Susan Rose Blauner - How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me: One Person’s Guide to Suicide Prevention

EPIGRAPH

WELCOME

FORWARD

EDITORS NOTE: WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS TO ME

ONE

SO YOU THINK YOU WANT TO DIE?

Hello

The Reality of Suicidal Fantasy

Moderation and Time Limits

Me

Finding Life Essence

Change (Arghhh) and Choices

TWO

OUTTHINKING SUICIDE

Breathing

The Language of Suicide

The Neuron Superhighway

The Grim Reaper

Brain Style

Recognizing and Avoiding Triggers

Stopping the Snowball

Finding Relief

THREE

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

TRICK #1

Asking for Help

TRICK #2

Emergency Contacts

TRICK #3

A Crisis Plan

TRICK #4

Feelings

Identifying Feelings

Feelings Chart

Feelings Galore List

Tracing Feelings Back

Stating a Feeling

TRICK #5

Feelings Versus Facts

TRICK #6

The Brady Bunch Syndrome

TRICK #7

Spirituality, Nature, Meditation

Spirituality

Nature

Meditation

TRICK #8

Acting As If

TRICK #9

HALT

Hungry

Angry

Lonely

Tired

TRICK #10

Keeping a Journal

TRICK #11

Tasks and ActivitiesHealthy Diversions

TRICK #12

The Telephone Lifeline and Phone Lists

TRICK #13

Contracts for Safety

TRICK #14

Brain Food

TRICK #15

Therapy

TRICK #16

Vitamin P

TRICK #17

Oh, What a Beautiful MorningSayings and Affirmations

TRICK #18

Mirror Work and Inner Dialoguing

TRICK #19

ServiceHelping Others

TRICK #20

Movement and Exercise

TRICK #21

Sound and Color

Sound

Color

TRICK #22

Support Groups

TRICK #23

Structure

TRICK #24

Hospitalization

TRICK #25

What About an Afterlife?

FOUR

THERE IS HOPE! LETTERS FROM MY THERAPIST, FAMILY, AND FRIENDS

Honesty

Sylvias Perspective

A Brothers Walk on Eggshells

Watching Her Husband, My Brother

Like a Holiday from Adulthood

God Doesnt Make Junk!

Sues Song

Rich with Humanity, Hope, and Change

FIVE

HELPING THE SUICIDAL THINKER

Introduction

Risk Factors and Warning Signs

Suicide Facts and Statistics

WORDS

What I Heard Versus What I Needed to Hear

Delivery and Timing

Expressing Your Feelings

Acknowledging Their Pain

Speaking from Love

BELIEFS

Secrets Are Deadly

Its Okay to Talk About It

Its a Family Challenge

Change Is Possible

ACTIONS

Listening Well

Respecting Boundaries While Taking Action

Practicing Patience and Compassion

Getting Educated and Finding Your Own Support

SIX

UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN

geese (a poem written by Christopher Brehl)

I Recognize

Destiny

SEVEN

HOTLINES, WEBSITES, AND OTHER RESOURCES

Hotlines and Suicide Prevention Organizations

Crisis Hotlines

Hotlines in Canada

Organizations

Organizations in Canada

Twelve Step Organizations

Book Lists

Books Useful to Me

General Works

On Youth

On the Elderly

For Professionals

For Survivors

NOTES

SEARCHABLE TERMS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COVER

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

I welcome you into this moment, where change is at your fingertips. Change, one of the most challenging things for humankind to embrace. Yet when we embrace it, great reward can be found.

I welcome your sorrow and your pain. I welcome your humor, imagination, and joy. I welcome your mind. I welcome you as you are, for only when we accept our present can we begin to change our future.

How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me is meant to be read slowly, with intention. There is a lot of information between the covers of this book. If you try to take it in all at once, youll be wallpapering your living room with all the lists and charts I give you to post. Pick and choose. Take what you like and leave the rest.

If you feel overwhelmed or pushed while reading, take a break, take a breath, and find something nice to do. If you feel like throwing the book across the room, throw it. I wont mind. I only hope that you return to it, for I am here for you, just as others were there for me. I care about you and how you are.

I welcome you into this moment of life. Like any moment, it contains endless possibilities and limitless choicesregardless of how we feel or what we think. I can honestly say that because of the choices I made, the depth of my pain has been filled with contentment. I live, feeling everythingdifficult and easybut I live in peace. I no longer wish to die.

I welcome you into this moment of my life. In a short while you will know more about me than most of the people I see every day. I know for certain that part of my destiny was to write this book. Perhaps part of yours is to read it. I wish you well as you do.

SUSAN BLAUNER , June 2001

My personal experience with death comes from my family and years as a physician. As the years have gone by I consider living difficult and dying easy. I see many people use their disease as a convenient way to commit suicide, and perhaps that is why so many young people today consider suicide as their treatment of choice. Yet I wonder if they ever consider the fact that they are choosing to kill someone while wounding many others. One of our sons is an FBI agent and he was asked if he could kill someone as part of his training. Perhaps to protect the lives of my loved ones I could, but even then I find it a difficult question to answer. A teenager I know was contemplating suicide after being physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by his parents. He was HIV-positive and ready to jump in front of a subway train. I wondered why he chose to kill himself rather than the people who were destroying his life. When I asked him, he responded, I never wanted to be like them.

I think that when you dont know what to do with your pain and are feeling unloved, suicide seems like a better choice than life. As one of our sons e-mailed to me one day, Life sucks, most people suck, and if you wake up one day and everyone loves you and the weather is beautiful, youre dead. That gets a laugh when I read it, but Im afraid there is a lot of truth in it.

We are born beautiful creations and then run into parents, teachers, and religious leaders, all of whom have the potential to make us feel unworthy and defective. We have to remember that, as authority figures, we can kill with words when they become wordswordswordsswords. It is an exceptional child who grows up loved and feeling like a child of God. When you do, you care for yourself in a way the unloved do not. Their addictions and destructive behavior are searches for the feeling of being loved, a feeling they never had.