BEATING SUICIDE
29 DECEMBER 2022 (15 MIN READ)
132 people take their own lives every day in the United States.¹ That statistic alone should drop your jaw and let you know that we are facing a serious problem as a society. Even crazier, I promise you that the number of people who think about taking their own lives every day is WAY higher than that number. Since this issue seems to be getting progressively worse, as a collective, now more than ever, we need to know what causes suicide and what we can do to heal those avenues, so we cannot only help ourselves if we find ourselves staring at that abyss, but also if someone we love starts going down that road too.
This article will present four key causes of suicide: shame, lost hope, ego death, and spiritual sickness. And how to go about healing each one.
As a survivor of spending years of my life wanting to kill myself every day and bringing myself to the other side, this piece is deeply cathartic to me and I hope anyone who reads it gets something useful out of it.
SHAME
With all the lives we have lost to suicide, almost all of them took something they were deeply ashamed about to the next level of the game. This shame that was so heavy for them boils down to two categories: the knockout punch and the small jabs. To explain the boxing analogy to those who are confused, a knockout punch would be one devastating shot and small jabs are quick, repetitive punches that add up eventually and take you out of the fight. In terms of shame, the knockout punch would be one thing that you need to hide from everyone desperately and the jabs are smaller things you are ashamed about that are all adding up to hurt you deeply. When it comes to the knockout punches, some examples would be a hidden mental illness, a hidden crime, a hidden string of affairs, a hidden disease, a hidden sexual preference, or a hidden medical procedure, just to name a few. Personally, I’ve dealt with two of these knockout punches in my life. As a young kid, I experimented sexually with a couple of boys, which my parents were quick to sweep under the rug and never talk about again. I was inadvertently taught to shame myself for my experience and force myself to never think about it. Whenever the experience would pop up in my mind, I would feel this massive pit in my stomach, my heart ache, and all I wanted to do was leave the planet with this secret. I was too young to realize suicide was an option and thankfully saw a therapist once I got to that age where I could have gone in that direction. Now, I can openly talk about that experience without any shame and not feel like it threatens people perceiving me as heterosexual.
The second knockout punch in my later years became hiding depression itself. I was so obsessed with having people perceive me as an alpha male that I could not bear having anyone deviate from that perception. This fear led me to refuse to not only talk about my deep depression and suicidal ideations, but also to not accept them in myself, opting instead for repeatedly repressing any thought tied to my weakness or depression. The constant neglect, repression, and shame towards my desire to not be here added up so intensely that I almost attempted to take my life on multiple occasions, and one time basically crossing that line of attempt when I swallowed a whole bottle of benzos while drunk. Having gone through two of these knockout punches of shame, I can tell you that feeling like a core part of yourself, or a personal experience, is so fucked up that no one can hear about it, over time ends up feeling like you become the energy of that thing. In other words, people end up attaching their core identity to that item of shame, desiring to get rid of themselves, when they actually just want to get rid of the thing they are ashamed about. Unfortunately, due to the irrationality caused by intense emotions, most people in this situation don’t realize that things about yourself cannot magically disappear, they can only become accepted. And the path towards acceptance is the path towards healing. The more one runs away from accepting what happened to them or what is happening due to shame, the more they run closer to the path of suicide.
The antidote to this poisonous ingredient comes down to radical acceptance. Although the book, Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins has some questionable ideas, he said one thing in there that absolutely changed my life: the billboard concept. In the book, he advocates that the most important step to fixing yourself comes down to accepting everything about yourself—to the point that you would be fine with a massive billboard in your hometown being rented out to list all of your dirty laundry. What I took away from this argument was that you are not giving yourself a fighting chance at healing yourself or feeling fulfilled if you can’t fully accept something about yourself. And that comes down to having the demons of shame tapping at your heels every chance you try to develop a new slate and heal yourself, reminding you of all the “bad” things you have done that nobody can know. Thus, the billboard gives you a chance to wipe your slate clean and not have any skeletons from your closet running after you, as the world will be able to see them too. Since no one is going to actually rent a billboard out and do this, an effective equivalent can be posting about the things you are ashamed about on social media. When I was fighting shame around my bipolar diagnosis and the fact that I had to go on lithium to get it under control, I posted about it on social media, which led me to stop carrying the shame since everyone knew now. Since the shame was gone, I could actually focus on healing my disorder, rather than focusing on all the shame. Taking it a step further, I like to believe that no one can blackmail me, as I would take it as an invitation to reveal something I feel ashamed about. If you feel compelled to believe the same thing, then you are entering the PhD level of conquering shame.
Now, with regards to the jabs of shame, consider all the little ways you hide certain truths about yourself that you don’t like. Take out a piece of paper and write them all down. To give you some inspiration, these can look like feelings you hide in front of other people, parts of your physical appearance that you wish were different, pieces of your personality that you wish never existed, etc. As you can see by the length of your list, imagine the combined energy of all that put together and equate the force of that to one punch. This one combined punch ends up becoming the most powerful knockout punch ever—even something Mike Tyson could never serve up. Since these little jabs add up to so much damage, you have to be incredibly careful with how many you give yourself. Take each little jab the ego serves up as a quick reminder to love and accept that piece of you. To counteract the combined punch of shame, coat each of those shots with love to create a knockout punch of affection that makes you want to be here at all costs.
LOST HOPE AND ISOLATION
When people reach a stage where they want to end their lives, it implies that they feel as if there is nothing to live for. Their loved ones aren’t enough. Their work is not enough. And most importantly, they are not enough. In other words, it feels as if nobody or nothing cares enough about them to justify their existence, especially themselves. Even though the contrary is true most of the time, people who face suicide can’t get themselves to feel that truth in their body. During my episodes of obsessive suicidal ideation, I had tons of friends and a loving family, but I could not feel any of that love since I felt like such a worthless piece of shit. The key thing that picked me up out of this hole was not something cliche, such as accepting love from others or crying in a kumbaya circle. Surprisingly, what lifted me out was dedicating my life to a mission beyond myself, where my livelihood was not only important to me, but the other people I was helping too. So, picking myself up out of the depression was not just about me anymore, but the waves of people I could potentially help down the road. When I started relapsing and facing the demon of suicide again, I would imagine the mass amounts of people who would die with me too, since I would not be there to support them any longer. (No, these people would not actually die. The visual just helped me realize that my life was no longer about me anymore).
For me, this mission was using what I learned from helping myself heal to heal others who are going through similar things. I knew that if I genuinely made it out of the dark hole and learned how to absorb the sunshine, I could carry tons of other people who were stuck in that hole with me to the light too. Even if it was just imagining the potential of one person practicing some of the tools I learned and eventually not killing themselves, that would be enough for me to shut up the demon of suicide and feel the sunshine. Since most people don’t desire to go down the road of being a healer, what other mission can suicidal people think of to pull themselves out of the cave? In short, anything that you feel goes outside of you, opens your heart, and gets you excited, as that sequence can pull almost anyone out of a rut. My formula to find this magical thing boils down to remembering what you loved doing most as a kid and combining it with the key trauma you have dealt with in your life. So, if you loved doing Karate as a kid and bullying was the thing that fucked you up the most, then this mission could be teaching karate to kids who want to overcome being bullied. This doesn’t have to be a full-time job or anything, but just dedicate enough time to it where you feel like it’s somewhat pulling you out of your negative headspace. The reason why this strategy works so well is that you go from feeling like all the ailments of the world are being pointed at you alone to alchemizing all that pain into something beautiful and sending it towards the world. Put differently, you move from victimized isolation to liberated, communal healing.
Once you begin moving out of this hopeless, isolated space by alchemizing the repressive, inward energy and turning it into outward love, you will finally be in a space where you can accept the love that others have for you and truly feel it, hopefully making you feel worthy and not worthless anymore.
EGO DEATH
While the main causes of suicide in my eyes are shame and lost hope, another sneaky one exists that’s pretty powerful, which no one seems to be talking about: ego death. And I don’t mean the ego death you feel on psychedelics, where you just want to hug a tree all day. I more so mean the one that comes with growing up or losing a certain juvenile side of yourself. Let’s say you finally realize that constantly thinking about what other people think about you, trying to impress them all the time, and putting on a persona to do so, no longer serves you as it is causing too much pain. Amidst this disidentification from the ego’s need for validation, you can feel incredibly lost and confused, as it’s hard to envision a different way of living in this fake world. Within this depression, confusion, and grief that comes with losing an old side of you, the ego will try its best to reclaim its power. The ego needs the drama of feeling insecure, fearful, and being resistant towards change to feed itself and stay alive. So, for its survival, it will do whatever it takes to bring you back under its control. And the more we keep pushing away from it, the more desperate its cries will get. These cries can often come in the form of suicidal ideation, as it’s the one thought that makes you throw out all progress and bathe in the fear of the ego. Think of it as the ego’s nuclear bomb, where it knows it will win the war no matter the cost.
After I healed myself from the shame and lost hope, I was on a beautiful streak of finally feeling like I was enjoying life. However, awareness of my shadow started to threaten this beauty and asked me to start working through my demons that were previously unconscious. Once I started alchemizing these shadows into light and began to feel cocky about my abilities to heal myself, out of nowhere, suicidal ideations started flying at me like machine gun bullets. I was utterly confused and deeply fearful, as I thought I got over this part of my life and felt the same fear as before revisit me, but thankfully, I realized it was the ego attempting to drop its nuclear bomb. Also, it didn’t have much to do with who I really was right now, but the person I once was a long time ago fighting their hardest to hold on to power over my mind. So, understanding the tools I used earlier, I honestly spoke to my loved ones about what was going on and thought about how the lessons in this experience could help others, dropping the shame and giving myself over to my mission in the process. This suicidal ideation and ego death link happened many more times since, but each time I got much faster at bringing myself back to homeostasis through using these tools: dropping any ounce of shame, alchemizing the suffering into knowledge and healing, and understanding the truth about how the ego was waging a real war against me.
In your first few fights with the nuclear bombs of the ego, you are most likely going to have to stick your chin up and fight hard. Similar to how the heroes in myths have to battle the dragon in their first encounters, you are going to have to battle the one in your mind once you see it for the first few times. However, after enough time and wins under your belt, once the dragon starts rearing its ugly head back at you, you can laugh and kiss its cheek, as you no longer have the fear of it that you once did. This situation is exemplified perfectly in the X-Men movies. Whenever Professor Xavier and Magneto meet again for the first time in a while, they always smile and say, “hello, old friend.” Xavier and Magneto are the hero and villain in the story. They have fought enough times, to the extent that they can have respect for each other as friends and share a laugh when they can. In terms of how this pertains to you, once you know you can beat the cries of the ego and respect the power it holds as well, you can start to feel like it's your friend. So, next time the ego cries for help, as a friend, reassure it that you know what’s best for yourself and that you are sorry it will have to suffer for a bit.
If you do not believe in the metaphysical, then please skip the next section of the article, as it will go into the energetic causes of suicidal ideation. Everything that has been written up to this point is more than enough to get you going on the right path, so don’t worry if you feel like you are missing out.
SPIRITUAL EVACUATION
If you chose to read on to this section, and you are one of my spiritual friends, then you probably feel in your heart that another energetic space exists outside of this dimension that our souls all came from. In this dimension, where we also return to after death, we experience the feeling of oneness with our loving creator, in the sense that there is no separation between anyone and only connection based on the fact that we all come from the same divine source. We enter the dimension of earth with all its division to learn something new and bring it back for the good of all—mostly the reality of how much division can hurt a human being and their soul. However, learning this ugly truth is a result of immense pain that the soul’s carrier—the egoistic “I”—has had to sit with and feel for extended periods of time, all while the soul has known the truth behind the scenes. Sometimes, when the pain is too much to bear, and the soul’s carrier has no spiritual outlet to soothe and heal themselves, the spirit can feel the need to eject and go back home to God/the divine/source energy, as it has learned what it needs to know and it can no longer bear the pain anymore. To avoid this spiritual ejection, which manifests as suicidal ideation, one must spend more time in reality connecting to their spirit and hearing what it needs from them to feel more comfortable.
In order to hear the whispers of the spirit, one has to start putting themselves in energetic environments where it can feel free, rather than constantly restricted and in pain. Since the spirit feeds off of a vibration of love and presence, where it can step outside of the needs of the ego and recharge itself, one should place themselves in a situation that makes them feel loved and present. This positioning can best occur in deep meditations, moments of well-meaning play, connecting with nature, and doing something that puts you in flow state. Once you start giving your soul these moments to break free and gain energy, you will start to feel connected to it and hear what it needs from you. These needs can range from a certain new job you should take all the way to letting go of a certain person that is not serving you in your life anymore. The more we spend time living from this centered place of the spirit and listening to its needs, rather than only listening to the needs of the ego, the more we give ourselves a chance at perpetually fighting off the demon of suicide, as our soul will have our backs, rather than wanting to leave us and go back home.
¹ “Suicide in the United States.” Wikipedia (2022).
