Self loathing is vicious, seductive, persistent, and something I fight. When I’m struggling, “I hate myself” is what I hear in my head. This voice may speak once or twice. It may loop over and over again for days. The intensity of the rage and loathing I feel for myself is difficult to communicate or comprehend. It permeates me and threatens to tear me apart.

About four years ago I made the call that the single biggest internal factor that was holding me back and crippling my life was self-loathing. So I set out to understand it better, to fight it, and to starve it. These days it’s not with me all the time. I have whole weeks where I can just live and enjoy my life and it doesn’t bite at all. But I still have the bad days here and there where it wells up strong and I have to work really hard just to stay still. These are days I fight self harming compulsions. They are days I can’t look in the mirror, can’t eat, can’t bear to be touched. Human contact is intolerable, indifference leaves me drowning, criticism cuts into me, and praise only makes it more intense. I have learned when to fight it and when to endure it.

Self loathing is difficult to wrap your brain around if you don’t experience it to this extent. It runs so counter to our self-protective instincts and the usual human preference to think of ourselves as decent people. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have been able to untangle some of the things that drive self loathing in me. One of them, and it’s a big one, is siding with someone else’s perspective about you. If you’ve been degraded by someone who treated you as pathetic, inhuman, revolting, contemptible, useless, or unlovable, then in the dark times when your reserves are low, you may wonder if they were right. I was bullied a lot at school, so in my case self-loathing was just taking the side of the majority opinion that I’m a freak and deserve everything that happened to me. We don’t like to back the losing horse, and when abusive people are in the majority or more powerful than us, it’s not uncommon to lose our own perspective and take on theirs instead.

Another thing that feeds self-loathing is the deep desire to not be vulnerable to harm again. In the aftermath of trauma or abuse, we may assess ourselves as inadequate and use self-loathing as a tool for self-improvement, thinking that we will make ourselves stronger, more resilient, and more impervious to harm in the future. It’s a seductive idea, but the reality is that we carry on the work of abusers long after they have gone, and cut ourselves away from the very things we need to be able to grow strong – compassion, truth, love. We become brittle and damaged by a campaign of relentless self modification that leaves us disconnected from our sense of self or self-worth.

This inclination towards self modification can also come from a sense of worthlessness. Self-loathing can be the rage that results when we perceive ourselves as fundamentally inadequate in some way. We often judge ourselves harshly when the outcomes of our efforts have been poor. Despite everything we tried, we could not stop them, or we could not keep them, or we could not make them love us, or make it better, or make the dreams come true. Facing our powerlessness is so devastating we turn on ourselves instead, with all the viciousness of someone with a deeply broken heart. And we resolve that next time, we will make ourselves into someone who would be loved, who would get the happy ending and would deserve it.

Self loathing can be used a powerful motivational tool. We gear towards punishment and talk harshly to ourselves to drive us through all the things we don’t want to do, to overcome the depressive reluctance to engage with our lives. We make ourselves keep getting up in the morning, keep working, studying, breathing, fighting for a better life. We do what works, and self loathing does work, for a while. When the alternative is curling up to sleep in a house on fire, we generate change and cling to life with whatever we have. But at some point we have to stop using such a savage implement on ourselves because it will warp and destroy us.

Self loathing often has a very close relationship to shame. Many of us carry secrets about which we are deeply ashamed, an internal list of how hideous and unlovable we are. These may be things we regret, our failings as parents, partners, children, or friends, things done to us about which we take on shame, and about which our culture shames us. We hold these things very tightly to us, and in the dark they fester, they grow in magnitude. We may be unable to forgive ourselves for our own powerlessness, for times we’ve been selfish, cruel, indifferent, lazy. We may be trapped by a need to hold an abuser to account, and find that our thinking twists so that we cannot accept our own fallibility without somehow saying their actions were not that important. We may fear exposure of things that other people would shame us about, sexuality, abuse, gender issues, mental illness… We cannot be reconciled to who we are in some way, and so we suffer, and we hate ourselves for our suffering.

Sometimes we hate ourselves because we’re the safest person to hand. We don’t feel safe to be angry with people or about situations in our life so we direct it all inwards. The rage victims feel towards abusers can be frighteningly intense, and many people conclude that the safest, moral choice is to take that rage out on themselves instead of risking acting out revenge fantasies on another person. The cycle of trauma continues and the person is left weakened and desolate by these attacks on themselves, as well as furiously angry about the self loathing on top of the original harm. People will also turn rage inwards when they don’t feel they’re allowed to be angry, for example a woman who gives birth to a child with severe illness may come to the conclusion that she has ‘failed’ to bear a healthy child. In a position where she feels that she cannot express her anger and disappointment without being seen as a bad mother, she may soothe those feelings by savaging herself instead, in ways that seem deeply irrational to those around her.

Self loathing, oddly enough, can feel safe. Where the alternatives, like being angry at someone powerful and well protected, or deciding to accept our own weaknesses, can feel terrifyingly risky. They may even be incredibly risky. Retreating into a dark hole to gnaw on our own flesh and bones seems to us like a victimless crime, the lesser of many possible evils. As a child, one of the things I feared most was not being destroyed by the bullies, but becoming one of them. I craved the power to protect myself but deeply feared that this meant I would hurt someone else instead. When forced to confront this ambivalence, my reaction was suicidal. Self loathing gave me a way to try and improve my life while feeling safer that I was not blithely exchanging roles. Criticism – legitimate or otherwise, feeds it, and praise also leaves me afraid that I have tricked people into thinking I’m an okay person when deep down I’m convinced I’m not. There’s something alarmingly soothing about retreating from the world back to my dark cave of self loathing.

The cost is very, very high. Intense self loathing leaves me with a profound sense of not being safe anywhere, ever, because one of the people I’m most afraid of is myself. Without safety, recovery is nearly impossible. I become the monster that hides under the bed and stalks me from room to room. There is no escape. I undermine my own efforts, sabotage safety, blossoming friendships, destroy good things in my life I’m convinced I don’t deserve or will ‘weaken’ me. It quickly becomes a spiral, as I act out my feelings I have ever more fuel for my rage at myself and ever more evidence of my own intolerable flaws. The difficulty is that refusing to act upon such strong feelings leaves me with an incredible tension – where the difference between how I’m feeling and the outward appearance of my life is so vast it is actually painful. There’s such an intense need to show some of my feelings, and to discharge some of the intensity. I use journals, inks, symbols that I have imbued with personal meaning to stop me resorting to more drastic measures. I fight the impulse to unmake them all, the despise all my protections, to wake the next day and feel humiliated. I nail my colours to the mast and when needing an answer to the question “What does it mean?” in the aftermath of torment, insist on only one answer “That I am human” and turn all the rest aside.

So I starve my self loathing. It can’t grow strong if I don’t feed it on twisted thinking and fears. If I am loving to myself and let others be kind to me, I grow stronger and my thinking grows clearer. I insist on treating myself the way I treat others, and being kind to my vulnerabilities instead of harsh. I am cultivating healthy entitlement, and taking the risk that through care and kindness I will grow, rather than through drivenness and self hate. Initially these choices were very difficult, and felt terribly risky. They get easier. I am committed to good principles of hope, healing, joy, respect, fairness, even if I can’t live them every day.

When the bad days happen I argue with the voice in my head and I say to it “I don’t hate myself, I’m just stressed.” I cancel classes and stay home. I stay away from the mirror. I let myself go without food for a day if I have to. I try not to claw at my skin. I put the knives out of sight. I write. I paint. I try to hang onto memories of being loved. I let the images of mutilation and destruction flow through my brain and turn my face from their allure. I find somewhere to cry I hope the neighbours wont hear. I let the pain and the rage be there and I hold my fingers tight and refuse to act on it. I follow the pain down and face the horror that has incapacitated me. Slowly, the desire to tear all the skin off my body will ease. Slowly, the images of breaking all my own fingers will settle like leaves on water. The urgent need to act will pass and the sense of rawness will curl back under my skin. The fire in my brain will go back to coals, the stars come out, the planet turns, that which consumed me passes on, and I’m free of the demon again. Just a little more breathing room, just a little stronger.

More info about self loathing here.

See more like this:

• Looking for self compassion
• Coming home is sad
• Grounding techniques

I get asked this quite a bit. I also get asked the counterpart – can I get better without therapy? I think the point of therapy is to have someone else to support you to problem solve, look at different perspectives, help you access information and resources, to be with you and walk along side you whatever it is you are struggling with or going through. I think that the process of therapy is a craft rather than a science; that is the skills of empathic listening, building rapport, timing, pacing, imparting information, connecting, modelling good boundaries and communication are skills that must be learned and honed. Therapy is a relationship with someone, not something you do to them.

Good therapy comes in many different forms, because different therapists have their own unique personality, skill sets, interests, and communication style. This diversity is a wonderful thing because the people who look for therapy are very diverse and what makes one person feel comfortable and grow is an approach another person may find unhelpful. Having said that, good therapists do their best to adapt to clients and to find an approach that is helpful, or to help people find someone else to work with who has a more appropriate style or better experience. Therapists often specialise in certain areas – childhood development, family therapy, psychotic illnesses, etcetera. There is a common misconception out there that all psychologists know about mental illness for example, but this isn’t really the case. It depends on their interests and training, and it is often more useful to ask when making an appointment to check if that therapist has any experience in the area you are looking for support in. Given a choice though, I would take a caring, invested therapist with no experience in your area over a disinterested, dominating, or inappropriate therapist who is an expert in that field!

Therapists cannot fix people or make pain or mental illness go away. If you are expecting this from your therapist you may become very disappointed and frustrated. It’s pretty common for therapists to have to try and explain that these things are not within their power, that they are not withholding anything from you, they simply cannot do what you would like them to do.

The therapeutic relationship is a very unusual one, probably unlike any other relationship we will have in our lives. It is a rather artificial relationship in that it is constrained by clear boundaries that do not usually change over time, and a high level of intimacy is expected very quickly. This is contrast to most of our other relationships which develop slowly with gradually deepening intimacy and boundaries that change and evolve over time. There are advantages and limitations to the therapeutic relationship. The major advantage is that very little is asked of you to sustain the relationship. In good therapy you make an effort to communicate clearly, to be honest (including about problems and disagreements), to turn up on time, pay your bill, and respect the boundaries (no calling at 2 in the morning). Apart from that, it is entirely about your needs. You never have to listen to the therapists marriage struggles, wriggle out of having to babysit their kids, or worry about remembering their birthday. They are here to support you and help you meet your needs. The boundaries of the therapeutic relationship are designed to protect you, they recognise that being in therapy is vulnerable, that there is a power imbalance inherent in sharing personal information when the other person is not reciprocating, and that you deserve to have the space kept entirely for your interests. They are not supposed to mean that there is no real connection, the therapeutic relationship is supposed to have the capacity for great depth, empathy, respect, and warmth.

These therapeutic boundaries also limit what therapy can provide. Therapy is a very poor substitute for many losses in life. Therapy does not replace friends, family, lovers, meaningful work, community, the affection of children, having stable housing, or being free from sickness and pain. There are many things we need in life that cannot be found in therapy. Good therapy can help us to grieve their loss, to work through trauma, to create healthy substitutes or build new relationships, but therapy in that instance is a bridge back to the things that give our lives meaning and hope. It cannot hope to replace them.

Therapy can help you to

• Talk about and work through really private things you don’t want to share with other people
• Learn better communication and relationship skills
• Get a new perspective on your situation. Sometimes it’s very hard to see things clearly because we are so close to it and so emotionally involved. A second opinion can be really helpful.
• Learn more about our situation/condition/illness and access resources about it
• Find hope, meaning, self-worth, a capacity for love and joy when you have lost them
• Have a safe space to grieve, hurt, be overwhelmed, not have the answers
• Experience care and kindness
• Get the push you need to really face and deal with the things that are holding you back
• Feel heard and validated
• Hear hard truths
• Have the courage to tackle difficult things
• Work towards your goals, recover from mental illness

As you can see from this list, a lot of what is helpful about therapy can be found elsewhere in your life. For a list of 50 benefits of having a therapist, written by trauma specialist Kathy Broady go here. In therapy, you are the one who does the growing, in a sense you are the one doing most of the work. (not to pretend that therapists don’t work hard!) So, if you cannot afford therapy, or find a therapist to work with, don’t be disheartened!

There’s a lot of books and articles that say that you must get therapy if you have DID, that therapy is always long, intensive, and difficult if you have a trauma history. I disagree! I think therapy can be a wonderful blessing, but I also know that so much growth happens in our day to day lives and our regular, ‘natural’ relationships. Sometimes we take into therapy needs that simply can’t be met there, and we’re much better off looking to other areas of our lives.

Personally I am deeply grateful to my groups, especially the first I was involved in Sound Minds. I so badly needed friends, a community, people to talk with, feel heard by, have round for a movie, share birthday celebrations with. I have learned so much from them, developed better relationship skills, and taken those skills and good experiences into other areas in my life. I have been amazed at how many of my symptoms reduced or disappeared when I started to make friends and rebuild my social networks. Things I had been struggling with and making little progress about in therapy resolved as my life circumstances improved. I didn’t need to work on them specifically, they were an outworking of isolation, disconnection, loneliness, a lack of affection, acceptance, respect and support. The beauty of our friendships is the mutual nature of them, we give and we receive. Some days we support them, other days they support us. This kind of relationship is consistently described by people with a mental illness as the most crucial one to aid recovery.

You can to some extent, be your own therapist. There are some good books out there about this, in a nutshell, this is about making time and space to focus on your life, your needs, your own growth instead of suppressing, avoiding, denying and downplaying your struggles. You can read about your condition or experiences, join a self-help group or chat room, start a journal, listen to your dreams, develop your self-awareness, make a big effort to take care of yourself. This is pretty difficult at crisis points, but what I’m trying to say is that all is not lost without a therapist. 🙂 Certainly I would suggest that not having a therapist is a far better option than being on the receiving end of bad therapy. Which I realise begs the question, what is bad therapy? That could be a really long list! Some basic issues are:

• The therapist violates boundaries; such as breaking confidentially (apart from mandatory reporting or other relationships covered by confidentiality such as their own supervisor), making sexual advances, being physically abusive etc.
• The therapist pushes their own agenda; they try to convert you to their religion, they coerce, dominate, control, or manipulate you
• The therapist has no respect for you; they denigrate you, are irritated by you, interrupt you, are scornful of your feelings, dismiss your ideas, call you derogatory names, miss appointments, roll their eyes, fall asleep during appointments, can’t remember your name or any details about your situation
• The therapist has poor relationship skills; they react badly to conflict, become defensive or hostile, need to portray themselves as a good therapist even if that means making any problems your fault, can’t negotiate, listen, reflect, or communicate clearly
• The therapist cannot see any of your good points; they relate to you as if you are your illness and have no skills, strengths, abilities, insights or contributions to make, they destroy your self confidence, blame you for your problems, take all the credit for any good outcomes of therapy, or create dependence and fear of making your own decisions
• The therapist is afraid of relationships; they are cold, distant, brutal, callous or indifferent
• The therapist is sadistic; they are a predator who uses therapy to access vulnerable people the same way predators get into the boy scouts, or become priests, teachers, or police. The therapist humiliates, abuses, undermines, exposes, or torments
• The therapist lacks confidence; they allow you to violate boundaries, to manipulate them, humiliate them, abuse them, destroy their reputation, intimidate them, play out all your weaknesses and issues in the therapeutic relationship in a way that is destructive to both of you
• The therapist is burnt out; they express hopelessness, exhaustion, confusion, cynicism, apathy
• The therapist is incapacitated by their own issues; your struggles and the therapists are too similar for them to have any perspective, or they are unwell and lacking insight and balance, or temporarily overwhelmed by circumstances in their own life and unable to really concentrate on your situation

‘Bad therapy’ ranges from the therapist is good and other people really love working with them, but their style is not a good fit for you or their speciality is not appropriate for your needs, all the way through to the therapist is extremely dangerous and inappropriate and their behaviour is very destructive to their clients. Fortunately the latter are pretty rare, but like any profession they are out there. It can be really tough to figure out if the therapy is inappropriate or if it is just pushing some buttons or setting off some vulnerabilities you have. If you’re prone to black and white thinking, you will probably have days where you idealise your therapist and sing their praises to everyone, and others where you demonise them and do the opposite. Being uncomfortable in therapy is not always a sign that the therapy is bad!

Some people worry about becoming dependent upon a therapist. A good therapist will allow a close relationship to develop if that is what you want, but not encourage dependence on their perspective or decision making. My observation has been that most of the people who are really concerned about becoming dependent are those who are least likely to be at risk of this. I also find it a little hypocritical that the medical model often expresses concern about dependence on therapy, while telling people they will need medication for the rest of their lives! If you need to see a therapist for the rest of your life (and you can afford it) to keep you stable and coping – who cares! I don’t care if you need to keep a pet hedgehog (and seriously, they are cute!) do ten handstands a day, do six impossible things before breakfast, and wear green nailpolish to feel good about yourself and your life. If that’s working for you, go for it!

Hope there’s been some food for thought in here. As usual, these are just my opinions and experiences, and this is only a blog post, it really isn’t a comprehensive assessment of the topic. If you’re looking for a therapist, I hope this might give you some confidence to work out if the therapy is a good fit. If you don’t have a therapist I hope you feel more encouraged that you can still grow, learn, and recover. If you’re struggling or have struggled with bad therapy, I hope you can talk about your needs and concerns with the therapist and work them out, or walk away if you need to. Good luck!

A sense of humour is one of the big keys that can help reduce traumatisation and increase resilience. Some survivors of trauma develop a very black sense of humour that can be incomprehensible to people on the outside, but is actually a really useful survival strategy. A number of years ago I was seeing a shrink who would be startled on occasion that I would come in, talk about something really dark and frightening, cry and get really emotionally intense about it, then when enough stress had been discharged, start cracking very black jokes about the situation. He advised me to hang on to my sense of humour and told me it would help get me through. He was right.

One of the things about crises I’ve noticed is they build momentum over time. There’s a sense of situations, problems and experiences all stacking up on top of one another until the whole situation is so huge and exhausting I can’t cope anymore. Humour is great because it can interrupt that process. Instead of being stuck on train tracks speeding downhill, watching the crash coming and being unable to stop it, humour can lift you off the tracks and take you sideways – somewhere else entirely. The problems are still there and the pain is still there, but you get a breather and a different perspective. Often humour in these situations is dark because that’s what you have to draw upon. The same things that hurt you can also be darkly funny in certain lights.

Obviously, this isn’t about humiliating someone else, and not everyone is comfortable with this kind of humour. There is a crowd who will get jokes about psychosis, catheters, and all the things that we also cry about on other occasions.

A few years ago I was in a really difficult place in my life. My housing was unsuitable and deeply stressful, my family had broken down, my mental health was crashing badly and one night I was really in trouble. I was self harming, feeling constantly suicidal, suffering severe insomnia and dissociation and pretty desperate. I’d had a frightening and exhausting day and it was about 3am. I hadn’t slept in a few days and I was becoming really scared about my state of mind. I sat on the floor and called Lifeline, hoping a friendly voice might help get me through the night without hurting myself.

Lifeline are really busy outside of business hours, because most people feel in crisis and need to call at the points when all their usual supports – doctors, clinics, friends – are asleep and unavailable. I always expect at least a 1/2 wait to get through if I call at this kind of hour.

I huddled against the wall, listening to the hold music on loop and jumping everytime it sounded like my call was being picked up, only to hear a recorded message about how busy they were. The suicidal feelings were increasing as I waited and I was trying to calm myself down and talk myself through them without much success. I felt trapped, exhausted, and totally overwhelmed.

Finally my call connected, the guy on the phone said hello, and then accidentally disconnected my call.

In the swirl of numbness and desperation I had a moment to decide which way to fall. It was like a see-saw balanced perfectly in the middle for just a second. I laughed. The sheer stupid ironic ‘Murphy’s Law’ nature of the whole situation made me laugh. I was going to laugh or I was going to self destruct, and laughing saved me. I shook my head in disbelief at my total inability to catch a break and gave up on getting any help that night. I crawled back into my bed and left it all as a problem for another day.

So, if you find a sense of humour helps – and sometimes the weirder or darker the better – make sure you keep reminders around you that sometimes life makes no sense and if your options are to be crushed by it or to laugh at it, it’s better to laugh. I keep Monty Python movies around, tack up comic strips I like, and have a few mates with a wild sense of humour who help to keep me from cracking up. There’s a time and a place for offloading and honesty and emotional expression too of course, but I find it also helps to laugh until your kidneys hurt from time to time. It might be the thing that gets you through.

Some time ago I became curious about what qualities and skills people use to survive extremely harsh environments, such as polar expeditions. I wondered if there was any overlap with the kind of skills needed to survive harsh environments closer to home, such as an abusive family or chronic serious illness.

I’ve read a couple of books about factors that influence survival and come across some interesting ideas, such as the notion that survivors of extreme circumstances seem to share an unrelenting will to live. It seems that perhaps some people reach a point where the cost to keep living is too high. The pain is too great, or the despair, the things they would have to do are too awful or exhausting. Others drive to live is so strong they will severe trapped limbs, drink their own urine, stagger for hundreds of miles. That’s not to suggest that the will to survive is the only factor – luck, skill, experience also play roles. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you try, you simply can’t find your way back to safety. I’m also not suggesting that those who curl up and surrender to overwhelming circumstances are weaker or inferior. Both defiance and acceptance have their place in how we respond to the world. Sometimes those who defy, triumph, other times they do terrible things in their determination to live. Sometimes we mourn those who gave up before help arrive, other times we venerate those who refused to be dehumanised, who gave up their food or wrapped the last blanket around someone else. Sometimes we just mourn the loss of someone who faced hopeless and overwhelming circumstances.

It seems to me that there’s a lot of parallels between situations involving starvation, hypothermia, drowning, being lost or cut off from safety in an inhospitable environment, and those many of us face in our personal lives, children who are being abused, people living in violent homes, a family member struggling with a life threatening illness, those of us who instead face loneliness, humiliation, shame, grief, misery, hopelessness, or fear. The nature of the threat may be very different but the need to find a way through it, ways and reasons to endure or escape, and a way to balance survival and morality, these seem very similar to me.

I once watched a documentary, the name of which escapes me, about how men in the polar regions coped with such a difficult environment. It put forward an interesting idea that stuck with me, that the key to navigating a stressful environment with chronic unpredictable crises, is to be able to respond very quickly to the development of a crisis, and then to wind down afterwards equally quickly. They had as an example a fire in the campsite. A fire in the poles is incredibly dangerous, most of the water is frozen ice or snow so it can be difficult to put out, and all supplies are terribly precious and difficult to replace, possibly the difference between life and death. Men who had been dozing, reading or relaxing playing cards were shown rushing to action. In a heartbeat they ran out to the fire and efficiently had it under control. Having responded to the emergency, they came back to their quarters and returned to dozing, reading and playing cards. They said these were key survival skills, to respond very quickly, and to get out of crisis mode very quickly. Sustained crisis mode is very dangerous, burning energy very fast like running on turbo. You can’t afford to be depleted in a survival situation.

When I thought about how I manage crises like this I decided I do pretty well at responding quickly. I tend to be the first person to spring into action in a first aid situation, I’ve helped out at fires, talked to suicidal people, nursed dying pets to the vet, and so on. I’m good at recognising and quickly responding. I’m not so good at the wind down afterwards. Having gone into high alert crisis mode, I tend to stay there for hours or days. I find it really difficult to wind back down to regular functioning. I think cats are amazing at this, they go from sleeping to manic to sleeping again with barely a pause between. One of the things I’ve noticed for me is that staying in crisis mode exhausts me. It also ‘stacks’ the crises, instead of separating them into distinct experiences. What I mean is that without getting any downtime between events, each crisis feels worse than the one before. Each exhausts me further, leaves me more depleted and discouraged, life starts to feel like I’m under siege, an army camped at my gates, staring at a larder of dwindling supplies.

Working on coming down between crises can be hard. Once you’re all wound up and on high alert and running on adrenaline, there can be a warped logic that says ‘Oh we’re here now, might as well stay here, the next crisis wont be far off anyway’. Without downtime though, you never get to restock your larder. You are like an engine in neutral with the pedal to the floor, accomplishing nothing but burning fuel. We can’t function well when we don’t get the chance to take breaks, wind down to normal functioning, and take something in. Whatever nourishes you – reading, touching base with a friend, gardening, playing music, having a bath, going for a run, having a good laugh, playing with kids, sports… whatever it is you need it. You have to take time out of crisis mode and take in some sustenance. It doesn’t matter what the nature of your difficult environment is, whether it’s something you’re working to change or something you can’t, whether the stress is physical illness, abuse, mental illness, family breakdown, financial crisis, housing stress… one of the things that may help you get through is to resolve that every minute that something terrible is not happening right now you will wind down and replenish. It doesn’t matter if you’re having Monty Python film nights between visits to the hospital, or snatching 20 minutes to tend a garden, anything that breaks up the unrelenting stress and nourishes you will help you survive, endure or escape.

Anything in your life that you can enjoy or appreciate will nourish your spirit. In times when I’ve been struggling with suicidal feelings I’ve reminded myself of prisoners of war starving, of their joy when released at such ordinary luxuries as salt on their food or soap when bathing. Not to belittle my own struggles or make me feel guilty, but to remind me to tune in to these things. To feel the softness of soap bubbles on my hands, the cool clean water running through my fingers. How good it feels to drink when you’re thirsty, to wash your face when you’re hot and tired, to stand barefoot in the warm dust, in the cold mud, on the cool earth.

They don’t make up for the pain of whatever you’re going through, maybe nothing can do that. But they break the pain down into parts, the crises into mouthfuls instead of unrelenting distress that goes on for weeks, months, years, and strips every resource, every last bit of energy, hope, optimism and tenderness from us. Just a moment can give us a little sustenance, and can break up the bad times. You don’t want to have bad years. You can break it down to bad hours, bad days, bad times, with good times between, with peaceful times, with a little pleasure or silliness or rest. Last year for me was a very bad year. It was also a very good year, because I’ve been fortunate enough to have opportunities arise, people who care about me, and because I work on snatching back any moment I can to get out of crisis mode. I’ve written more about this idea in Self Care and a Myth of Crisis Mode.

If we can teach soldiers and explorers skills to cope with harsh environments, I can’t see why the rest of us can’t borrow some of the ideas and apply them to our own lives.

Wow, another big topic! I simply cannot do justice to these in a blog post, so please don’t be under the impression that my notes are in any way definitive. I just hope to share a few thoughts and ideas and maybe they’ll be useful to someone else. If not, there are a lot of books out there, and good support too (although you may have to look hard for it) so please don’t be discouraged, keep hunting for what you need.

Feeling suicidal has been something I’ve lived with for most of my life. I was first seriously making attempts on my life when I was 10 years old, feeling totally alone and overwhelmed and desperate not to suffer anymore. Since then it’s been a companion I’ve had to learn to live with, a shadow I can’t shake. It sits on my shoulder and whispers into my ear, weakens my courage and resolve, tells me that things will not get better. So how am I still here?

There’s a few nasty traps with feeling suicidal that I’ve been able to see and to some extent avoid. The first one is the idea that if you are sick enough, or in enough pain, that someone else will come and help you. This is a powerful rescue fantasy that the mental health system often inadvertently plays into, which is heartbreaking because no one can sweep in on a white horse and take your pain away. I once spoke with a young woman who tried to admit herself to hospital as she was feeling suicidal. They told her unless she hurt herself they couldn’t help her. So she did. Mental health staff will often draw distinctions between degrees of suicidiality – the occasional thought, feeling it strongly, making plans. Between so called ‘passive’ and ‘active’ attempts (those you have a good chance of recovering from and those you don’t). In my experience this is often done quite without any awareness that in an attempt to be taken seriously and gain the help they think is on offer, people often steadily graduate up the ranks to higher and higher degrees of suicidiality. What agitates me so much about this, is that a cross-wiring of kinds is happening here – good healthy impulses to get help and get better are being cross-wired into self-destructive acts. Now both the healthy and the unhealthy impulses are driving the person down into suicide – what hope do they have then?

Sadly, the line between the people not sick enough to need help, and those so sick they are considered beyond help is very fine in some circumstances. People find themselves unable to access services as their situation is not serious enough, and then unable to access them as they are too high a risk. A long time ago I discovered that my learned pessimism about other people’s power or willingness to help me actually stopped me getting worse in a misguided attempt to get support. It’s not an easy one to stay out of for me, a bit like a whirlpool that pulls at me. I have to mentally remind myself a lot that my energy must go into getting better and taking care of myself, that getting sicker to get help is like going deeper into the desert following a mirage of water. No hope lies that way.

Another trap I’ve noticed is using symptoms to express pain. The mental health system is at times very poorly set up to support people who’ve experienced trauma. Sometimes the number and severity of your symptoms are used to ‘grade’ how severe the experience you’ve come through is. This penalises you for being resilient, and leaves you caught between getting validation and acknowledgement for your trauma, or functioning to the best of your capacity. People with trauma can start to speak ‘the language of symptoms’, in inpatient settings they may compare severity of illness to rank their trauma along side each other and compete for the highest severity, comparing scars, numbers of diagnoses, amount of time in hospital, number of suicide attempts. Especially when your trauma is being denied or downplayed by those closest to you, the need to have it acknowledged can be so profound that people self destruct seeking that validation. This can be hard to understand if you’ve not experienced it. The language of symptoms is subtle and insidious and once you start speaking it it’s very hard to break. In this language suicide is seen as the ultimate way to express pain, to reject terrible circumstances, to show that you were a victim, and that your situation was so severe it was not possible to survive it. The way out of this is to refuse to rank trauma, to validate all harm and all pain, to take away the burden of ‘proving pain’ from people who are hurting.

The lure of safety is a trap that can make death seem enticing. People who’ve been badly wounded and broken can be willing to hide out in any port to escape the storm. It’s hard to keep hoping that tomorrow will be better when all your hopes are dashed. It’s hard to find strength when the bad days are horrific and completely outnumber the good. We can get to a point where we just want it to stop and will do anything to make it go away.

I turn these thoughts on their head whenever I can. Instead of seeing death as a peace that I am denied, I find anger in my heart at the thought that my story would end in such a miserable place. I use everything I have already survived as impetus to keep me going on – if I was going to give up, I should have done it 10 crises ago. I’ve already come this far now, nothing will take me down now. I find that it is crucial to reframe the seductive nature of the traps and find a way to think of things where continuing to live is being brave, is bearing witness, is triumphing over abusers, is having a voice, is all the things I long for. If you allow suicide to be framed in a way that it seems to contain the things your heart deeply longs for, then you are incredibly vulnerable to it because it will take all your strength to deny yourself what you so deeply desire and have within your power, and none of us can be strong all the time. For me it’s key to see these things as tricks and deceits, like sweet voiced sirens that will sing me onto the rocks if I listen to them.

I also hold onto many things that help to keep me in life and wanting to live. I do not have one precious thing, for that would make me terribly vulnerable to losing it. I have lost so many things dear to me in my life. I have many things, big reasons and little reasons that hold me here and keep me fighting for life. Some are huge ones – I want to write books, who would care for my pets, my family needs and loves me. Some are little ones – I’d planned to feed the ducks this evening, I haven’t finished making that birthday gift, the moon is so beautiful tonight, perhaps I’ll watch it set. They are my talismans against the dark, and they fail when the darkness is great. I hold one until its light goes out, then I put it back and take out another. The power of feeling suicidal is that it strips meaning from that which means most to us. In a black, fey mood, the thought that our children would miss us is suddenly hollow and devoid of power. I have learned to expect this and not be dismayed by it or blame myself for it. I rotate my reasons to keep going, and never hold onto one past its usefulness. In time it will regenerate and I’ll be able to use it again.

I also now know that there are times when all my reasons fail. When I am joyless and without love of life, when I have no hope for a future and can find no meaning in my pain. When to ask me to live is to ask to me to submit to torture and anguish. In these times I pour the pain out of me, into journals, I weep for hours, days, months, I scream myself to sleep. I accept that I am without hope, without reasons, and I put myself at the mercy of the world. If I am to die, then kill me, but it will not be by my hand. And if there will one day be a reason for me to have endured this, then spare me. I will wait for it. One day there will be reasons and meaning and hope and I will be glad to have endured.

I have also learned that not all change and help comes from within me. When I am deeply broken, I bind myself to stillness to keep me safe from my reckless longings, and I wait. I have learned that if I wait patiently, with my eyes open and my ears pricked and my heart ready, then something will change around me. I will read a book that speaks to me, or someone will say something that unlocks a peace in me, or some circumstance will change and give me hope. Sometimes my desire to be the agent of change, to fix the pain and put the world to rights is the very part of me that is most dangerous in despair. I hold myself still and wait for hope.

I also find hope in my ignorance. I remind myself how many books I have not read, the degrees I do not have, all the millions of people in the world with thoughts and ideas and theories and experiences I’ve never heard of. When I can find no way to patch together any hope with what I know, I go hunting for information and I tell myself that I will find it again. My knowledge is such a speck in the universe, and how much my world has changed with powerful books, good friends, sound advice, how much my inner life has grown and my strength increased as I’ve learned and understood more. And yet still I know so little. I cannot pronounce the certainty of despair when I have only the tiniest fraction of all the knowledge in the world. Other people have found hope, I will sit at their feet, I will watch their lives, I will find foundations for my own.

I abandon reason when reason drives me to despair. There have been times in my life when the anguish was so unbearable that I have broken inside and decided that it was no longer fair to ask me to endure it. That if love of my family kept me here, than that love was cruel. I have taken my hits and bled my last drop and no more can asked of me. I had no reason to expect that my life would become any different to how it has always been. In this place I cast about desperately for a reasonable response and could not find one. In the end I sidestepped the question entirely and concluded that if hope was foolishness and staying alive was madness than I would be a fool. A little madness can be a refuge from the relentless logic of such thoughts.

At times it is helpful to remind myself that there are those, only a very very few, who have hurt me for the sake of the pleasure of hurting me. That they would gain delight in knowing that I continued to inflict pain on myself long after they had gone. That dying by my own hand would be murder from an untraceable distance. I am a profoundly stubborn person. I decided if they wanted me dead, they were going to have to do it themselves. If there are black days where I live only to spite those who’ve hurt me, then so be it.

Feeling chronically suicidal can become a mental habit whenever things go wrong. Your brain tosses it up as an option like a big dumb dog dragging something horrible on to your bed. If you’re used of thinking of suicide when you’re stuck, it may help to talk back to your brain (politely) and tell it you don’t want this option at the moment. You want other suggestions and ideas about how to improve things. You may even write a list of all the various options open to you, and number them ahead of suicide in your list of ways to respond to your life. So perhaps suicide ends up being at option number 467, after

• 452. Move to Japan and take up kite making
• 231. Eat everything you can find in the fridge
• 93. Call a helpline

I run my proverbial list in order from most to least likely to help, easiest to most drastic, and least to most harmful. Even self harm, total isolation, or an eating disorder are before suicide on my list. They I can heal from later, suicide I can’t. Some things – like harming someone else – are after it. It doesn’t have to be a good reason (although a good reason is better) it just has to be enough to get you through. Almost anything you do with your life should be above suicide on your list of options.

So the rope I have cast over this pit is woven from many different things, stubbornness, folly, faith, patience, experience and a deep love for life. No one thing alone could keep me safe, but between all of these things a kind of armour is made that helps to protect me from despair, a kind of path that walks me through the darkness.

I imagine that the things we each make this path from may be different for us all. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense to no one else, if it’s patchworked together, a jumble of contradictions, badly worn thin and with holes you have to leap over. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it only has to be enough to get you through this night. Tomorrow can take care of itself.

I hope you may find something here useful or thought-provoking. If you are feeling suicidal yourself, please take good care of yourself. Call someone if that may be helpful, do those things that keep you safe and give you hope, reframe it, wait it out, find someone to hold you, find reasons to endure, and walk gently. There is hope for us.

Australian 24 hr phone services:
Lifeline: 13 11 14
ACIS: 13 14 65
Suicide call back service: 1300 659 467