How often to do you experience suicidal feelings? And how do you cope with them? Talk about anything regarding suicidal feelings.
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
i experience them pretty often. there are some parts who feel them intensely, and other parts who don’t. what’s weird in the past year or so has been discovering that one of the adults–one of the ones who seemed to have everything together, and whose job was to make everything look ok–got suicidal because she couldn’t cope with having failed (in her eyes–if her job was to make it seem like everything was ok, and nothing all that bad had happened in my life, i guess she did fail… but i don’t necessarily think that was a failure).
so we’ve kind of been trying to keep her from being out long enough to start feeling that despair. it sucks for me (ellis) because she’s the other one who copes with the basic responsibilities of life, but i’m at least able to do it without starting to get suicidal, so i (15 year old me) am stuck coping with most of the responsibilities because when cleo comes out, if she starts looking at our life, she gets suicidal. i don’t know if she’d act on the feelings, but it just adds to the other parts who are suicidal and more likely to act on it.
the other parts… they didn’t get suicidal until after i left home. it was more than a year after i’d left home, and i’d started having flashbacks and nightmares. and i can remember them thinking “leaving home was supposed to make everything better, and here i am, feeling all those horrible things i used to feel.” so it started with going to therapy, but the college counseling center had crummy therapists, and also with the way my system works, the ones who were actually *out* in therapy were the ones who didn’t or couldn’t talk about the memories or indicate exactly how wrong things were. so therapy wasn’t any help (and was harmful as things went on, since by the time i was actively suicidal, the therapist’s advice was “you just need to decide to be happier!”)
thinking about it, i’m the least suicidal when things in my life are the worst, and the most suicidal when the external stuff is going well. i think it’s because if there is bad stuff going on around me, i can see that it will end. it’s how i coped with my life when i was growing up, at least from the time i was eleven: i told myself that it would end, and i wouldn’t have to go through the pain any more, i just had to hold out for a few more years until i was eighteen and could leave home.
but when i left home, the parts who had taken the worst of the emotions were still feeling those emotions, and i couldn’t figure out how to ease their pain, and therapy wasn’t doing it. it didn’t help that i consistently have “paradoxical reactions” to antidepressants, meaning that they tend to make me more depressed or more anxious. so those weren’t a help.
i guess how i cope with them is just do my best to live through them. other parts can’t always switch in while there’s an actively suicidal part present, but we’ve managed to keep going to therapy–no matter who is present, i think we’ve gone to every session scheduled, for three years now. and the suicidal feelings do ease, when the parts who are suicidal are able to go to therapy, but then the feelings come back… hopefully, after a while, the feelings will ease even more.
it’s hard, because the main thing that tips things over into suicidal feelings is that the emotional pain i’m in gets to be too much, and so the focus is on the current pain. we’re learning to tell the difference between the past and the present. i guess part of what’s hard is that we don’t remember much of the past, not very clearly, so when someone does something now that matches up with what we remember, the feelings are intense. and i guess if we were able to remember the full memories from the past, we’d have an easier time recognizing that things going on in the present aren’t the same. i’ll have to think about that one, because it’s a new thought for me. 🙂
Feelings. I think I hate feelings sometimes. If it weren’t for feelings, life would be easy. Instead, I often have feelings that make me want to be in heaven now, and leave this earth. …I believe I’ll go to heaven when I die, but that I don’t have a right to take any human life, including my own, otherwise.
Maybe that would still be considered suicidal. I say over and over again that I’d be happy to leave this place at any time. I really would.
I’m not sure I get suicidal “feelings,” but I often experience suicidal thoughts. I know there is a huge difference between thoughts and actions, but it seems like the line that divides them is really thin. Like, I have this thought and I know that I could simply just do it without feeling anything.
I try to remember the people who love me and believe in me and how hurt they would feel if I left. Its much easier in some ways to be the one to die. Its deciding to live that is hard.
when i am suicidal i try hard not to think about the people i would hurt. this is not because i want to be dead but for me when i think about them i get really mad cause why should i stick around just for people who arent helping me? i mean, sure, they would get hurt. but i am hurting a whole lot more than people who would be left behind. so then i just start getting so mad about that, like i am supposed to keep being in so much pain just so that someone else wont feel pain and that just makes me MORE suicidal.
mostly right now i am working on believing that the pain will get to be less painful and i wont be hurting so much any more. but it has to be for me cause if its about other people then they should help me feel better and mostly they dont or cant.