Help advice on opening up??

[Lysander]

to start this off i didn't know which thread to post this to, so i'm hoping this is the right one. i am very conflicted on whether i should open up to my counsellor about my plans to ctb or even talk to her about that in general. i don't want to be stopped if i do decide to ctb, and i don't want to be locked away or given the same 'it gets better' bs but i don't have much other choice than to carry on as i have been so far. thoughts/words of advice?
also any tips on feigning recovery, if that's an option, as lots of me still wants to ctb. (once again was debating which thread to post in, sorry if this isn't the place!!)

 

[d3c96524be95]

My two cents: if you feel the urge to talk about your suicidal thoughts but don't want to be locked up, then the most important thing is to not give the impression that your project is imminent and precise, even if that implies minimizing. This is not full proof as the threshold is different from one "counselor" to another (and maybe from one country to another), but I reckon it's your best bet. Also, the "it gets better" bs will highly depend on the person you talk to, but I've noticed that usually trained professionals tend to not fall into that rhetoric as they know it's annoying and unhelpful. Still, they aren't able to help much unfortunately.

I'm with you on this. It's so frustrating to not be able to talk about these invasive thoughts openly. I'd want so much to talk to therapists about them and not feel like there will be bad consequences for me if I do so. That honestly weighs more than anything, but that's the way it is.

 

[Looking]

As stated above by @d3c96524be95, if you're not wanting to get hospitalized, then you really have to use careful language, it's very important.

In my experience, talking in past tense prevents a majority of my issues related to the talk of suicide with my therapist.

• "I've wanted to kill myself in the past",
• "I had a plan",
• "It occasionally comes back as ideation",
  "It started since I was younger", etc.

This way you can share your current plan (if you so desire to) under the guise that the plan is "inactive".
Maybe you two can go through the plan together and discuss aspects over it under this assumption.

It depends on several factors:

• How much do you trust your counselor?
• What are the law requirements for hospitalization?
• Have you talked about it in the past? If so, how did she react?
• How well do you know her? Can you predict her reaction in advance?
• If you do end up getting hospitalized, what's your plan then? etc.

 

[Angi]

You can ask your cousellor what they would break confidentiality for and have them expand on the usual short phrase of "threat to self or others". I did this, so now I know where the line is for this specific person. I would recommend this strategy, since it lets me talk about way more than without it. Also, the posters above made good points.