The Forever Decision by Paul Quinnett   Chapter 4

ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE?

When I told a friend I was writing this book he said, "Well, I guess as long as they continue reading it, they haven't made a final decision to die." And so, since I still have your attention, I am going to assume that you haven't made the ultimate decision just yet. Or maybe even if you have, you might be willing to reconsider. As someone once said of the person who had really and finally and once-and-for-all made up his mind to kill himself, "He died ten minutes ago."

What I hope is true of you at this moment is that you are still uncertain about taking your own life. And because I have talked to hundreds of suicidal people, I can make a pretty good guess that you, even in your darkest hour, remain torn between ending your life and trying to go on with it. This is as it should be and, though it may not make you feel any better, almost all people considering suicide remain unsure about taking their own lives, even up to the moment they make an attempt. I can still remember interviewing a woman who had jumped from a bridge into a rushing river and survived. She had worn her raincoat because, as she put it, "I didn't want to get wet."

If I can make another guess about what has been going on inside your head and heart, it is that you have had long and difficult discussions with yourself about whether to live or die. In the psychology business, we call this ambivalence.

Ambivalence simply means that a person is struggling with a decision, examining the positive and negative aspects of some act or other and trying to anticipate the best possible outcome. It means having two opposite feelings at the same time --you want to do something and you don't want to do it.

Sometimes dying seems the best thing to do, sometimes living seems the best thing to do. This ambivalence, as you well know, is a terrible thing to endure. It is a precarious balance of life against death and thinking about it saps all your energy. Ambivalence comes and goes, like a painful toothache.

I don't want to lecture you about the psychology of ambivalence or what it means, but I do want you to know that being uncertain about the decision to kill yourself is perfectly natural and that even though you may feel you are driving yourself crazy by talking to yourself about taking your own life, such self-talk is necessary, maybe essential.

The thing that concerns me most about your ambivalence is that it is as if your desire to live is on one side of a delicate balance scale, and your desire to die on the other. Both strong desires, they are balanced just so and neither of us knows, right now, what it might take to tip the scales in one direction or the other.

I would worry for you if, for example, a letter you were expecting did not come today. Such a disappointment, while very small in itself, might tip the scales in a negative direction. On the other hand, that phone call from someone you love might come through tonight, tipping the scales in the other direction, and everything would change for the better. This is what is scary about ambivalence and the delicate balancing act you may be experiencing.

I think that most everyone who has at one time thought about suicide is stronger for having thought about it. They have examined the death option in some detail and have, after weighing things out, decided that as tough as life is, it is still worth living. As one young man told me, "I thought about suicide once, even loaded the pistol. But then I realized I was too much of a coward to pull the trigger.”

"Coward?" I asked him.

“Well, I guess I was afraid to die just then,” he said. "Although, I am not afraid of death now. After all, I looked death right in the eye."

Maybe, until we look death right in the eye, we cannot live life so well. And maybe, after we have done so, we are stronger for it. Maybe only after we have come close to death, can we come close to life. To me, it seems so.

You might look at your ambivalence this way: because none of us has ever been dead, it is easier to be negative about life (something we know about), than to be positive about death (something we don't know about). And it is only when we are confronted with our own deaths that death loses its promise to be better.

There is a story about a man who jumped into a river to kill himself but failed. While he was bobbing along in the current a police officer threw him a rope so that he could save himself. The man refused to take the rope. The officer then pulled his pistol and aimed it at the man, threatening to shoot him. The man, faced with a more certain death and the true negativity of it, grabbed the rope.

It might help for you to know that for every person who has made up his or her mind and has no doubts about ending his or her life, there are dozens more like you who remain unsure, uncertain, and hesitant. And if you were in my office with me that is the way I would hope you would be. I would hope that the two of us would have the courage to look death square in the eye and not be afraid to talk about it. Because if we could do this, we might begin to see that dying is something we all have to do someday and by talking about it we might come to a better understanding of what life is and what we can do with the days we have left.

Gambling with Death -the Most Dangerous Game
When we are in pain and having trouble making the decision to live or die, we sometimes flirt with death. We toy with suicide. We do things that may kill us, but we don't take full responsibility for what might happen. We say to ourselves, "If I die, so be it." Or, "If I survive, I guess I wasn't meant to die this time.” This is like tossing a fatal coin --heads I live, tails I die.

I remember a young man named Joe who drove his car as fast as it would go along a twisting mountain road. He was angry and hurt that his girlfriend had left him for someone else. He was thinking he might be better off dead. He skidded around comers at high speeds and eventually crashed. His car was totaled, but he survived. When I saw Joe in the hospital, he said, yes, maybe he had been suicidal.

"Did you want to die?" I asked him.

"I don't know. I guess so."

"Do you want to die now?"

"Of course not," Joe said. "That was stupid. Now my insurance rates will go up." Then he laughed and said he had been sure to buckle up his seat belt before he headed into the mountains, "...just in case.”

This is ambivalence.

Even though I have said you do not have to be crazy to think about suicide, to my way of thinking this sort of gambling with death is crazy. It is like the person who loads a revolver with one bullet, spins the cylinder, points the muzzle to his head and pulls the trigger. It is like saying, I don't know if I really want to die, but I'll give death a chance. Or there is the person who takes a handful of sleeping pills, not knowing if there are enough pills to do the job. She may wake up or she may not. She will turn the matter over to fate.

To me at least, these are terrible gambles and even though I know how someone may despair of living, to give one's only life over to chance may be the worst solution of all.

(I will talk more about what can happen if you fail in a suicide attempt in a later chapter.)

Being unsure about wanting to die is okay and normal for people in a suicidal crisis and I don't want you to think for one minute that this uncertainty is anything that will go quietly away in a day or two. But it does go away. Most people in these desperate hours of ambivalence feel as though time has stopped or is barely moving. It is as if the rest of the world is going off at a normal clip, but for you, time has ground to a halt. And until things begin to change, it might help to know that what you are experiencing is what others in your same frame of mind have experienced. It is just the way it is.

There is one other thing of which I want you to be aware: suicidal logic. When you are in that trapped feeling of nowhere to go and stuck with the ambivalence of living or dying, you may think you are thinking clearly. Chances are you are not. Chances are you are depressed, and depressed people sometimes do not think so clearly or so well. (I have written more about depression in a later chapter.)

Consider this thought: "Either my life improves, or I must kill myself."

If this sample of thinking sounds familiar, ask yourself, "Is this the only way things can turn out, either A or B?" If your answer is yes, then you are stuck in a kind of one-way logic. And a dangerous one at that.

Just for the moment, I will agree with you that maybe your life won't improve, that things will go on being miserable and hopeless and that, if you're depressed, your depression will go on forever. Option A, your life getting better, is out.

Question: Do you really have to take option B and kill yourself?

Answer: Well, not necessarily.

There is always option C. With option C you could, for example, just go on being depressed and miserable. People do it all the time.

What is illogical about suicidal thinking is that you have given yourself only two ways to go with your problems -- up or down, life or death. Maybe you hadn't thought of option C, just to go on being miserable.

Remember, the only person who says that if life does not improve I have to kill myself, is you.

Here is another dangerous piece of suicidal logic. We call it circular logic. This in-the-head conversation goes like this:

"I'm going to kill myself."

"Why?" "Because my problems can't be solved."

"How do you know your problems can't be solved?"

“Are you nuts? If my problems could be solved, do you think I'd be on the verge of killing myself?"

This kind of logic is like having one shoe nailed to the floor and running at top speed: the faster you go, the dizzier you get. It never occurs to you to sit down, untie your shoes, step out of them, and walk off barefoot in some new direction.

Sometimes it takes talking to someone besides yourself to break out of circular logic, someone who is on the outside looking in.

I know that such examples of suicidal logic will not do you much good and that, of all the things that might improve your situation or mood, the least helpful thing I could say would be something like, "Cheer up, you have everything to live for!" So I won't say that.

But I want you to know that if you let some average person know you are thinking about killing yourself, this "cheer up" message is pretty much what you can expect them to say to you. This is their logical argument to try to counter your logical argument. Their argument is just as simple-minded as yours. Unfortunately, when you are despairing of living another day, either kind of logic isn't much worth a damn.

There is the old joke where someone is trying to cheer up a depressed person and says, "Cheer up, things could be worse!"

The depressed person cheered up and, sure enough, things got worse.

So I won't kid you that it is an easy thing to think your way out of a suicidal crisis and quickly end the ambivalence that haunts you. After all, you may have finally arrived at the point where you've begun to think seriously about suicide after a long and losing battle, a battle I can never know about.

Disappointments can mount up and maybe you have been nickel-and-dimed to death. Or maybe you have lost greatly and just can't imagine doing without what you have lost. Either way, once the suicidal crisis starts it isn't like I (or anyone else) can say, "Bingo! Your crisis is over!"

On the other hand, I want you to know that no crisis lasts forever and that being unsure about dying is okay and normal until things begin to change. And, if you don't kill yourself first, things will change, sometimes even for the better.