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78 The Desperate Inner Experience of Suicidality

Episode 78 Published 4 years, 8 months ago
Description
  1. Lead-in
     
    1. Almost no one understands suicide very well.  Almost no one.  

    1. Some of you might say -- but Dr. Peter, I've been really down and out.  I've been really suicidal.  I've been there.  I lived it.  
      1. Not gonna argue with you about having been suicidal. But having intense feelings, almost irresistible impulses toward suicide, constant suicidal thoughts
      2.  -- that doesn't mean you understand suicide.  Not at all.

    1. I don't think most people who have attempted suicide really understand their experience.  

    1. I don't think most therapists really understand suicide.    

    1. Why ?
  6.  
    1. Because we're afraid to really enter into what is behind suicide.  We don't want to go there.  We're terrified of what lurks underneath.  We have parts of us that don't want to understand.  
      1.  Lauren Oliver, Delirium “Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed."

    1. And I'll go further than that.  And it's not so much because we're afraid of what we'll find in another person, a friend or relative or colleague.  It's because we are terrified that finding the darkness inside of others will wake up our own sleeping giants of darkness.  The darkness inside us.  The terror inside us.  That's why we avoid, why we distract, why we skirt the edges of this topic. 

    1. Benjamin Franklin knew this:  Nine men in ten are would-be suicides   -Poor Richard's Almanack.  

    1. Freud popularized it in 1920 -- book the Pleasure Principle.   -- he discussed the death drive: the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.  Death drive or drives went by the name Thanatos -- the Greek god personified death.
       
      1. Caught a lot of flak for it, then and now.  Not really widely accepted.  I think he was on to something.  Something we don't want to think about others -- that they have drives toward self-destruction.  It's something that we don't want to admit about ourselves.  


    1. If we are really honest with ourselves in looking at suicide
       
      1. we would realize, with John Bradford There but for the grace of God go I. We would give up our false presumptions about our own strength and our own natural resiliency.  

      1. We would realize, with Shakespeare's Lord Chancellor in Henry VIII “We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.” ― Lord Chancellor William Shakespeare, Henry VIII 

      1. We would understand Mahatma Ghandi when he said: “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”
    4.  
      1. We would have a lot less judgement about the souls and experience of those who killed themselves.  Yes, the action of suicide is wrong, gravely wrong, and we'll discuss that in next week's episode.  We're not minimizing the gravity of the act -- I'm talking here about the phenomenological experience of those on the brink of self-destruction and why they are there.  

      1. And we would understand something about the spiritual dimensions, the dark spiritual powers at work in suicide as well.   


    1. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think you really have any accurate idea about suicide.  Suicide is one of the most misunderstood of human actions.  
      1. Because we want to avoid the churning darkness, the despair, the hopelessness, the alienation, the trauma within us, we don’t want to see it
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