Wanting to Die: Recovering from Suicidality
When Suicide Feels Like The Only Option
“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
I don’t often talk about the time I tried to commit suicide.
I was in intensive care for three days with kidney failure before I started to recover. Most of that time I was unconscious.
But when I did wake up, I was met by silence. Silence from those around me and silence especially from my then partner at the time. Nobody spoke to me about my overdose. The silence was as impenetrable as a wall.
The depth of people’s silence was so heavy it draped over me like a thick cloistering velvet curtain, making it difficult to breathe, and even harder to move.
What people don’t understand about my suicide attempt is that it wasn’t a way out of unbearable hopelessness but rather my attempt to escape an emotional pain that was so acute it felt like being burned alive.
Can you imagine condemning a person who jumps from a burning high rise, who are faced with certain death from the flames, or death from falling from a great height? Both are terrible options, but the person has to choose between them. No-one would condemn the person who jumps even though it means certain death.
Why could people not understand I was trying to escape the flames?
If the emotional pain could have been removed I would not have wanted to die. It was the level of emotional pain I was feeling that I felt I could not cope with.
Why Did You Do It?
When I woke up after three days in intensive care, I was told I was being shifted to a standard medical ward.
I asked if I would be able to have a shower, and a nurse pointed to where the bathroom was. The instant I sat up, everything was swimming before my eyes. I felt like I was going to faint. I said this to the nurse at the desk, and she told me to sit for a while, and then I would be okay. She and two other nurses were sitting at the counter.
I wondered why none of them was coming to help me.
I stood up and started to wobble, then sat down on the floor. I tried again, and the same thing happened.
I felt like crying.
They all were watching me when I looked up.
I told them I was unable to walk without falling and asked if someone could come and stand with me while I walked, as I was scared. The same nurse told me not to be silly and held back one of the younger nurses who had stood up to come to me. She told me again not to be stupid and to walk to the shower. She said I had wasted all their time and resources by trying to take my life when there were sick people who needed looking after.
I hadn’t expected a verbal attack.
I wasn’t after sympathy. I was only worried about walking to the shower unassisted and falling.
I hadn’t given any thought about what had occurred before the overdose as I had been awake and conscious for only an hour or so that morning. I felt my eyes fill with unbidden tears.
I stood and started to walk toward the shower. My legs gave way from under me, shaking uncontrollably, and everything started swimming and going black before my eyes. I lowered myself toward the ground as I fell and heard the older nurse tell one of the others to go and get a chair.
A younger nurse came and helped me sit in a shower chair, and wheeled me into the shower room.
I was very aware of patients in other beds on the ward with curtains pulled around them, who had family members sitting next to them.
I felt like I wanted the floor to open up and me disappear underneath.
I once again felt rejected, unaccepted, unwanted, a burden, an embarrassment, ashamed, and the full force of my emotional pain hit me once again.
I took off my gown and sat there while the young nurse stood about six feet away from me, holding a shower rose and extension and hosing me down. The water was lukewarm, and I was shivering uncontrollably, mostly with emotion. I was trying to hold back my tears, so I didn’t start sobbing in front of her.
She caught my eye and, to break the silence, said, “Why did you do it?”
In the silence of the few seconds that followed, the full weight of what I wanted to tell her hung over me.
How did I encapsulate all that had occurred over a lifetime and how I felt about it in one or two sentences to give her an answer?
I couldn’t.
I had been diagnosed with severe depression, anxiety, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder after I had left the religion of my childhood and was shunned by everyone I knew. Shunning meant being treated as if I had died and was no longer visible.
I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from a re-emergence of symptoms after having suffered ongoing sexual abuse as a child.
I was struggling to cope on my own in a world I had no experience of living in after having been sheltered for 35 years within a tight-knit religious community bounded by strict rules and guidelines.
My entire identity was stripped away, and I was in the process of attempting to rebuild who I was in therapy, but with the resurgence of emotions after so many years of being ‘shut down’ numb and not feeling, I was not coping with the level of pain I was experiencing. The shame I felt for the feelings of inadequacy in not coping in the world was beyond description.
I was overwhelmed. I could not see a way forward. I had reached a tipping point.
Overdosing
After a night where I had drunk more than I usually would, I ended up crying myself to sleep.
I woke up about six in the morning.
The children were with their dad that weekend. I stood alone in the kitchen, in the quiet and with the early morning light filtering through the blind. I reached into the cupboard to get a glass out for some water so I could take some painkillers for my headache. My other medication was next to the painkillers.
In a snap decision, without giving myself any time to think about it, I opened the bottles and swallowed all my antidepressants, valium and painkillers. There must have been about ninety pills.
All I wanted was to go to sleep and not wake up.
I went and lay down on the couch in the lounge. My new partner got up to use the toilet about seven-thirty and went looking for me. He found me passed out in the lounge, surrounded by vomit on the floor in front of me. He could not rouse me. He rang for an ambulance and then rang his stepsister. She came and sat with him, and they followed the ambulance to the hospital.
Unbeknownst to me, I had not passed urine for the three days I was in intensive care before I woke up. The doctors and nurses thought my kidneys had failed because of the overdose. However, after the catheter had been removed, I was, fortunately, able to urinate without an issue.
I told my partner I would not blame him if he wanted to separate. It might have been for the best as I still had a lot to sort out emotionally and he also had issues of his own. He said no; he had thought about it fleetingly but then decided he wanted to stay with me. We would sort it out together. I felt comforted, loved, and grateful.
A Conversation With My Estranged Mother
While I was still in the hospital, a nurse came to me and said I had a phone call. There was no phone in my room, so I walked down to the nurse’s station to take the call.
To my shock, it was my mother.
We had not spoken in the 12 months since I had left Jehovah’s Witnesses religion. I had been brought up in this religion from the age of 4 years old and I was now in my early 30s.
She said, “T…….. told your Dad and I you are in the hospital, and you have been in intensive care. Are you all right now?”
I said, “Yes.”
She then rushed out a whole lot of words all at once, stating, “I am allowed to talk to you and help you, as we wouldn’t leave someone sick and in need, even though they are disfellowshipped if they need help. That is my Christian obligation. I want to come and help you. I can clean the house and look after the kids, and help cook meals for you at home until you are better. I know T…. probably still has to go to work. Would you like me to do this for you?”
I had so many emotions going through me as I stood in my hospital gown, with the phone against my ear, listening to my mother’s voice. I was trying to process all she was saying, but along with happiness at hearing from her, anxiety was snaking its way through my body.
“What about when I get better? Will you continue to talk to me then?” I asked.
“No, I can’t. I am only allowed to help you when you are sick and in need. I want to help you. I miss you so much. I love you. Do you not understand how much pain you have caused me with what you have done, leaving Jehovah and forcing me to cut you off? Please let me help you.” She sounded breathless and full of hope, but I could feel the tension rising, connecting us through the telephone line.
My legs were starting to shake with emotion and weakness as I stood there with the phone against my ear. I felt the familiar heaviness solidify in my chest like a lump of concrete, and unshed tears felt like rocks in my throat.
“I would love to see you and have your help, Mum. I miss you so much. But why would I want to get better if you are going to cut me off once I no longer need you physically?”
Her voice traveled down the phone to me, and the difference between us suddenly seemed unmanageable. “Don’t be stubborn, Deborah. I am offering to help you.”
I felt my eyes fill with hot, salty tears.
Here was my mother talking to me after all this time. She was offering to come and look after me.
The child inside of me was full of longing for a Mum who would nurture and care for me at this moment in time.
However, I could also hear the recrimination in her voice and felt like a little girl being told off for putting her in this situation.
I snapped.
“I nearly died because of you.
My kidneys stopped working because I tried to kill myself.
Your cutting me off doesn’t make me want to come back to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It makes me hate you for loving them more than you love me.
Why would I want you back in my life, all loving and caring, only to then have you cut me off again as soon as I am better? Why would I get better?
Why not stay mentally sick so I can have you forever in my life? What sense does this make?
I have to get better, for my sake and the kids. But I can’t do it if you are playing games with me.
Talking to me when you permit yourself. Cutting me off again when you feel you no longer can justify contact. That screws my head up. It completely fucks me up.
I will see you only if you will not cut me off again.
So what is it going to be?”
I had been shouting down the phone, and the nurse sitting at the station in front of me had stood up and come over to stand next to me. She had her hand on my back.
My voice was shaking with emotion, my legs were shaking, and I felt sick in my stomach.
My mother sounded like she was a million miles away. All I could hear was condemnation.
“Well, you chose this. You chose this way.
You knew I would have to cut you off if you left the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I am in pain too.
You don’t know how many tears I have shed over your decision and the pain it has caused me. You are responsible for your actions….”
She kept on talking, but her voice had muted into a drone, a record player of religious rhetoric I had heard repeated from the platform over many years.
As she continued to talk, I handed the phone to the nurse. I could no longer hold back the tears. I walked back to my bed and pulled the curtain.
I cried for the Mum I wanted and needed her to be.
I cried for the unconditional love I wanted and needed. I cried for the pain she was experiencing. I cried for my aloneness. I cried because I wondered why I wasn’t lovable enough for her to put me before Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I cried because the feelings of aloneness, shame, and isolation as a result of my suicide attempt had increased rather than diminished.
I was engulfed within emotion at the moment.
I folded. I cried and cried until I fell into an exhausted sleep.
A few months after this, my partner and I separated. He was an alcoholic and was refusing to take steps to address his drinking issues. I had begged and implored him to get help.
I decided it was too hard for me to emotionally recover while living with someone who was presenting two different faces to the world and at home, and who was not prepared to give up the alcohol.
Rebuilding My Life
The all-engulfing enormity of disconnection, aloneness, and abandonment that swallowed me whole after my disassociation from Jehovah’s Witnesses is hard to describe.
After being actively involved with my family, my extended family, and my Jehovah’s Witness family, with whom I had deep bonds, there was just nothingness in the space left once I had gone.
Because I had not formed any social relationships outside of the Jehovah’s Witnesses the whole time I was with them, I had nothing to fall back on when they were no longer there.
When you belong to a group where the ideology says you are a ‘special’ people, the only group accepted by God doing his divine will on earth, and that all the rest of the world, backed by Satan and his demons, are opposed to you- intense mental, emotional, and spiritual bonds are formed with each other.
You feel tossed to the wolves when you are not with each other, and you think that you can rely on and trust only one another.
The feeling is that no one else in the outside world can be trusted — only fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Although I had ceased attending most of the five meetings a week months before my disassociation, I still had weekly Bible studies with my friends, while I tried to reconcile my doubts. I saw my mother frequently, and I had friends within the congregation whom I saw weekly. Although I had not shared all my doubts with my JW friends, we still met and had coffee or lunch, and I felt close to them. Some of them had children the same age as mine, and they would come over each week and bring their children to swim in our pool along with both my sisters-in-law and their children. We would have meals together also.
All this stopped after the announcement that I was ‘disassociated.’
The experience of it was of an aching, huge chasm within my whole being of total aloneness. I would go shopping for food, or drop the children at school, and be surrounded by people but realize not one of them knew me, or me them.
I was alone and disconnected within and also isolated emotionally from other people.
Therapy
Suddenly the relationship I had started to build with my therapist assumed another level of meaning and intensity.
The first doctor I had begun to see had returned to her home country unexpectedly with her husband, and she referred me to a psychiatrist with whom I could continue therapy.
I commenced seeing her weekly.
In a short period, I felt she was the only person who knew me, and I started to lean on her more heavily.
Combined with the engulfing aloneness were questions such as:
“What if the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right?
What if I am going to die now that I have left them?
What if God won’t even listen to my prayers now that I have left?
Does God really totally abandon me as the Jehovah’s Witnesses have taught me all my life?
Is there even a God?
If there is not, how do I find my place in this world?”
The anxiety created by these thoughts was crippling.
I would physically feel pain and be incapacitated.
I would curl up in bed, feeling like I was dying and unable to function. I would go on automatic pilot to get the kids off to school, and then I would be unable to move or perform for the rest of the day. I was diagnosed with major clinical depression and anxiety, and my medication dose increased.
I cannot adequately describe the physical pain of being cut off by everyone. The disassociation and my asking my husband to leave were within weeks of each other. Even though our marriage had been on the rocks, we maintained a sexual relationship up until the end. No longer having the sexual contact, and having no connection physically with friends, hugging or nurturing each other emotionally, started to build into an aching chasm.
I ached to be held.
I physically felt ill with longing for both sexual and non-sexual touch.
Whenever I had enough money, I would see a massage therapist. Sometimes this meant I had NO money for food for that week and had to get food vouchers from the neighborhood support center to feed my children. I felt guilty for doing this, but it was survival.
Sometimes it was the difference between not enacting a suicidal action and committing one.
When the children went to their father’s or my parents’ for a weekend, I would sometimes end up in the emergency room of the local hospital — rocking and folded up within me, just waiting to talk to the mental health nurse and for someone to hear my emotional pain.
If this were not able to occur, I would ring Lifeline or another helpline. When the suicidal urges and feelings were so strong, ringing a suicide hotline was a survival technique. I careered through each day and week.
During this time I commenced my enrolled nursing diploma. I saw my therapist weekly, and I had the support of a mental health nurse at the local hospital if I needed help in the days between seeing my therapist.
Breaking Out of Numbness
When I had first started to see a therapist it was about my lifelong inability to feel and how all my feelings seemed only skin deep, or only were experienced as a heaviness in my chest. I had always felt like I was acting a part.
She had assured me that talking about the past and exploring it would be the way to break open the lid I had placed over being able to feel.
That had indeed started to occur after a few months of talking in therapy, to the point where I thought I had no control at times over my feelings, the strength of them, or being able to contain them.
The intense feelings were frightening to me although it indicated progress to the doctors. Having to deal with the emotions brought its own set of challenges and problems.
Four or five times, I ended up as a voluntary inpatient within the local public mental-health system, staying between one and three nights in the hospital. Each of these times I didn’t see a doctor, but I curled up within a bed and just sobbed. Other patients were invaluable as a support, and I found myself also supporting other broken souls.
Hospitalizations
On the whole, my experience within the public mental health system was that the hospital was a holding cell, a containment area, so suicidal actions could not be carried out.
It was a place to stop you from dying.
It was not a place to heal.
No talk therapy or healing occurred whilst I was in the hospital.
It was a place that could prevent you from acting out suicidally, when you felt you needed the extra support, by virtue of the four walls surrounding you and not having to think about meals or responsibilities or the like.
For a short while, I attended a consumer support group connected to the hospital and met some supportive people within that, but still, I didn’t feel that I really could connect or relate closely to most of them.
My crisis was mainly spiritual, one of faith and abandonment created by being disassociated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses along with an emotional turmoil of dealing emotionally in the present with past sexual-abuse trauma I had not been able to deal with previously. Also, the ending of my marriage, the alcoholism of my new partner and the health crises of my oldest son were impacting me, along with severe clinical depression.
Sometimes within my therapy, I would spend the whole hour talking and filled with a desire to reach out and touch the therapist’s hand.
I would fill up with tension and conflict knowing it was a non-contact relationship, with my outside self trying to contain me from reaching out in real life to touch her hand.
Sometimes I did. She never shook me off, but she didn’t respond either.
Psychotic Depression
I remember on one occasion I had become so distressed and upset, as I was driving myself into the hospital, the lampposts along the road were changing into people before my eyes. It was the weirdest sensation and experience. My depression at times was labeled psychotic depression because of these experiences, and I was then given antipsychotic medication as well.
Another time I was sitting within a cubicle in the hospital emergency area. A nurse had interviewed me and had gone out to get a doctor. I suddenly heard my therapist’s voice outside the cubicle, seeming to come from the direction of the roof.
I thought she must have been in another room, and her voice was carrying and coming through the roof air vents. Unfortunately for me, she was exasperated and talking disparagingly about me.
I started to sob, and I felt desperate to see her and try to explain myself so she wouldn’t think badly of me.
When the nurse returned with the doctor, he was quite concerned about my obvious distress. I was asking him to please speak to my therapist and gave him her name. He told me she was not on duty that day. I did not believe him and told him I had heard her talking about me to someone. I presumed it was him and said to him that I needed to talk to her.
He kindly and gently explained that she was not available, and I took that to mean it was not possible to see her. I spent some time talking to the psychiatric registrar who was on duty. After talking to him, I settled down enough that the doctor allowed me to go home and did not admit me.
At my next therapy appointment, I brought up what had happened at the hospital. The therapist insisted to me that she had not been there that weekend. I found this very difficult to believe as I had heard her voice, her accent, and she had been talking about me to someone else.
It was tough to hear and to understand that my brain, because of emotional stress, had been making up these things. It made an already difficult and harrowing experience even harder and more difficult to bear.
Not being able to trust your brain, and feeling like you don’t know what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not real’ in what you are observing by sight or hearing, is indescribably frightening.
I stayed on the antipsychotic medication for just over a year and then gradually, under medical supervision, weaned myself off it. I stayed on the antidepressants for more than eight years. Twice during that time, I tried to come off them, but my symptoms of depression increased so much I had to go back on them again.
My main symptom was tiredness and wishing to sleep all the time. I often wanted to lie in bed and shut out everyone and everything. The desire to do this was overwhelming.
Anytime I did not have the children, or they were occupied, I would climb into bed and hide under the covers. It took all my energy to go to TAFE, where I was studying nursing, doing placements, and doing assignments; at home, I was driving the children to sports, school, and extracurricular activities.
The times in between, my energy would completely disappear, and I would cry or sleep for hours.
“Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories
Toilet ‘Purging’ Dreams
From the commencement of my therapy, I experienced dreams that would repeat over and over with slight variations each time.
I still occasionally experienced the dream I’d had since I was a child of being chased by a lion, but I now encountered multitudes of dreams mainly involving defecation and toilets.
In my dreams, I would be talking with people while I was sitting on a toilet. Or I would be going to use a restroom in an outdoor setting and would be sitting there while the dream happened around me. Sometimes the bathrooms were disgusting and foul, and other times they were in beautiful settings. Toward the end of my therapy, these toilet dreams stopped and had not returned since.
All I can surmise is the symbolic process of my purging by discussing and remembering the past expressed itself in my dreams in the settings it did. The experience of feeling contaminated, tainted, dirty, and full of shit, as well as the fear of appearing disgusting to others, and the process of discarding detrimental opinions and beliefs about myself, all came out in my dreams.
My Childhood Fantasy World
Throughout all these experiences, I had the ongoing connection with a fantasy world and family that I had created in childhood to sustain me. I would say the main achievement of my attending psychodynamic therapy besides learning to feel again and then to moderate my emotions; was learning to form emotional bonds and connections with real people in the real world that eventually replaced m intense connection to my fantasy world.
The disappearance of this internal world was not a conscious happening. I did not know it was going to occur, and the realization when it finally happened — that my fantasy world had disappeared, and I couldn’t conjure it up in the same way anymore — was a huge loss and a distressing time for me. However, at the same time, I realized I must no longer have needed it, and it had gone for that reason.
I also was gradually building and forming meaningful and emotionally safe interactions with other people.
The formation of these friendships and the experience of showing and feeling emotion when dealing with other people meant I started to interact less and less within my fantasy world. Gradually the experience of living within me in my fantasy world subsided to the point where it ceased. For a while afterward, I underwent a period of grieving and loss for this world.
Ongoing Recovery From Suicidality, Depression, and Complex-PTSD
This process took place from when I first started to see a therapist until I stopped seeing one over an eight-year period and involved two therapists.
I focused on reading real-life stories of people who had overcome or learned to live with traumatic events in their past because of physical conditions or other traumas, and I drew strength from these stories.
I looked up online support groups for ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. At times I found them very supportive, but after a time I noticed they sometimes had the opposite effect, and I would feel more depressed. I tried to take what I found to be positive from all these different avenues.
I realized and came to believe I could choose what thoughts I focused on and what I allowed myself to dwell on. I could stop my thoughts, and I could redirect them. Affirmations, mindfulness, meditation, positive thinking, and visualizations all became daily practices for me.
I read a book written by Carolyn Myss entitled Why Some People Heal and Others Do Not. It was very much a turning point for me. The book was about not remaining a victim and not forever identifying yourself by what had occurred to you in the past but using the past to draw strength from and to move forward. The book resonated with me.
I was given support at many different times by strangers and telephone counselors and many different doctors and nurses.
Learning that emotional pain usually occurs in ‘chemical waves’ each lasting and peaking for about 60–90 seconds helped me understand and cope when I felt emotionally overloaded.
I mentally pictured coping with labor pains in childbirth and reminded myself I only had to get through one pain wave at a time.
The emtional pain was trying to pass through my body so it could move out and no longer require energy to suppress it.
Releasing the pain was a good thing in that I could then have energy available for learning to live again.
In more recent years I discovered the trauma recovery work of Dr. Peter Levine and the benefits of body somatic therapy in releasing and recovering from trauma.
Learning to tune into my body and listen to my body has increased my confidence in myself and my body’s own ability to heal itself. Connecting with my inner wisdom which I had not previously realized had been there — is a significant force in my recovery.
Connecting and melding with nature and being grateful for all the beauty and wonder in nature and life has been a mindset that has helped me in recent years.
Really training and focusing my mind to look, see and be grateful for the small things and connections happening multiple times a day, enables me to maintain good mental health.
Writing and self-publishing my memoir in 2014 was the start of cracking open my past and my heart and allowing others to truly see me. By allowing others in, it has helped me form deeper connections outside of myself.
Writing on Medium in the last couple of months has also given me a voice and platform for speaking about things that are important to me. In the process of communicating my own stories, I have also been able to read things that others have written that have impacted my heart and life in a meaningful way.
Recovering from suicidality has been a journey.
It did not happen overnight.
It has been a process involving a lot of hard inner work and I have been fortunate to be able to also find therapists to assist and support me, by holding space for me whilst I heal myself.
But suicide is never an easy way out. It is often come to as a last resort when emotional pain overwhelms.
Learning to handle and process my emotional pain took me a long time and I had to learn the tools and skills to be able to do this.
Freeing up emotional pain and especially in the last year being able to work with my body to listen, understand and release trauma has meant that I have loads more energy and space to focus creatively on things I am passionate about. No longer are my days spent either suppressing or expressing tsunamis of pain.
I am so grateful for the help and support I have found through people, therapists, online, books and in so many myriads of ways — that all have been stepping stones and instrumental in helping me recover from symptoms of mental illness and suicidality.
I still get bad days. I still sometimes grieve and cry over things that arise from past experiences. But I know now that they WILL pass.
The difference today, from when I attempted suicide is that today — I know I am worthy. I am loveable.
I am allowed to be me. I have a voice. I am allowed to take up space. To be seen.
I no longer need to hide.
It has taken a long time but I am finally in a good place.
It is time now that I start to give back, focus on my strengths, and move forward.
