Choose to Stay…

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Suicide and an Argument To Our Future Self  

Excerpts from the podcast “Stay”, with Krista Tippett

There is a philosophical thread extending over twenty-five hundred years that urges us to use our courage to stay alive”, writes poet, philosopher and historian, Jennifer Michael Hecht.

She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. She’s now proposing a new cultural reckoning with suicide, based not on morality or on rights, but on our essential need for each other. She writes:  “We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.” What Dr. Hecht wants to have is not so much against suicide, but for staying alive for each other. It’s choosing life, choosing living.

Statistics have made it clear that suicides can cause more suicides. It is also clear that talking to people about rejecting suicide can help them reject suicide.

There seems to be an aura of, or at least a possibility of nobility in suicide, even a kind of romance with darkness. There’s a noble lineage also, if nothing else: Sylvia Plath, it’s Virginia Woolf, it’s Ernest Hemingway, it’s Goethe’s, and it’s Marilyn Monroe, David Foster Wallace…

And yet it is not romantic or noble. Sylvia Plath’s son killed himself 40 years after his mother died in the next room. A great many people who kill themselves speak about their being a burden on other people. People sometimes consider suicide because they’ve been depressed a while, or because they’ve just had a humiliating blow and they think very poorly of themselves at the moment. Other’s want to die after a break up of a relationship or trouble at work. They cannot see that things can change. Then when you look at yourself, and you realize that you have fallen in and out of love with the same person, you have fought with friends, thinking you’ll never speak to them again, and then you love them again. “In a simple sentence, your suicide will be a much greater burden, exponentially greater,” says Ms. Hecht.

Anthony Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton, writes about, “How moral change happens in a society”. For example, the Atlantic slave trade, dueling, and foot-binding changed in a single generation. He concludes that change can happen when the idea of how to be a good person changes. It’s a matter of honor and shame, and it’s cultural.

Dr. Hecht proposes that we need to start a similar kind of deliberation about suicide. We need to make suicide-resistance part of our culture. It should not be imagined as noble or romantic, or a solution for suffering. We must attach a sense of honor to perseverance.

We need to actively reject suicide, and get this into our collective minds by reading it, speaking it, and hearing it.

We can start by noticing that maybe this isn’t appropriate. “Sometimes people argue with me that suicide is a right. (And if your physician and the people in your family think that it might be time for you to go, that seems to me a different conversation). But is it right for a teenager to do this? No. Is it right for a parent of a young child to do it? No. So, who is this guy whose people are perfectly fine with his decision and he’s of sound mind, and he decides he wants this? It’s a very rare person. And if we’re going to say that this is a right over and over to people, what are we giving them the right to? It’s not the right to free speech or the right to freedom — this is a right to die when they’re not in trouble.”

Next, think about educating the public. What we do in terms of trying to avoid heart disease, and cancer, and car accidents, and then think about what the average person who’s not in suicidal trouble at the moment does to prepare against the possibility of getting depressed and thinking this way. And for our children and for our friends, this is an unbelievably high-level killer. In the last 10 years, suicide is killing more college students than alcohol, and suicide is killing more people than car accidents.

We need to know we are part of this world, of our community. And there’s no such thing as wasted contributions. We need to be more aware that we all have these web-like connections to each other, and that sometimes when you can’t see what’s important about you, other people can. None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience.

Suicide has captured the attention of most of the finest thinkers in Western civilization. The story of suicide runs through Socrates and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Judas and even Jesus. Although a few secular thinkers have argued that we all have a right to suicide, (a form of moral freedom, a sort of pillar of our autonomy), a closer look reveals suicide was profoundly rejected by seculars such as Plato, by Aristotle, by Kant, by Schopenhauer, by Wittgenstein, and, by Camus as well.

“When you actually go back and read The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus definitely starts with ‘there’s only one philosophical question and that’s suicide’. But that invitation is very misleading, because he goes through the whole book arguing against suicide.” He said:

“Life is worth living, this absurd strange thing should be witnessed and it’s vital that you have some respect for your future self, who is going to know things you don’t know.”

History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings—the endless possibilities that living offers—and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the dark side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence to choose to stay. After that, anything may happen.

First, choose to stay.

Stay connected, talk to someone.

If you are contemplating suicide, or if you’re worried about someone who may be, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Help is available 24/7.

Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

The Inner Child Who Won’t Be Ignored

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There is a cause and effect relationship between what happened to the child that we were and the adult we became.  

Our relationship with others reflects how we see and treat ourselves. Eastern philosophy teaches that the world is as you believe it, and in the West, psychotherapists say our view of the world is revealed in the phenomenon of projection. To an unconscious mind, if we see it- we are it.

When we get into a new intimate relationship, all those earlier years of emotional conditioning come to the surface. These unconscious responses, developed when we were merely innocent children, are the result of our experiences with our “First Loves” – our mothers, fathers, or any other caregivers who were close to us. If, for example, your caregivers were affectionate, you are probably comfortable with affection as an adult.

If all your needs were adequately met as a child, the adult-you has a healthy, robust, curious, and spontaneous response to life. We call this a healthy Inner Child, and everyone deserves one.

If all of those needs were met properly, you won’t be interested in this article.

But if you had unmet needs, or were abused or neglected by one of those “First Loves” in a significant or recurring way, it left a wound. You may never notice this hurt but it is certainly there. It determines your actions and shapes your life. Or you may not think those things bother you anymore because, after all, you had to survive. But all you probably accomplished was to learn to mask those wounds, kind of like a Band-Aid, to get on with the task of growing up.

Without any conscious awareness, you created a core issue, and the underlying motivation of your life would be to avoid this hurt by building a good defense strategy. You tried to be perfect, or maybe you tried not needing anything. Whatever the defense, it’s not the real you.

screaming-kid

You can try to ignore this wounded part of yourself and most of us do try. After all, we are grown up, shouldn’t we act grown up? Who would want a sniveling little whiny brat hanging around the office, or in our grown up relationships?

But try as we might, the kid shows up anyway. It’s usually seen as an overreaction, or you may feel it as a freeze-moment: everything turns fuzzy and muddled and you can’t think straight. The next time this happens, ask yourself how old you feel. You’ll see. It’s the kid.

 The good news is we can heal this wounded part of ourselves by building a new relationship with our own Inner Child. If the messages we got as little kids were negative, then there was a misunderstanding. With supportive compassion, we can correct those mistakes.

How this happened is simple. Children feel responsible for the things that happen to them. Our caregivers were our God/Goddess. Since the all-powerful can’t make a mistake, we concluded that, when something was wrong, “it must be me”. This feeling of fault marked our earliest relationship with our selves. At the core of our being is the Inner Child who believes that he or she is unworthy, unlovable, defective, or not good enough. 

Take Betty for an example. She plays the ex-wife of Don Draper in “Mad Men”. In the latest episode, her partner couldn’t understand why she seemed to get so upset suddenly and for no apparent reason.

Of course Betty didn’t see it that way. She thought it was reasonable to be angry with her son, Bobby, because he “wrecked a perfectly wonderful day”.

Was it really so Angry Bettyhorrible that Bobby thought the lunch with two sandwiches was for him? Anyone watching the scene would know it was an innocent misunderstanding. He had no intention to cause harm. But for Betty, Bobby’s decision to share the lunch with another girl was a malicious affront! In a single instant she went from a Functional Adult to a sulking, fuming, and shaming Child. And like a little girl believing her own sad fantasy (“I’m not good enough”) she later says, to her partner “Why don’t they love me?”

I’d venture to guess that as a child, Betty’s parents believed “children are to be seen but not heard”. She probably learned that her needs were of no significance and were a nuisance. As Betty grew up, still believing this of herself, she learned not to trust the other loves in her life. I think Betty’s defense-strategy was to pretend not to care. And so, without awareness, she punishes her children when these wounds from her Inner Child arise. And she is passing on the wounds.

Like the character Betty, when we are automatically  triggered,  “out of the blue“, we  re-enact the traumas  laid down in childhood.

Here’s the kicker: We cannot be present in an authentic, genuine way in our adult love relationships if we are not aware of our childhood wounds.

Remember, little kids have a very limited amount of experiences to draw conclusions from. When we were 3 or 4 we couldn’t look around us and say, “Well, Mom’s certainly having a bad day. Since I just woke up, it can’t have anything to do with me!” We just felt awful, and we mistakenly concluded, “It must be my fault. I must have done something wrong.” If there are a significant number of these early misconceptions, we become wounded. We grow up wired to believe we are unworthy of love.

Repair can happen when we start to understand on an emotional level, on a gut level, that “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong, you were just a little kid.”

But how can we tell if it’s an Inner Child issue? The 1st step is to become aware. One way is to notice if we feel an emotion that is out of proportion with what’s going on around us, or when we get feedback that we are “overreacting“.

Next, we need to learn to become the Loving Parent to ourselves, who can hear the child’s voice within us and validate its pain and anger.

We can do this by focusing on a current hurtful situation while asking ourselves, “What could have happened in my childhood that would draw me to the same conclusion?” You might find a memory or it may just be a feeling.

Another method is done by journaling non-dominant-hand dialogues (asking your Inner Child what he or she needs). This may require asking for help. We all need some help at times to see ourselves more clearly. Look for a psychotherapist who is comfortable with Lucia Capacchione’s method, illustrated in her book, RECOVERY OF YOUR INNER CHILD – How to talk to your Inner Child and find what it needs. 

Once you have rescued the wounded Inner Child, there are other approaches to keeping yourself in tune with your authentic self that aren’t quite as intense. I write about them as well in other articles. Stay tuned!

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“Carry the spirit of the Child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.” ~Aldous Huxley