Blues Control

Posted by fxckfeelings on August 6, 2012

Like all symptoms of mental illness, anxiety and suicidal feelings seem controllable since they’re related to thoughts and how we look at things, especially since they have the potential to be so destructive. In reality, their primary causes are powerful, mysterious and, whether rooted in past events or biology, are not curable or easily reversible by the best treatments, most loving families, and strongest willpower. What good treatment and a loving family can do, however, is give meaning to the courage it takes to ignore pain and dangerous impulses, giving one comfort, if not control.
–Dr. Lastname

How do you get rid of the pain from your child’s suicide? My son died four years ago, and our entire family is still devastated. We are all now living with depression, anger, and our own thoughts of suicide at times. We are all in therapy but it’s moving so slowly, it doesn’t feel like life is moving forward. After a tragedy like this, how do you get your purpose back?

While I can’t imagine anything much worse than having your child suicide, the key to surviving it is to understand how similar it is to having your child die of any other cause. No parents should have to bury their child, no matter how that child’s life ended.

Intuitively, suicide feels like a preventable cause of death, so it seems justified to review the many would-haves and could-haves leading up to it.

Mental health professionals sometimes make things worse by focusing on such possible “causes” as unacknowledged trauma, unshared feelings, or unrecognized calls for help, all of which mean blame. Blame then feeds the depression and anger you talk about, poisoning normal grief with feelings of guilt, regret, and failure.

The fact is, we don’t have any cure for suicidal feelings, just tools for managing them. We don’t know why some people are more impulsive than others, have the bad luck to happen upon an opportunity to end their lives when they’re most low, or have a susceptibility to abusing drugs that will weaken their precarious self-control. Trauma adds to the risk, but there’s no way to undo the past.

Talk to people who’ve lived with suicidal feelings for many years. Many are strong people with good values; they have to be, or they wouldn’t make it. They’ll tell you they would never blame anyone with strong suicidal feelings for losing control, or those who love that person for not doing enough. They regard suicidal impulses as potentially lethal symptoms of a chronic disease. The main cause of death is severe illness, which is bad luck.

So don’t ask why your son ended his life, because it’s a question that can do nothing but torture you. The real answer is that we live in a hard world where some people suffer terrible illness for no good reason. What matters most is what they, and we, do with it. Focus instead on your child’s life, and how brave he was to carry on for as long as he did, despite being in so much pain.

Tell stories about what he was like when he was being himself. His life was cut short, but he had a rich personality and many opportunities for laughing, giving, and sharing. Your purpose is to treasure that memory and rescue the meaning of his life from the cruelty of self-recrimination and the sorrow of death.

Life isn’t greater for lasting longer, or being happier or healthier. Don’t dishonor his memory, or your love for him, by thinking otherwise.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like my son’s suicide destroyed the meaning of my life, but I feel pain because I loved him, not because I failed him. I will nurture that love by cherishing our relationship and carrying it with me.”

I have always been a nervous and anxious person, and while it’s never interfered with my life, I would never consider myself to have ever been truly calm. Since having my fourth child fairly recently, I have had a handful of panic attacks—racing heart, can’t swallow, upset stomach, and total fear and doom. Since having those few episodes I feel like I am constantly walking around scared that it is going to happen with no notice. Everything is starting to scare me—bad weather, illness, planes flying over my house. I have told a few close loved ones but I feel like if people knew my thoughts it would be devastating and beyond humiliating. My husband is wonderful and very understanding but I can’t help but feel like he is getting tired of my irrational worries. My biggest fear is something bad happening to me or my children—I don’t think I could handle something bad happening. I try so hard to push these thoughts out, but it turns into obsessing on illness, injury, and accidents. All of this has me very ashamed. I think I can be a very outgoing, fun, confident, competent person until I have one of these episodes and then all the obsession and fear comes back. My goal is to try to not become so wrapped up in fear of bad things happening in life that I miss out on the life I am living right now.

If only anxiety were not stigmatized and you had an opportunity to talk to other sufferers, you’d find you have a typical case. As is true for many women, your anxiety began after childbirth, a typically vulnerable time because of hormone changes. It was accompanied by depressive, negative thoughts and attacks of panic that felt so dreadful you were afraid of the next one.

Not surprisingly, your fear of panic started to make you phobic of any activity that made you even mildly anxious, and downwards went the spiral. After a while, you began to feel ashamed of being a burden on loved ones and losing that part of your personality that you and others liked, so you were tempted to hide out. Now your anxiety hasn’t just taken your peace of mind, but your self-respect.

You haven’t mentioned treatment, which makes me wonder whether you’ve been too ashamed to try. The big three, as we’ve said before, are: behavioral treatments, like meditation and self-hypnosis that reduce sensations of anxiety in your body; medical treatments, like medication; and, cognitive therapies for attacking negative thinking. Taking a course on anxiety management will help you overcome stigma, meet some nice people with similar problems, and educate you about treatment choices.

While it’s tempting to focus on getting better, your lack of control over the process means it’s better to focus on managing symptoms and getting on with things. That’s because people who try too hard to control anxiety get more anxious and feel like failures, so never let yourself hope for control you can’t have.

Unfortunately, none of the treatments above offers a cure; they all offer management and, to some degree, possible relief. Your goal is to alleviate your symptoms as much as possible (without self-medicating) while respecting the effort it takes to go on with your life.

In the meantime, you obviously haven’t let anxiety or panic stop you from being an active mother and wife. You’re living your life according to your values, and your husband understands that you can’t help feeling this way, so you’ve really accomplished your goal of preventing fear from changing what’s important in your life.

It takes great strength to survive a series of panic attacks without becoming a basket case, and you appear to have the resilience to do just that. You have no reason to be embarrassed and every reason to be proud.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I’m coming undone and letting down everyone who depends on me, but I’m actually coping well with a kind of migraine that floods me with fear. I’ve got lots to learn about managing it and I have every reason to believe I can keep it from ruining my life. I’ve already shown I have the courage to tolerate symptoms without giving ground.”