Help How to snap out of, prevent or calm down from a suicidal crisis?

[Melly]

This might be a common problem? Here's my situation. I'm trying to stay alive for my loved ones but I am very unstable. I seem to always have had some sort of tension building up in the back of my mind, no matter what I do, and eventually it all gets too much and I become incredibly self destructive. I've been like this as far back as I can remember. I don't know if that can change.

I am like a bomb that needs to be defused regularly.

I have at least one person who can reliably calm me down and make me sane again.
But I also don't want to be a burden. And sometimes nobody is available.

How do I defuse myself? Can anyone relate? How do you deal with yourself and like... keep those 30 minutes of alone time from escalating into a suicide attempt.

Any advice would be welcome even if it's stupid. Thank you... And good luck with whatever you might be dealing with.

 

[Redacted24]

Totally with you! I tend impulsive and don't keep the means handy (don't have them although I could easily)... and during a spell a couple of years ago I kind of came out of it less than a km from where I would have my hands on it.

For me there are a few things I try depending on when I'm in that mind.

Going for a walk, especially into nature is my go- to. Try to notice the leaves, squirrels, birds. Try to spot things in the shadows. It's hard to get up and get moving, but once you start it'll just flow.
(I was on such a walk but went into town during my near miss above. Try not to walk to a shop that sells firearms!)

If that's not an option (night/ weather) then I try music, or reading kids or YA books because they're easy and don't require much effort

Of course coming here to play games or read others posts etc kind of grounds me too (thanks everyone for the content!)

Those just come to mind.
I'm sure others have terrific ideas...
Hope it helps!

 

[Santana Idaho]

This might be a common problem? Here's my situation. I'm trying to stay alive for my loved ones but I am very unstable. I seem to always have had some sort of tension building up in the back of my mind, no matter what I do, and eventually it all gets too much and I become incredibly self destructive. I've been like this as far back as I can remember. I don't know if that can change.

I am like a bomb that needs to be defused regularly.

I have at least one person who can reliably calm me down and make me sane again.
But I also don't want to be a burden. And sometimes nobody is available.

How do I defuse myself? Can anyone relate? How do you deal with yourself and like... keep those 30 minutes of alone time from escalating into a suicide attempt.

Any advice would be welcome even if it's stupid. Thank you... And good luck with whatever you might be dealing with.

The simplest solution is to distract yourself until you've procrastinated enough to come out of panic. It's the only thing that works, unfortunately. I'm trying to fix my nervous system and implement some healthy distress tolerance skills. It's really, really hard for people like us. I'm here because I've already tolerated distress; I can't tolerate distress any farther. (Supertroopers). You still want to live. That's going to carry you through a lot.

It sucks, but , all you can do is do something you want to do every day. Live for the things you look forward to. You can do almost anything you want if you know how to get it. You found this forum, and here you are asking for help. How many of us die before even considering that? How many of us die without talking to anyone who understands? And here I am, telling you what I know about living with trauma.

It'll never leave. But if you want to, if you are willing, you can learn to live for what good you can experience. You can start with accepting that your friend loves you. Accept that even though you are looking into a painful future, there's no use in grieving a pain that hasn't happened. They're with you now. Accept that they are limited. Just as you are limited. And that suffering, at all levels, is part of being alive.

Talk to them. Tell them you love them. That they mean a lot to you. That you're struggling, and you need them to work on their boundaries with you.

Hopefully this will soothe some of the fear of overburdening them. There are some free and low cost support groups you can try to get some live socialization with people who relate.

A bit about me:


I've never experienced anything good that's stayed with me. All good memories are tainted by how they led to bad endings. One of my earliest memories is feeling exhaustion at the thought of living for a long time. I never even knew about death at the time, and I didn't learn about suicide until later in elementary. I've been wanting to die ever since. I almost attempted the night before 7th grade.

I've spent ages trying to find my purpose. What I've always wanted to do it connect to people. People like me. And people who don't understand people like me. So, I'm focusing on different ways to do that.

I still want to die.

But a reason to live is a reason to live.

 

[-Link-]

One technique for this that I like: "Talk to somebody. Talk to anybody." (Ideally somebody who cares about you.)

You don't have to talk about your suicidal crisis. You don't even have to talk about mental health at all.

Topic of discussion doesn't matter. It could be as mundane as the weather or a recent movie release or what they're cooking for dinner. This obviously isn't going to solve whatever issues you've got going on, but the goal here is to buy yourself time to ride out the darkness while also interrupting your downward spiral and lessening its intensity, and redirecting your attention away from the cycle of catastrophic thinking that often fuels a suicidal crisis.

One of the ways this can improve the acute situation is that it counters the body's "fight or flight response" (the body's physiological response to a severe acute stressor), which will be a common factor for anybody in acute crisis. By talking to somebody you trust -- someone who cares about you -- you're activating a feeling of "social safety" which goes towards calming the body down from this physiologically stressed state, because even a mundane conversation can trigger a sense of mattering or belonging that, even if you're feeling so far down, still allows something inside you to recognize you're not entirely alone. Even something as simple as tone of voice or body language can help reduce the body's stress response.

Also, this steps you out of isolation and forces you outside of your own mind. This is especially so for suicidal inclinations that are focused on past failures or future hopelessness, where a conversation with a fellow human being basically forces you "into the present moment" which, too, acts as a disruptor to that spiral of suicidality.

This is of course not curative. It's only meant as a temporary relief or as a means to buy yourself time or as a way to get yourself through the moment. Or the day. Or the night. After whatever time passes, of course you could become vulnerable again to spiralling.

So, if/when you find some temporary relief, those are the periods of time to work on crisis planning. If you have crisis plans already in place, then it's just a matter of picking one and running with it like you'd run through a script. For the "talk to somebody, talk to anybody" technique, maybe your plan has details with a list of people and contact information to reach out to, as well as small-talk topics you could talk about (recent movies, what pets have been up to, how things are going with the family, etc.). Maybe record notes along with each person on your contact list about who would be best to contact and under what circumstances or topics. You could also record how each individual person has helped you in the past (even if they've only unknowingly helped you), and such notes could act as evidence to remind yourself during future moments of crisis that, yes, it is indeed worthwhile contacting somebody in a moment like this.

Then, if you get yourself to a point where you're spending less time and energy battling periods of crisis, then perhaps you can start allocating that time and energy to other techniques that go more towards progressive symptom relief over the longer-term.