Difficult topic: Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?

[BusynMember]

I ask because tonight was not a good night, I do have a mood disorder, and I did think about suicide tonight, although I did not act on it other than to take some allergy medications that I know will knock me out so that I will go to sleep and forget about it.

I guess the stress of being a mother to 100% grown kids got to me tonight. It was dumb. Jumper is dogsitting and spending most of her nights in an empty house with a dog and not home enough for my tastes...or for how much I would desire. She also will not talk to me about her boyfriend and I know this is eating her up inside. I feel like I'm losing her to the big wide world and, although I know that's healthy, it makes me feel sort of like there is nothing for me anymore. She doesn't need me anymore.

Sonic has a huge support system. He likes being in his own place, which is fine because of his autism, but I wish he liked to hang here more.

Then I thought about Julie, so far away and how I'm the only relative who doesn't get to see her and the baby whenever I liked and I felt hopeless (this is a symptom of depression, which I have to fight all the time).The baby will not be as close to me as them. I can't fight the distance factor.

I got so sad that, while crying in my room, I called 37 and asked if I could stay with him and just get away from it. His difficult child status is really going away, at least in my eyes. I've been Skyping his son and him and he does call me every single day and seem to enjoy talking to me, unlike Jumper. He said, "Of course you can. You're my mother. I"m always here for you." Not a difficult child thing to say. I know he means it. Bless him. Soon perhaps I will have no difficult children. I know he means it too. He would be there for me.

So I got off and started to wonder, do adopted kids love you as much as biological kids? That sent a new wave of angst.

Meanwhile, in the middle of this, hub started yelling at me over something jerky and I was not in the mood and told him to leave ma alone, which set him off worse. Jumper was there and put her two cents in. She asked me, "Why are you acting like this?" That just set my suicidal feelings off again. Why WAS I acting that way?

She left to dogsit.

I am very mixed up inside, confused and depressed. I wonder why we live here. I'd rather be closer to Julie and 37 and my two grands. Jumper is busy. Sonic has a full life a nd would survive fine if we moved. Husband's job is here. He won't move. I then started thinking of moving to Missouri and forget and forget Jumper, who is never home anyway, even on vacation. And I meant leaving for Missouri with no plans to come back.

I took t he Benadryl because it makes me tired and hub accused me of taking drugs. I smiled. For the first time ever maybe, I understand why our kids sometimes take drugs. It dulls the pain. They must be in pain to do drugs. I got it tonight. I probably would have smoked some good dope if I knew where to get it just to see if it muted my pain and negative feelings. I am still thinking of finding a way to smoke pot, although it's illegal in my state.

I feel like I'm losing everyone who once needed me and my life has become worthless. I really don't have a lot of friends. My one good friend spends the winter in Arizona and I've tried hard to make new friends, but it's hard at my age. Very hard.

So I had a suicidal-feelings night. Now I'm awake and still feeling a hangover from yesterday's pain. Still wondering why Jumper is not here. Still wondering why husband was a jerk last night. Still feeling warm and fuzzy only toward 37 and my grandson, even though Julie didn't do anything.

I'm not going to commit suicide. I have thought of it MANY times through the years, but never even tried it, although I know how I'd do it if I ever wanted to . But that's not an issue now. Just FEELING like I'm so pointless that I'm not needed here is bad enough.

Am I the only one who has recurrent suicidal thinking? Yes, yes, I know if I did it, eveyone would feel guilty (wich keeps me from doing it), but it doesn't feel good to wish I wasn't here anymore. Again, I am not going to do it. But it is disturbing that I am thinking about it.

I am more likely to take Benadryl today. I only need one pill to put me to sleep. I am very sensitive to medication. I just don't want to be awake today to face all this crapola. So...does anyone have any weed...hehe I'm serious that tonight I would have tried if it I knew somebody who had it. Kind of scary to become a pothead at MY age!!!!

 

[nlj]

Yes.
Often.

 

[recoveringenabler]

MWM, you are such an endearing, truthful, sensitive and honorable soul..........I so empathize with how you are feeling today.

I don't have active suicide feelings, however, there have been many times where I have felt as if I could not sustain the level of suffering I felt.

What I can relate to are the mood changes which are felt deeply. I'm aware that others seem to have a more smooth and steady relationship with their emotions, where I can be thrown off balance fairly easily because of my enormous empathy. Someone posted a blurb recently about being an Empath, someone very tuned in to the feelings of others, almost to the point of being psychic. I am that person. I believe you are too. That gives us many abilities to be compassionate, good listeners, to be very present and able to see others.........to be able to extend ourselves to others and hold their tender emotional states safely. I can be present with others suffering and with profound loss, mine and others, I'm able to contain those feelings within me and stay grounded.

On the other hand, because I am so sensitive, the emotional waves around me, or sometimes the emotional waves in the world, can have a profound and very difficult impact on me. Which is why I do so much to keep myself in balance, diet, exercise, meditation, it's a balancing act to stay grounded and present and emotionally stable because I am so very sensitive and I FEEL everything with a capital F.

Our dysfunctional backgrounds of being able to see and feel the truth as children was a double edge sword which put us in harms way.....and yet we emerged from that stronger and capable of being in the 'fray' of emotional chaos without losing our center.

Doesn't mean we don't feel life's uncertainties and challenges deeply.

I may be wrong here MWM, but like me, your "job" your reason for being, all your energies and direction has been focused on parenting, on taking care of others. With Sonic and Jumper leaving, Julie with her new baby and 37 far away..........your world has suddenly become empty. So has mine. I've been experiencing a lot of "emptiness" lately. At times it feels very strange. I try hard not to allow myself to slip into a dark place about it because I believe it is a huge life transition for me, going from what I've done for 40 years, taking care of others as my primary direction.......to this emptiness. It can be uncomfortable.

Oddly, like you, yesterday seemed especially strange. I was out of sorts. I felt like I didn't fit in to my own skin.

I think it's all appropriate though. Humans just don't swing from one life experience to another without some weird feelings. Like the bird flying from one thermal to another to gain altitude, once you leave the safety of that thermal, the wind can blow you into some serious chaos!!

It's uncomfortable to not have a clear vision of what the next step is. Letting go of the "kids" into their own lives is strange. I feel that with my granddaughter away at college like your Jumper. And I feel it with my daughter, who seems to be changing and somehow that negative connection we had is gone. We've had that connection forever...........and now those chords are broken. That is a good thing. AND, it can feel very, very strange. It can make me feel as if I am not sure who I am, where I'm going and what I'm supposed to do now.

I've often said to husband lately, "I feel as if I SHOULD be doing something and I don't know what it is." I've been a 'doing' machine for a very long time. Now I am just BEING. That transition feels empty. However, I think that emptiness is a profoundly important place to be. I think it is the place within which new life will begin............new ideas.........openings that weren't there before...........creation.

We birthed children and we raised them and now that is essentially over. We are the birds who've left the thermals. There is this period of unknowing, of emptiness, of a vacuum, all of that space................my sense is I just have to keep riding this wave until I land somewhere. It's a little disconcerting, sometimes uncomfortable, often strange, and yet..................there is promise MWM, there is opportunity, there is a birth...............all we can do is stay open and breathe..........

I believe this is a profound transition. It can be scary and strange. Or we can frame it as being exciting, new, an opening, a possibility that just wasn't present before. I think emptiness is not honored in our culture, we're so busy doing and moving and shaking, the stillness is looked upon as negative. I am practicing honoring that space of stillness. I am practicing being present in it. Allowing the uncertainty.

My thoughts are with you today MWM. Hang in there. Right on the other side of the horizon is a whole new possibility. We just have to wait until it becomes clearer.............it will. Just give it a little time...........

 

[BusynMember]

Thanks, RE.

 

[recoveringenabler]

Are you feeling better MWM?

Sending you many heartfelt hugs and warm wishes for your serenity to return...........

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

MWM, you have just been through unacknowledged trauma having to do with your father. When we "get it" about our families, we eventually do come into balance. We are healthier, stronger, we see more clearly, and we accept what we see without requiring explanation. We get it that it is what it is. But that does not happen automatically. In resolving our current situations, our current perceptions of family, we are also, unbeknownst to ourselves, recalling, remembering, reliving, every past trauma, consciously or unconsciously remembered, having to do with the feelings being currently resolved. That is why, once we are through it, we feel stronger, more certain, less vulnerable. Because we are all those things. But in the interim, we are vulnerable. We are reliving things we no longer remember, things that come to us now only in the same emotional voice they were hidden away in to start with, at the time the injury occurred. We are putting those old hurts away in our newly learned perspective.

That is what happens to me.

I believe that is what is happening to you.

I think there is no answer. I think, based on my own experience, that there will be an end point, a place where you will see or read something that puts it all together for you because you have done the work and are ready to put this part away in a healthy, integrated manner. But because so much of what is being healed is below the level of consciousness, we are thrown back into old patterns, old insecurities, old images of self.

The feelings are real.

These are the hurt little parts of us, some of them hurt before we had words, that are here with us now to be healed.

That is what is happening.

You will be fine. You will be better than you have ever been, changed forever and for the better.

It just hurts to go through it. We wonder where the intensity of emotion has come from and what it means and whether we will ever be able to be okay.

You can do this.

You are doing it, or you wouldn't be feeling what you are feeling.

So much of the trauma we've experienced happened before we had words to label and limit it.

That is why you don't know what it is.

The first time you went through it? The times when you were wounded?

You had no words to explain how this could be happening. Now, you do. It was far more painful when the initial injury occurred.

All these feelings you are feeling now were the ways you needed to see yourself in order to survive your childhood.

That little girl you were needs you to hear her and help her verbalize what happened to her.

***

Oddly enough, I have been going through something similar. I too thought it had to do with the kids, with the loneliness, with the Season, maybe.

There is a thread in P.E. about comparison.

And the light bulbs have been bursting since I read it. In a way, it is comparison that is the source of the pain. It isn't what we have or don't have, but what we come to believe we should have, or should have had, or who we should have been, that destroys us. What we believe we should have is that elusive something that looks like happiness to us. "This is what happiness looks like. I don't have that illusory thing, therefore I am not happy, could never be happy, have never been happy. I made the best of a bad, bad situation...but this is an ugly story with an ugly ending."

That's where I have been these past weeks.

That was my conclusion.

That everything was, and had always been, ugly, unless I convinced myself it was beautiful, or that I had suffered and grown, or that there was a purpose in there somewhere, or whatever.

I have been in this weird place, more like depression than anything I have ever experienced...so I am thinking it must have been depression. I did not actively contemplate suicide, but I did begin to think it was alright to be approaching the end of what had turned out, no matter what I had done to make it better, to be an ugly, ugly story.

During this time, I had the biopsy, learned it was cancer, had it removed and had those stupid, ugly black stitches. Somehow, that whole experience figures in to this.

Ugly.

Ugly, ugly story.

But just lately, especially after reading that post on comparison and radical acceptance, I am beginning to come back. I am alright.

You will be, too.

I know, because it is true for me too, that this is what it feels like to heal from yet another aspect of childhood trauma once and for all.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Things I find helpful.

"Be old enough and patient enough for kinds of love, seasons of it; be quiet in your soul so that when happiness comes again, if it ever does, you will know."

Anne Rice

***

"Sybil remembered the crucifixions of her past, and by each of them, where she herself hung and screamed and writhed, she saw the golden halo and the hands of the Fool holding and easing her, and heard his voice, murmuring peace."

Charles Williams
The Greater Trumps

This has been the imagery of this time, for me.

***

"You are not involved in word games.

You are fighting for your spirit, your sanity, your soul."

I don't know where I got that one.

***

"In the morning, I found my courage.

Man, would I need it."

Dean Koontz
The City

***

"Love is not a victory march; it's a cold and it's a broken halleluiah."

Leonard Cohen

***

"Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out right or wrong, like a gambler's bet. It is an act, an intention, a project; something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or unending Time, but timelessness, that old, Eternal Now."

Russ

***

And finally MWM, this:

Riding the Dragon:
The Artist's Way at Work

Julia Cameron

If you have never read The Artist's Way, one of the most helpful suggestions I have ever received is to begin something called Morning Pages. What you do is write three pages ~ no more, no less, one side only ~ every morning when you first get up. No editing, no rewriting, no "making nice." No one is going to see this but you ~ and you may decide never to look at them again, either. But what this process will do is force your mind to come together and express what it is that's working around beneath conscious thought.

That is why we have to do three pages whether we feel like it or not.

That is why we have to stop at three pages, whether we feel like it or not.

A little of the work can be lists of things you need to do that day or whatever. Most of it is chain of consciousness. It doesn't even have to be punctuated correctly.

:O)

The remainder of this book is about change. About focus. About where we want to let ourselves go. It is based on an ancient Chinese scroll about seven dragons. The scroll is a masterpiece, and describes, so they say, what it is to rise through the levels of consciousness or spirit or fear or whatever we wish to call the process seemingly happening to each of us as we live these lives that are both our possessions and our creations.

Know that I am holding you, at prayer for you, celebrating the harshness and the reward of it for you as you come through this, MWM.

They say the most comforting words in all the world are these: "All shall be well; and all manner of things shall be well."

I can't remember who said that, either. A female Christian mystic, I know that, but I don't remember which one.

Cedar

 

[2much2recover]

I go through this off and on but more so because of my health issues. Since the diagnosis of CRPS (Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome) I have been living in utter hell with no way out. I almost always feel frustrated at my lack of ability to do the things I used to do or have any semblance of my former life. I am in bed a lot, mostly waiting out the pain - since I stopped taking all opiates.
I have so many other diagnosis as well, along with experiencing pain, because this disease effects the nervous system, I have so many "other" things pop up that it drives me mad sometimes. I am: constipated/have diarrhea, my eyes hurt, headaches, nausea/vomiting, muscle cramping, and oh so tired all the time. (plus so many more - every part of my body has had symptoms since I was diagnosed with this damn disease). Sometimes I feel so bad, I swear that I must be dying and the Doctor's just haven't diagnosed whatever it is I am dying from yet! (by the way anyone who has complaints of those of us on SSDI - at least I would rather be NOT SICK and working than have this life I have now!

I feel like I'm losing everyone who once needed me and my life has become worthless. I really don't have a lot of friends. My one good friend spends the winter in Arizona and I've tried hard to make new friends, but it's hard at my age. Very hard.

Yes, this part gets to me as well as being this sick can be so isolating.

Am I the only one who has recurrent suicidal thinking? Yes, yes, I know if I did it, everyone would feel guilty (which keeps me from doing it), but it doesn't feel good to wish I wasn't here anymore. Again, I am not going to do it. But it is disturbing that I am thinking about it.

I also feel this way and this is why I am back in therapy. I have to find my footing in this "new normal" for me - being hopelessly, chronically ill. When you wake up every day hoping and praying for just one good day, the darkness of not having had one in so long can be extremely depressing.

Ironically becoming this sick is what kind of lead to NC with difficult child daughter again. (also how she got her foot back in the door for a while there - I was to sick for months to even get out of bed and she just started showing up) Of course one of the huge elephants in the room had been, between being NC for 4 years and then in contact for just over a year, was the money I invested with which she then cheated me out of my share of the profits. (I had given her the bigger share because I was not on SSDI but could no longer work) When I finally addressed the issue she kept trying to degrade my husband and trying to pass the blame on him, but he is the one that was informing and showing me the paperwork of what was going on with her financial shenanigans at the time it was happening. One thing dear difficult child to never do is to put down the one loving and responsible person who has been not only the primary financial provider but the best damn caregiver ever for your very sick mom.
When I was in contact with her she would say disgusting things like: "well when you need me to take over my husband (hers) is going to be the one wiping your ass". Yeah right, while her main job would be wiping out my bank accounts. Funny thing is she didn't even realized what was wrong with what she was saying and it was a lot of those things that I learned to listen and not question because they helped me better understand what I was dealing with. I thought I could keep up with the cold games of a sociopath - hah who am I kidding?
It still it made me the angriest how mean she was to husband, who loves me with all his heart and shows it every single day. She was trying to isolate me from the person who cared about me the most - yes difficult child's are capable of playing the same DV scenarios that those abusers do. (and it's not like he is new on the scene he has been a part of her life for more than half of her life). That's what finally grabbed me in my throat and said - no more - DONE!
I am in a lonely place, not currently depressed beyond the norm, but I wanted you to know MWM that you are not alone in your thoughts.

Thanks once again for the site where I can share my feelings in an open and honest way.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

"well when you need me to take over my husband (hers) is going to be the one wiping your ass".

This is horrible. I'm so sorry you were treated in that way.

She was trying to isolate me from the
person who cared about me the most - yes difficult child's are capable of playing the same DV scenarios thatthose abusers do.

That is true.

Cedar

.

 

[BusynMember]

After reading Robert Hare and others like him ad nauseum, I would disregard anything a psychopath said. They have no emotions. Yes, they know they hurt people with what they say, but they only know that by observation. They don't feel these emotions themselves.

What a horrible thing to hear. I hope you wrote her out of your will.

Don't let her near you. Maybe write that also in your will...she is not to care for you or ever have power-of-attorney. I'd do the same if that were my child. I'm glad your husband loves you so much. That is very precious and many people don't have that.

 

[2much2recover]

I hope you wrote her out of your will.

Oh I have believe me - and just because of the games she plays - so she will not take me to a lawyer to change it at the last minute, I keep the one with her in it at the house and the real, updated one in my safety deposit box. The games we are forced to play : (

Don't let her near you. Maybe write that also in your will...she is not to care for you or ever have power-of-attorney.

Yes, I have that part in my living will. That should also prevent any last minute shenanigans at trying to change my will at the last moment to benefit her. I would rather giving any remaining money to a charity for single mom's trying to help themselves than ever give one penny to her. (I was a single mom for many years before I met husband.)

 

[BusynMember]

I completely understand. Good for you.