A Parent's Guide for Suicidal and Depressed Teens (6 page)

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Authors: Kate Williams

Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Life Stages, #Teenagers, #Self-Help, #Depression, #test

BOOK: A Parent's Guide for Suicidal and Depressed Teens
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is lying on the couch watching TV with no desire to call a friend? I need to check out my denial rating often.
Panic
My first reaction to the idea of suicide was panic. I couldn't accept it. My mind flooded with a white light that was like electricity short-circuiting my thoughts. How could she not want to live? This beautiful person who had been such an incredibly alive baby and toddler! This was so impossible!
Panic is just a short step from denial. When I was feeling panicky, I said to myself, "Calm down. Why is this so hard for you?" I traced my panic to many factors: fear, stress, grief, and regret. I also attribute panic to my lack of information about suicide. But nobody else seemed to know much either. I often thought I was in over my head.
Fear
All parents fear losing their children, some probably more than others. This is a normal fear. We have put so much energy into their lives. Whether we've been "good" or "bad" parents, all of us have given much. The process of raising children makes us attached to them, whether our relationship is smooth or stormy. We are attached and involved.
 
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At the time I think my fear was more intense because I'd lost my younger brother to an overdose when he was twenty. Nobody knows if his death was a suicide. The grief over this loss has often made me fearful and overprotective of my love relationships. I've heard it said that after the first death there is no other. That is true, but it may also be said that after the first death, you want there to be no other.
I had to grieve the loss of my brother in order to keep the fear of death from controlling my behavior with my daughter. In the process of this work, I discovered that she had romanticized my brother's death. She saw death as a hippie heaven where people sit around in the clouds drinking tea and listening to Cat Stevens. I shuddered to think that this fantasy had descended down the generations, that the true cause of his death had become a family secret. I was the only one in my family willing to talk about his life and death. The rest of them remained silent.
A year into Rachel's and my work in therapy I told her, "You may think I miss my brother and that's true. I never get over missing him. But I'm also mad at him. I'm mad because he left me. He was the one person in the family most like me. I'll never stop missing him because he's not here. And if you choose to die I will not romanticize your life, I'll be pissed."
 
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Take some quiet time and ask yourself about your fear of death. What experiences have you had with death that may add a charge to your present fear?
Anger
My anger at the idea of losing Rachel feels healthy because I can express and release it. But often anger is like a shotgun feelingwhen we're angry we may not know what it's all about. You may be angry at an ex-spouse who hasn't supported your child. You may be angry at the ''system." You may be angry at your suicidal son or daughter for scaring you.
If you're walking around angry at everything without expressing, focusing, and releasing these feelings, anger is going to prevent you from dealing appropriately with your child's pain. When you're angry you need to explore the other feelings that are linked to it and
feel them,
then deal with each issue one by one so the anger doesn't block your response to other events in your life.
Fear of Failure: Shame
Parents of suicidal teens suffer a double-dose of shameful feelings. On the one hand, much of our sense of self-esteem is connected to the idea of
 
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being good parents. On the other hand, suicide is often seen by our culture as a failure of the parents. We stand to lose not only our own esteem, but also that of the society at large. That's how I saw it. I felt that if Rachel killed herself, surely I had failed to fill some huge void in her that I had not even known about. At first I thought, ''How can I live if she dies? How can I ever do anything again?" But then I began to feel it was a reflection on me. I felt ashamed when she even talked about suicide. It seemed like a complete repudiation of my life and values. Gradually as my daughter got help, and as I learned how to talk about suicide directly, the shame around the issue diminished. It had less power over me. Now when we deal with emotional issues, shame is not a dominant part of my response to her.
Religious Perfectionism
I was raised to be a good girl in a rigid, religious family. This religious perfectionism led me to think a person has to keep going no matter what. In short, good girls don't kill themselves. One might say my family of origin was religiously abusive: it praised perfectionism, excessive self-sacrifice, denying one's feelings, and living how others expected one to live. My family system never suggested that working hard had its downside or that
 
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sometimes you have to leave abusive situations in order to be healthy. There were no options. My mother's words were always, "Follow God's will. Your personal happiness is of no concern."
I have worked hard to counteract this grim message. But I had never before confronted one underlying aspect of my family's message: "Don't kill yourself because God will hate you." Though as an adult I didn't look on suicide as a sin, it was still, in my mind, something you're not supposed to do. I had often heard, "Your body is a temple. You use your talents to serve. Don't hide your light under a bushel."
Paradoxically, children present parents with the problems that are the most difficult for us to handle. I think they call it radar. In spite of all my previous work in therapy and Twelve Step groups, I was unprepared for the idea of suicide. As depressed as I may have been in the past, I never wanted to kill myself. I've always reacted to my problems by asking, "How can I change this?" or "How can I live with this?" or "Where's the door?"
If suicide was something many people did think about, then what was the next step? Spiritually, it was important for me to change my hateful and harsh internal belief to one that was loving: there was a loving God who wanted my daughter to live because she was loved and she deserved to have a good life. This is the message I presently believe.
 
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Once I affirmed this new message by saying it over and over, I was able to let go of the old one and not be in a panic when talking about suicide.
Parental Love and the Preservation of the Family
After working through many intense feelings in the last five years, I've come to believe that human beings have a biological drive to live and that this is an instinctive part of life. Biologically, we need our children to continue and carry on our history. This feels like a healthy instinct to me. We have to go easy on ourselves when we first panic about suicide; part of our reaction is normal and healthy.
Aside from our fears of our own personal loss and our shame about being bad parents, there is also the elemental truth that we deeply love our children and we want them to live no matter what. Of all the people on earth, the one I would most readily die to protect is my daughter. I want her to live and live a happy full life. I honor this love for her as healthy, normal, and good.
First Things First
As parents, our personal feelings are important. But in the middle of a crisis, the first step is to get help for the child in danger. You may feel overwhelmed. Looking for help may take all your energy.
 
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No matter. Stop doing everything else until you find help. If you don't know who to call for help, look in the front of the phone book for the number of a crisis hot line. Ask if there's a teen crisis line in your town.
If doing even this much feels too hard, you must call a friend to be with you. Ask a friend to help you make the phone calls. Ask a pastor or teacher for suggestions. Call the school and talk about the problem. Keep asking for help until you get it. Ask a friend to drive you and your child to the therapist or the hospital.
The next thing to do is to figure out how to deal with your feelings of fear and anger and shame so that you will be calm when you talk with your child. You have to be able to discuss suicide in a calm and thoughtful manner.
 
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3
The Last Taboo: Talking Directly about Death
. . . pain is the root of knowledge . . .
SIMONE WEIL
Deal with the Reality of Suicide
In the beginning of the process of getting help for Rachel, one of the first and most important things I did was acknowledge her pain. I said to her, "I understand you to be saying you are in terrible pain. I will do anything to help you figure out what it is. I'm sorry I did not see you were in such pain sooner."
Secondly, I insisted she go to a counselor. She resisted, saying, "All my friends say therapists are full of shit." She continued to say that as she went to therapy. I said I knew it was difficult but the visits were nonnegotiable. You must get your child in to a therapist
fast.
Get the physical body there; don't worry about what you'll do next.
 
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State the Obvious
You must tell your child that you love and want her or him to work through the pain.
As a teacher, I had been around kids long enough to know that it would not be helpful to say, "How could you think such a thing?" I also knew that I didn't want to tell her to shut up. Nor did I want to say, "Go ahead and make your own decisions." That seemed really cold. But I didn't know how to talk about "it."
Suicide is an act of violence, an act of self-destruction. It may seem horrifying to you, and you may have trouble expressing your love in the face of suicide. What helped me was to take out her baby pictures and look at all her natural positive energy and imagine that energy still being with her. I imagined her as a child swimming, playing by herself, counting pinecones in the backyard. I imagined all the active, energetic things she used to do as a way to keep in touch with the spirit in her that wanted to live. I knew that child in the photos was still inside her. But the part of her that felt joy intensely and passionately dealt with sorrow the same way. She needed guidance. So I set out to ask for help from friends who had been depressed and suicidal.
 
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Talk about "It"
I sometimes wonder if the sexual revolution eliminated sex as a taboo, and therefore the younger generation had to find a new way to rebel, to be shocking to the older generation. Could suicide be the new taboo that must be toyed with? Or was it something I'd never really known much about?
I started asking people in my peer group whether they had ever wanted to commit suicide, and many of them said, "Well, yes, I thought about it." One day I spoke in a meeting of my Alcoholics Anonymous group, and I talked about how upset I was about the idea of suicide. In the past, whenever anyone in the group had mentioned suicide, I had tuned them outit was just not acceptable. But that day I heard many stories from people who'd once felt suicidal. I discovered it was a part of many people's lives. I concluded that I had been too repressed by religion to even consider suicide. Perhaps thinking about suicide was a fairly normal part of coming to terms with emotional pain. When a person is in pain, working through it includes the choice of feeling it or not, the decision of living through it or not. In most cases, people choose to live.
In the process of talking with people, a friend who had been depressed and suicidal gave me a book that has become my favorite:
Suicide: The

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