The Disintegrating Self: A Short Reflection for Suicide Prevention Month

*This post mentions suicide. No details. Please don't read if it might be upsetting for you.*

I thought about writing various things for World Suicide Prevention Day (or month) this year. I wrote something on my personal social media, and about an hour later, I deleted it.

I thought about writing a few things across a few different contexts, but for each of these I didn't go ahead. There were lots of reasons for my decision to not share.

Suicide is very, very complex and, understandably, highly emotive in many different ways.

Of all topics, it's probably the one that makes me worry most and the one I feel most scared to talk about. That being said, it's a subject I would find useful to talk about, but only if I knew that the other person felt fully comfortable.

The tricky thing is that I don't know how to know if someone is fully comfortable. Maybe the only way to know is to ask. That feels like a risk. I'm worried that I'd be too much.

If someone asked to talk with me about it though, I would say yes. That's because I'm comfortable with talking about suicide (and self-harm, hearing voices, visions, unusual beliefs and so on..) I think there is an immense value in talking.

It's interesting to me that there's a growing body of research showing that feelings of disconnection contribute to some individuals' struggles with suicidality.

For me, feeling connected to people in my life is about feeling able to show all different parts of me, including the parts that feel painful and struggle.* I feel disconnected when I feel I can't show all the different parts of me.

I often feel that I can't show all of them.

For me, suicidal thoughts and related experiences relate heavily to this and the feeling of disconnection this brings me.

This feeling of disconnection is inseparable from the emotion of shame. Shame is a relational emotion. It happens in the context of other people, as I have written about extensively on this blog and in my books.

In Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, Patricia A. DeYoung writes that ‘shame is the experience of one’s felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other’ (p. 21).

I completely know what De Young means here with the word 'disintegration'. At times, shame has made me feel like I am falling apart, like I don't know how to live.

This post shares something I wanted to express and think about a bit more over the near future. I don't know if I will get a chance to talk about it.

*I'm okay. I'm in a good place at the moment, thankfully.

-Rosie x