The Forever Decision by Paul Quinnett   Chapter 17

TIME HEALS

If you have read all or most of this book by now: you will have no doubt detected that much of my purpose in writing this book is toward one very simple end: to cause you to stop, to think things through, and to give yourself some time to reconsider the forever decision. Given the limits of our relationship, I hope I have done that much.

Because if I have, then I know that there is at least some chance that in the time that has passed since you first picked up this book, your situation may have begun to change. I hope for the better.

In the next chapter I will talk to you about how and where you might want to go for professional help if your problems persist, but for the moment, I want to talk to you about time.

I titled this chapter "Time Heals" because time does heal. Research conducted on people waiting for counseling or mental health services has demonstrated again and again that, as near as we can tell, the mere passage of time leads to an improvement in their symptoms. Oftentimes, if the person has waited only a week to a few weeks to see a counselor, the reasons he or she was so distressed and requested the appointment will have disappeared and the person no longer wishes to pursue professional help. We call this phenomenon spontaneous recovery.

Spontaneous recovery does not help us explain what happened to the troubled person and why he or she is feeling better. He may have shared his problems with a friend, she may have found a job, he may have found someone new to love, she may have quit using drugs on her own, or he may have spoken to his priest or minister and found relief. Frankly, we don't really know why people get better without the professional help they sought. But thank goodness they do.

What we do know is that, as time passes, many troubled people begin to feel better and whatever symptoms they had begin to fade. It may be something the person does for himself or it may be that circumstances change for the better and those circumstances, in and of themselves, put an end to the crisis.

Maybe it is worthwhile to keep two things in mind. Crises, including suicidal ones, are time-limited. By its very nature, a crisis cannot go on and on and on. Something must give. And, provided you don't kill yourself, something eventually will give.

With the simple passage of time things may get worse, but with the same passage of time things may get better. Unless you can know your future perfectly it seems to me you cannot know with any certainty that, in fact, things will get worse. You may believe things will always get worse, but that is only a belief, and maybe one of those not-so-rational ones that go with the logic of suicidal thinking.

Ordinary People, Ordinary Problems
The second thing you might want to think about is that the reasons most people give for wanting to kill themselves are not catastrophic ones. Quite the contrary. People kill themselves all the time over ordinary problems.

For whatever reasons you have been thinking about suicide, and no matter how staggering and unbearable your problems may seem just now, I know that if you could see these same problems from some point in your own future (from a few weeks to a few months from now) you would -and I hope will -find them rather small and insignificant. In retrospect, you may even find the problems that would have been solved by your suicide laughable.

None of us can predict the future. Anyone of a thousand shifts can take place in the currents of our lives. If we are in a crisis, somehow, sooner or later, the crisis passes, the suicidal thoughts fade and, like a sudden squall on the surface of a lake, the winds stop, the waves quiet down, and a passage opens up where none existed only moments before.

I firmly believe that if you will but put the decision to end your life off, you will, in the days and weeks ahead, find fewer and fewer reasons to choose suicide. What seems so impossible and unbearable today will, in some future place and time, seem only a bad memory. How else, I ask you, can all the millions of people who have given the forever decision serious consideration still be alive?