O very young: Some thoughts about suicide and healing from trauma

“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life is that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. ”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

You’re only dancing on this earth, for a short while.  This past February I learned that Stephanie Selby, who became famous for being the main protagonist in Jill Krementz’ book A Very Young Dancer died from complications of a suicide attempt. I felt sorrow—and maybe even complicity—I had idolized her for years and never once wondered what her life was actually like. I am her age cohort, another 1965 kid, and I was obsessed with her book. Holding the obituary in the NY Times, I stared at the picture of the front cover of that book as I had once stared at it for years. When you are a kid, there are lots of successful grown-ups to look up to, but to learn about a successful kid was a whole other level.

She was this image of perfection and success. I thought if I could learn how to be that successful, I could fast track adulthood which would give me a way out of a difficult childhood. I read and re-read that book. I scoured the book for clues—for success—for how to be thin. My mother had been a model and was obsessed with weight putting me on diets from the age of seven—she wanted me to have a ‘dancer’s body.’ As one of the tallest kids in my grade, and a solid kid, this was never a possibility. But I read the book over and over—hoping for some sort of osmosis: hoping that you could become someone by studying them. Reading about her suicide was a wake-up call: a reminder that you really never know what people are carrying. You never really know the weight of people’s burdens.

I was reminded of her again today when an old teammate posted a story about a friend who died from suicide—a friend who had so many gifts and so much to offer. A friend who was going to be desperately missed. I thought about the gap—the grand canyon wide gap—between the pain and sorrow that someone can be holding—and the love and admiration that others have for them.

I don’t have any massive wisdom about suicide-- only questions. Only an earnest desire and wish to bring more peace and calm to those who struggle. I am no stranger to suicide. I grew up in its specter—and know the fear and power that threats and attempts bring. I know that it can seem like a powerful immediate answer to what looks like an interminable problem. Except it is the exact opposite. Suicide is actually a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And it a lousy solution. There are so many more ways to hold pain. There are so many ways that we as a community need to hold trauma and grief—so that people don’t feel so alone with theirs.

From the veterans who commit suicide (there are roughly 22 a day) to the young folks who do—there is a theme of not being able to live with oneself. Whether from the moral injury of war—or the pain of living with trauma, sorrow or shame. Suicide is a singular death that that behaves like a shrapnel wound—injuring at least three generations of families—and tearing through communities.

It’s important to remember that the strength of people on the outside may not match their insides—that you may not know how much they are struggling. How much, like a swan, they are paddling below the surface, even when it seems they are gliding, quietly.

It's important that we don’t look away. That we hold that this level of sorrow exists even if we can’t see it. And it’s important to normalize the very human, and perhaps necessary, feelings of despair. The feelings that come with wondering who to be, how to be, and what to do—especially with regards to trauma and grief. I believe if we did a better job honoring the healing process—and normalizing how long it can take to heal and how hard it is to heal—we wouldn’t leave people feeling so alone holding their burden.

And maybe this is a small thing, but it seems like we need a shift from ‘who I am or what I do’—to ‘what I can contribute.’ . There’s too much pressure on being something or someone in particular—and the feelings of falling short of whatever that ideal is—of living with some profound disappointment that you failed at something—even though that something—or that standard of being—wasn’t actually real. This was always difficult but social media has made it worse.

But the ability to contribute? That’s something that is always available. The ability to contribute a conversation—contribute your effort (whatever it may be)—contribute your smile, your laughter, your tears. Contribute your silence, your listening and your comfort of others. Contribution is a stance that strengthens patience. When you contribute you plant a seed of some kind. And you don’t know when that seed will germinate. You don’t know when it will sprout. Contribution prepares the ground to hold the despair. And sometimes that’s the best we can do, while we wait for a better day ahead.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 If you or anyone you know is contemplating suicide call 988 or reach out here.

If you are seeking a therapist—this is a helpful website

What we need is here.

“…clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.”
— Wendell Berry, Wild Geese

What we need is here. This is one of those sentences that, when I am having a hard day, always makes me think, “Bullshit.”  What I need isn’t HERE. When what I need is more money, or snow tires or someone in particular, then it doesn’t feel like it is here --it feels like it is there. And there can feel so far away, so far out of reach. I can be inconsolable, frustrated, impatient. When you feel like what you need is there, then you completely forget to look where you are: you forget to be here.

Clear in the ancient faith. That’s the part of this poem I love. He’s describing the geese overhead flying overhead and knowing their way. You have all seen it, geese flying high, in formation. They know where they are going. They have each other. They have all they need to get where they are going. Those beautiful lines in the sky, those harbingers of change in both fall and spring.

What we need is here. Maybe I needed this refrain this week because sometimes the world’s problems seem too big, too ongoing, and my despair can creep back. Despair is always a sign that you have lost your ancient faith, that you have forgotten that you have all you need. It is a sign you are looking outside of yourself, and everything you are looking for is inside.

This may be one of the biggest disciplines of healing. You aren’t going to keep yourself from losing it, from getting frustrated, from feeling despair, from wishing that someone or something could fix it for you—all of that, my friend, is a guarantee of this work. But the discipline is coming back to yourself, to be clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. To catch yourself in the act of looking everywhere but within and to sit yourself down. Breathe. Pray. As the poet says, be quiet in heart. This act of slowing down, of catching yourself is so powerful. It is a necessary skill or capacity for healing, for being able to tolerate the grief and loss and frustration that comes with healing trauma, or really, getting through any tough stretch of life.

It’s not about putting a better face on it, or wishing it away or pretending it’s not bad. It’s about knowing, having faith in, trusting that despite how you feel, you have all you need to make it through the journey. It might not be pretty. You might not be happy. You might feel like you are barely hanging on. I am pretty sure that those geese who fly all the way from Canada to Virginia have moments of wondering whether they are going to make it, or at the very least “Are we there yet?!”

When you say to yourself, “what we need is here,” you are the friend who comes over for tea on a bad day and says “we can figure this out.” Healing requires that we befriend ourselves, not abandon ourselves. That in our worst moments we remind ourselves, what we need is here. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2022

Original Publication January 2015

Healing 'Bad Dog': Understanding Traumatic Self-Talk

“You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine”
— Elvis Presley, Hound Dog

Last week I wrote about understanding self-talk and practices to support more positive self-talk, and today I want to write about trauma and self talk. Trauma has its own impact on self-talk—how it affects us, and how we use it. And the antidote to it is not what you might think.

Even if you work really hard on healing, there are just some days where you fall in a hole. You think to yourself that you can’t possibly be back here again. The feeling of being lost, disconnected and unable to find your footing, again. Waking up 4 or 5 times a night, again. And when we are off balance, we don’t instinctively slow down, we thrash to right ourselves. Being off balance, like slipping on ice, puts us back in ‘survival mode’ and we tend to use whatever we once used to survive. In this state we try to regain control most often through our self-talk. My favorite version of this is something I call ‘Bad Dog.’ In ‘Bad Dog’ nothing I do is right. My inner voice is viscious and judgmental. Bad Dog isn’t just about perfectionism. It’s about living in a situation where I have to get it right or the world will end—where someone might die.

When bad dog hits I get wound up trying to do the right thing—at everything: the right way to food shop, to do the laundry, to make a PowerPoint. But nothing is ever right. I should know after all these years that Bad Dog isn’t the problem, it’s a very, very old attempt at solving a problem. It is a red flag, a signal I am in the ‘way back machine’-that I am trying to stop a storm that has long since blown over. Bad Dog and its viscious voice are an attempt at a solution—a way to not feel out of control, to not feel what I am feeling. But Bad Dog’s siren call is so seductive and powerful. The inner voice is so believable.  It looks so possible to finally be ‘good dog’ —that I might finally get the biscuit. Curl up in the warm bed.

So I often spend a long time thrashing around —and do what I always do—spending a long time fighting the process. Fighting the experience, fighting the feelings, frustrated that I am in this place of not-knowing again. I treat it like a house-guest who I don’t want to stay. I alternate between being rude and ignoring it, hoping it will take the hint and pack its bags. Spoiler alert: this never, ever works.  Almost always, instead of acknowledging where I am, I fight it believing that giving in to it, in the form of acknowledgment would mean that I am ‘lost’ and that I will spend an eternity feeling like this. That I will be stuck “here” forever.

But by some act of grace, I finally get tired of thrashing around. I let go. I surrender. I grab ahold of one of the words. And this is really the difference between managing your average every day negative self-talk, and traumatic self-talk. With traumatic self-talk, you have to slow way, way down. You don't heal traumatic self-talk one story at a time, or even one sentence at a time. You heal it one word at a time. You have to pick one word, one feeling. So, I stay with with one of the feelings. I finally let go of the idea that the answer will come as one coherent sentence and I take the lifeboat I have been offered: that one word, that one feeling. And I begin to talk about it, work with it, see if the names I give it, fits. I start somewhere, saying things out loud to see if they match the swirling experience inside me:

“Am I angry? No, that doesn’t fit. Am I sad? Well, I do feel kind of a heaviness in my chest, but the word ‘sad’ doesn’t seem to fit. Am I disappointed? No. Let me go back to the heaviness in my chest—I could feel that. What is that? I notice I am sighing. I take a deep breath. My only thought is I want to lie down and give up. I say out loud, “I am exhausted” and I burst into tears. The experience has a name.

But I don’t stop there. I keep talking. You can’t stop with the one word. Keep talking. “Exhausted. I am so tired of holding it all together. Tired of waiting. Tired of having to earn the right to be ‘good.’ And I dissolve into tears again. And for the first time in over a week, I can feel all my muscles let go and relax. I am not thrashing anymore. The storm abates, the seas calm. I know where I am.

It’s really important to understand that the words that come out of your mouth or from the end of your pen or your keyboard as you try to figure it out don’t have to be logical, or coherent, or make sense. The words you utter are like scavenger hunt clues. They often don’t make sense in and of themselves. They can be wrong. They can sound awful or silly or stupid. They might shock you or be something you never thought that you thought. But they lead you to the next word. Which leads to the next. And finally you find it, the name for what you are feeling, or the feeling for what you are thinking, or the narrative for the action you are living.

You heal traumatic self-talk by listening to yourself—your thoughts, your feelings, word by word. Traumatic self-talk served an important role. It wasn’t a Bad Dog, it was your Guard Dog. But you don’t need it any more. You can let it rest. You can listen to it. You can be brave enough to share these thoughts and feelings with someone who can help you heal. When Bad Dog comes up, you can tell yourself that this is old. That you don’t need this protection anymore. You can thank it for its loyal service. And you can listen to yourself word by word.  

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

First Publishes Dec 10 2014

 

How to Talk to Yourself so You Will Listen, Part II: Practices for Effective Self Talk

Self-talk can either help you or hinder you—like the words from anyone else. It’s just harder to ignore the voice in your head because as the saying goes: wherever you go, there you are.

While there is plenty of self-talk when it comes to figuring things out—and sorting through thoughts, most self-talk comes from trying to control our behavior. It either wants to get us to do something: Get up off the couch and walk now! Or, it wants to get us to NOT do something: Take a big, deep breath and close your computer before you reply to that email and regret it.

The problem is, as I started to describe in a previous post, that the habitual voice that many people use is judgmental, mean and threatening. Any voice that is mean or judgmental doesn’t put us in a state of mind to get things done—it’s a voice that puts us in a state of mind to pull the covers over our heads or take a stiff drink. Judgmental and mean voices induce shame—and shame is not a motivator for sustained change.

And threatening doesn’t work either. Perhaps the best example of why threatening doesn’t work is that the most dangerous threat that a person can receive—the threat of death—is not actually a motivator for health behavior change. The research shows that when people are told by their cardiac physicians that they will likely die if they don’t change their health behavior, only 1 in 7 actually do so. Six out of Seven don’t. Even under the threat of death. Threats simply aren’t effective.

So here are three practices to support effective self-talk for growth and healing:

Practice I: Be a person of very few words

Whether I am working with athletes, executives, trauma clients or parents I have found that one of the best practices for effective self-talk is the mantra---no more than 3 three words. If you can make it one, even better. If you were to walk in to your kid’s room and see clothes all over the floor you could totally lose it and start a diatribe: Look at this mess, haven’t I told you to pick it up, I am never going to buy you new clothes again…. Or, you could just walk in, look at the floor , look at your child and simply say: Clothes. By saying it in a word you get your point across, the task is apparent, and you have left the child and relationship intact. This is the goal of your self talk as well: get your point across, keep yourself in the best state possible for the outcome you want, and leave the relationship with yourself intact.

It’s best to think of situations that usually trip you up—where you typically use your self –talk as a weapon of self-destruction, rather than a tool for self-growth, and then come up with short one, two or three word mantras that you can pull out and use. Short, simple: Breathe, Smile, It’s Okay, Just one more, I got this. I have found with athletes that if they focus on the action they need to get a result, rather than the result itself, it works much better. For example, if they say Eyes Up! or Quick Legs! rather than some long discussion with themselves about trying harder to win. The same is true for all us—One at a time! is way more effective for getting through a stack of paperwork than some lecture on how you never get things done. So pick 3 mantras to practice this week.

Practice II: Call yourself by your name or something even kinder…

Yes, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but your actual name has more power than you think. Recent research shows that if we use our own names in our self-talk, as in: Gretchen, you are almost done, hang in there, we are more likely to coach ourselves with kindness and compassion and be more effective than if we say “I.” When we use “I” we tend to become demanding and judgmental.

My mother-in-law used to always put the word dear after our names when she spoke to us, as in: Gretchen, dear, what a lovely job you did with the garden. I think adding dear to your self talk wouldn’t be asking too much either. And I worked with an intern on one of my psychology rotations who, when she was really struggling, would call herself Honeychild as in: Honeychild you are going to get this report done and then be able to go home. Which I thought was brilliant.  So if you catch yourself in the act of negative self talk—shift to using your name, the name you like to be called, the name you want to be called—and allow for a more effective and compassionate voice.

Practice III: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, let someone else do the talking.

Sometimes the voices seem to win. You can’t change them, and they just won’t shut up. There is a truth that the harder you try to fall asleep and focus on falling asleep, the harder it is to actually fall asleep. There is a parallel experience with inner voices. Sometimes the harder you try to shut them down, the louder and more annoying they get. So sometimes it’s just better to drown them out. Listen to music or a podcast on your walk. Do your paperwork with a favorite movie playing. Listen to a book on tape while you do whatever task you need to do. Sometimes listening to someone else’s voice, anyone else’s voice is the only way to get a break from your own. Sometimes it’s just more important to do the thing you need to do, with the least damage possible, than it is to fight or re-program the voices. And from a neuroscience perspective—you are doing something challenging with a different experience: you are giving your neural pathways a chance to re-reroute. 

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Originally Published Dec 2015