you.

BOOM!

Remembering: To be able to bring back a piece of information into your mind, or to keep a piece of information in your memory

Up to this point in time the memories of Pete were entangled with his death. He died alone in the assisted living facility late one night. We had all gone to visit him earlier that day but then we left because we had life to deal with. How was it that we were so busy with our own lives we couldn’t be there to be present with death? I remember thinking, we should stay because he might die tonight. He did. He died alone. For thirty-some-odd years I couldn’t recall or remember any of the good times with Pete. All I could see is how I had failed him and he died alone. At the moment when F told me that I was the CSO, that I was Pete, I was all of a sudden, able to start remembering the good times. Riding in his pickup, sitting on the front porch with him, the smell of oil and dirt that permeated his workshop.

A self-inflicted trauma had filtered my memory of Pete. I say “self-inflicted trauma” because it was that. Had I failed him? Had he died alone because of me? Had I caused his death? No, I hadn’t, I had simply heaped the responsibility of it on myself, add to that large portions of grief and loss, and I had a recipe for a self-inflicted trauma. When we change the way we look at the world, when we rub the years of accumulated sleep from our tired eyes, the remembering changes.

When the perceptions of our trauma’s start to shift and change, we also change, our view of the world changes.

Now I can guess you may be thinking WTF, you aren’t Pete, you and he are different people. While that is true, it’s also not true. It’s true because we both were different collections of cells acting in concert to create a human form. But what about when we look deeper? All the attributes I had ascribed to Pete were ones that I saw as a child and remembered somewhere deep inside myself. Wouldn’t I have tried or wanted to be like that? What if I can view my thoughts and actions as Pete would have? Instead of doing what I had always done.

I had simply forgotten, forgotten that he loved me, the kindness he showed me, the even temper he always had. In doing so, I had forgotten to love myself, to show myself kindness.

And what about the NSO, The Negative Self Observer? Was Jill really those things? Was she mean, angry and demeaning? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that by ascribing those attributes to her, I had, in a way, altered my perception of how she treated me.

“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”
― Charles Horton Cooley

ChaChaChaChanges

After my first “therapy” session with F, I felt slightly different. As if maybe my current state and condition was not some inescapable dark abyss. How had I ended up in my current state?

Life. My life seemed to be a miserable, difficult, daily struggle with the darkness that I saw around me. How had I ended up here? Did everyone experience this same thing (I assumed not as then everyone would be suicidal)?

I had a laundry list of things that caused me trouble

Failed marriages
Difficult times at work
Difficult making and maintaining relationships
Feeling isolated
Feeling like nothing I did ever worked out
and on and on…

I had changed a lot of things over my life in an attempt to make things better. I moved, I changed jobs, I got divorced, quit drinking, quit using drugs, etc…

But things were still generally shitty and miserable. What more was there to change?

Throughout my life, I had changed all the things external to me, gave up drugs and alcohol (self-medication), changed jobs 30 some odd times, moved… Yet here I was suicidal, what more can I change to have a different experience? The daily struggle with my own mortality had reached a pinnacle and I wanted to jump. I had done all the things.

Or maybe not.

All of the changes I made to feel less miserable were external to ME and my self. It’s a fine line, ME and the things I want to change. External or internal. External things are easy to change, you just remove them from your life and go on. Internal things that is were it gets dicey. If one only looks at changing external things it’s a piece of cake. My problems are because of you, and I’ll just remove you from my life, I hate my job I’ll get a different one. Internal things not so much, how does one remove the self? Well, suicide is one answer. Or at least it appeared to be from my vantage point.

But how do we change the self? Is it about finding the self? Is it lost? To be lost seems to indicate it is somewhere else, somewhere unknown. If we could only have a spiritual GPS of sorts on this lost self then it would be easy to find.

But maybe we aren’t lost at all. Maybe instead we have forgotten who we are.

Thus I began the process of remembering who I was.

Asshole, I Love You.

I sat huddled on the floor, wanting to die. There were several ways I could accomplish this grim task: gunshot to the head, overdose, hanging. For months, I had been through all the possible variants of murdering me in my head.

I had decided to exsanguinate myself in the bathroom, arms draped over the edge of the tub full of warm water. I needed help, but I was embarrassed to ask for it. I was a wreck. I had recently admitted myself to the ER in a suicidal state. After a few hours, they sent me home.

I called the suicide hotline, as we are told that is what to do. The suicide hotline answered, a phone menu of choices, I selected whatever it said to. Then I waited, hold music playing in my ear. Fuck I wanted to die, and just be done with it. What the hell is taking them so long to answer?!? My mind is reeling with thoughts that if I could just do it, I would be at peace finally. Jesus Christ, why am I still on hold?!? Maybe I should just kill myself now and get it over with. I get redirected to another line, it rings, then I am on hold again. What the fuck! I have been on hold for over twenty minutes. All I can think of now is how angry I am that they aren’t helping me. I’m just angry that no one is helping me. The shambling suicide beast retreats to the edge of my mind, lurking there in the darkness. I hang up the phone after thirty minutes and I am pissed. For a while, I forget I want to kill myself.

Three days later, I have laid out a plan. On March 31st, 2018, I will murder myself. All my financial affairs are in order, I have written letters to those I care about. I sit in the chair and cannot understand fully what I am going through. There is only one option: to kill myself, as that will end it. I sit there weeping, distraught that it has come to this. Soon it will be over. For some reason, I pick up my computer and type “Suicide therapy Seattle’ into Google. In the first few results, I see something that catches my eye…

I had been in therapy for years off and on. I am a recovered meth addict and a recovered alcoholic. I am also a father and ex-husband 2x over. I have a successful career. I have a long list of problems and pain, and I can’t see the good parts of me or the world. There’s nothing to soothe myself with any longer. Therapy for me was bullshit. Sit in a room for an hour and talk about your problems and complain while someone else sits in a chair and nods. I would feel better after my sessions, like I accomplished something, but the beast would always come shambling back.

The website that caught my eye said that it was different. That it was successful. I found it at suicidetherapy.com. It used a therapy approach called Contextual-Conceptual Therapy, CCT. Well, what do I have to lose!? I can always kill myself later. I called, left a message, and filled out the online form. Then I read all I could about CCT while I sat and waited. Twenty minutes later, I get a text message response to my online message, asking me a few questions. He says there is an opening Friday, March 30th. I find this to be unbelievable. What therapist can see someone on such short notice? This guy must be a hack!! I decide to take the 2-hour slot at 10:30 am. If nothing came of it, I could always kill myself the next day, March 31st, the set date of my plan.

I lived a life based on fear. People’s words, actions, and intent were all against me. I wasn’t paranoid, the world was just a dark, ugly place. And I had had enough. I believe the genesis of this was when I was eleven or twelve years old, when I started having seizures. I would awake in the middle of the night in a terror, lose my sense of identity, hallucinate, and shake and shiver. I grew up in a very religious household. I remember the first time I seized like it was yesterday. I awoke not knowing who or where I was, but aware that I had lost myself. I was terrified. I heard voices and saw darkness all around me. I sat on the floor as my family looked on. I said, “I am evil, I need to die.” I remember my Mom calling the pastor, not the hospital. For the next forty years, my soul struggled with that moment. What if I was possessed, what if I was the devil?

Friday morning arrived, the morning of my “suicide therapy” appointment. I feel curious, but reserved. Will CCT be different, or more of the same? I have hope that it will. I need something different, otherwise, I am going to die. I drive an hour to the appointment and park. “Well, Kurt, this is it, do or die.” (there is some dark humor in that). I find the office and walk in. The therapist, who I nickname F, greets me and walks me into the room.

It’s a mess! What kind of therapy is this, I wonder? The room is filled with posters, toys, whiteboards, and mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Does he usually treat kids? He offers me a seat on a beach chair, low to the ground. He sits across from me, in the same kind of chair. We look at each other. I sense that he can see me.

I was heavily medicated: two anti-depressants and a large dose of anti-seizure meds. Finally, when I turned thirty, I was medicated for my seizures. They had gone away for many years after my teens, but had come roaring back just after my second son was born. Sometimes I had seizures three times a night, or more. I was finally diagnosed as having temporal lobe epilepsy, not demonic possession. That was a relief. I must have gone through 5-10 different medications in the following ten years. It was grueling. But at least I didn’t have the devil in me anymore.

We sit there in our chairs. In the first few moments, he says there are two rules in this room: “Don’t believe anything I say and don’t disbelieve anything I say.” I say “okay”, not fully understanding what that means. It seems contradictory. What the fuck. The next thing out of his mouth was:

“you are an asshole!”

Really? What the fuck, did my therapist just call me an asshole? I thought, ya know, he is right. “What kind of person wants to kill themselves?” He is right: I am an asshole that wants to murder myself. Somehow hearing it from someone else hit me like a tsunami. For a moment, I understand. I cry. I think he also has tears in his eyes. Can he really see me? I felt so disconnected, adrift, at odds with everyone, even myself. I was like a Golem trudging around, lifeless but determined. Determined to kill me and end this painful lifeless existence. That was the way I felt. But here was someone who saw something else, it seemed like he actually cared. What could he see that I could not? He could see ME.

We spent two hours in the room that day. Things looked slightly different. I see that maybe things aren’t as I thought they were, that maybe it was something I was doing that had caused my current state.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau

As we end the session and I am about to walk out the door, F asks me if I will promise not to take my life before Monday’s session. I wonder if I can make it two days? I think I can, as I glimpsed that maybe things can be different. I say yes, I will promise that. I have hope, something I haven’t had in a long long time.

As I open the door to leave, F says to me, “I love you.”

I remember thinking “well that’s good, because I certainly don’t love me.”

And so it starts

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a dear friend and he said to me “I am headed to Danny Deardorff’s memorial service”. It took a second to register with me as I processed what he just said. I thought “oh no, Danny died.”

I didn’t personally know Danny and had never met him. But without him I know I wouldn’t be here writing this right now. Danny wrote a book called The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche. Early on in my journey, when things had gotten so bad I couldn’t see any way out, my therapist at the time recommended I read it.

The Other Within isn’t an easy read. It deals with complex ideas and uses language I still struggle with at times. But it presented ideas and metaphors that changed me. It changed me to my core.

As I sat there processing the news of Danny’s death with tears streaming down my face, I couldn’t help but think that in that book he had shared part of himself and in doing so it had saved my life. And now he was gone, no more books, no more words. Just what he left for us.

What if part of what he left is what I am now? I feel compelled to share my story, my journey, because if Danny wouldn’t have done just that, share part of himself, I wouldn’t be here.