The Link Between Suicide, Trauma and Emotional Abuse
This is an incredibly difficult post for me to write, because it’s an incredibly difficult topic.
I’d like to talk about suicide.
I will be talking about suicidal ideation, emotional abuse, and trauma. The nature and content of this material might be disturbing or upsetting.
Before I do, I would like to say right now, if you are suicidal, having suicidal thoughts, or thoughts of hurting yourself or someone else, I invite you to use any of the following resources for immediate support:
National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
Crisis Textline: text “HOME” to 741741
Online Crisis Chat: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/
If you choose to read this post, keep these numbers close by, and consider reading this when you’re in a safe place, in close proximity of someone you trust, and/or can comfort yourself if you find the content upsetting.
I debated for weeks on whether to write about this. I consulted a close friend, who has also experienced suicidal ideation, for a second set of eyes and wisdom.
Let me reassure you that right now, I am not suicidal. Please know that as soon as I have these thoughts, I tell my therapist and my husband (or whoever is living with me at the time). I now recognize my own patterns enough at this point to know when I need to ask for help. When I experience intense emotions, when I’m flooded with insecurity or fear, and when it all seems to be “too much,” I ask for help.
My goal is not to scare anyone. Nor is it to ask for attention. If that’s what you think is happening here, I invite you to do a lot more reading about suicide, suicide myths, and how to talk to someone who is suicidal. It’s not your fault if you believe this—suicide is a taboo topic and rarely discussed, and there are a lot of misconceptions and myths about people who experience suicidal thoughts, about talking about suicide, and about what to do if someone is suicidal.
My goal is to build awareness and language around something I know other people experience. To add depth and perspective to a topic that almost nobody discusses. To create space for people who do have these thoughts to feel less alone, to feel safe to ask for help, and for their support systems to have more language and wisdom around the complexity of suicidal ideation and origin.
Deep breath everyone. In, and out. Are you safe? Are you okay? Are you ready? Let’s dive in.
This morning I saw a video on the internet that broke my heart. It was a video of a nine year old boy in Australia who was born with achondroplasia, a common type of dwarfism. He was regularly bullied, and his mother filmed a video of him in the car after school to show the impact this bullying had on him.
In the video, I watched him cry and curl his fists together, as he swayed back and forth in his seat. As he sobbed, he told his mother he wanted to stab himself in the heart. That he wanted to bang his head through glass. That he wished someone would just kill him. He pointed to his mother and said, “even you don’t do anything, you just stand there!”
I covered my mouth and held back tears in horror. This boy was nine. NINE. And he was suffering so deeply that the only solution he could fathom to relieve himself from this pain was death.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I were talking about my “feelers” as he calls them—he often says I have really sensitive feelers, to mean that I feel things more deeply than others. He used a beautiful metaphor to describe it (you might not find it beautiful in the traditional sense of the word, but I found it poetic and all too spot on):
“For me, when something hurts me or upsets me, it’s like I’m getting shoved or pushed. It bothers me, but I bounce back unscathed. For you, it feels like getting stabbed with a hundred knives, over and over and over again—and just when the stabbing stops and your wounds begin to heal, it starts all over again.”
He was right.
This is what I imagined that little boy was feeling. The way he experienced the bullying in his body, heart, and mind was not something he could bounce back from. Rather, as I watched him writhing, I imagined he must feel like a hundred knives were stabbing him over and over again, jabbing at the wounds that a nine year old should never have to learn to heal.
The notion of having “sensitive feelers” is one I’ve wrestled with for most of my life. Since I was a little girl, I felt my feelings more deeply, privately, and intensely than I imagined most of my peers did. In retrospect, I don’t know if this is true—perhaps all my peers felt the same level of intense anguish as I did. I don’t know, because I never talked to anyone about how I felt—I was too ashamed or scared to. I thought my feelings were too much—too big—an overreaction or exaggeration. So I kept them to myself.
I now understand these beliefs about my sensitive feelers—or even the adaptation of sensitive feelers—were learned behavior. I don’t believe we are born to think “I exaggerate my feelings” or “I overreact to things.” We learn those things. Through cultural messaging, from kids at school, from caregivers and adults.
I’m not saying this to point blame—I believe my parents did the best they could with the tools they had, just as their parents did. I believe kids at my school treated me the way they did because they had their own wounds to deal with. And I believe society has come a long way to reconstruct the messages it sends about how to cope with our emotions—I would like to think the “buck up” era is coming to an end—but when I was young being sensitive was still considered weak, and I believed there was no place in society for “sensitive Susans” like me.
As a result of believing my feelings were out of proportion, I didn’t seek comfort or support from friends or adults. I feared I would be met with “it’s not a big deal,” or “you’ll be fine.” Instead of reaching out, I wrote in my diary, stored my feelings inward, and eventually developed a complicated, fraught relationship with my emotional landscape and how to cope with it (enter eating disorder, alcohol abuse, and suicidal thinking).
By the time I was 13, I believed I was inherently worthless, that there was little hope for someone like me in the world, and that I would be better off dead. I wrote in my diary that I wondered if my friends would care if I died. Among other morbid drawings, I drew pictures of me with “X”s where my eyes should be. There was an ever-present thread of believing it would be better for everyone if I were dead—and that they likely wouldn’t even notice.
In college I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt—one that I made out of intense guilt, shame, and self-loathing. My high school sweetheart had passed away six months prior, and the guilt of never telling him I loved him ate away at me so deeply that I actually believed I deserved to be dead instead of him.
When deep depression and hopelessness have paid me a visit in my life, I have had fleeting thoughts wondering “how long I’ll last“ or “if I’ll make it through this year.”
Other days I’ll be in such a flurry of panic—smothered in that feeling of being repeatedly stabbed with no reprieve—that I’ll get in the shower so I can sob and muffle screams with the sound of the water. I’ll close my eyes so tight, hoping that will stop the thoughts and pictures in my mind of banging my head against a wall.
These are all forms of suicidal thinking, and yet they come in very different packages, for very different reasons, and at very different times, for each individual who experiences them.
The video of this boy got me thinking about the epidemic of bullying, cruelty, and abuse in our culture. How abusive it is to say mean things to someone about the way they look or act. How abusive it is to not believe in someone’s dreams and diminish their life views. How abusive it is to ignore or neglect someone. How abusive it is to withhold kindness in order to “teach lessons” or instill strength.
The word abuse is strong—I know. But tormenting someone to the point where they believe they would be better off dead feels pretty damn abusive to me.
This got me doing some research, and I discovered there is such a type of abuse, with its own name and set of indicators: Emotional Abuse.
Some suicidal people have experienced years of emotional abuse, whether repeatedly from the same person, or from multiple sources in unbearable intervals.
During my time as a therapist, I worked with highly suicidal at-risk clients, 90% of whom had experienced some form of ongoing emotional abuse in their lives. I didn’t know then there was a word or language around a lot of what my clients had faced in childhood. Many of them experienced repeated occurrences of emotional abuse—whether it was the cruel teasing of a bully or invalidating words of their caregivers (Legg, 2019).
“...Emotional abuse may be relatively more important in explaining suicidal behavior than physical abuse or neglect” (Miller, Esposito-Smythers, Weismoore, & Renshaw, 2013).
Emotional abuse is incredibly complex, difficult to address, and certainly not black and white. Emotional abuse is not as easy to point at as physical or verbal abuse, but it is real, and it can cause serious harm to children who are vulnerable and have no understanding of what is happening to them (Spinazzola & Hodgdon, 2014).
I won’t go into too much depth about emotional abuse—that would require its own article. But I will cover a few basics of what it is, and some resources if you feel compelled to keep learning.
What Is Emotional Abuse
Invalidation
Emotional abuse can come in the form of invalidation. Invalidation is dismissing, denying, or ignoring someone else’s emotions.
For example, if I say, “I feel really sad about what just happened,” invalidation would be a response of “you’re being too sensitive,” or “it’s not that big of a deal,” or “you’re taking this too seriously” (Gordon, 2020)
Gaslighting
Gaslighting means someone is making you question your reality. It can look like denying an event ever happened, or telling you that your feelings or experiences aren’t real (11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting, 2017).
For example, if I say “last week it really hurt my feelings when you told me I wasn’t smart enough to apply for college.” Gaslighting would be, “you’re crazy, I never said that.”
Unattainable Expectations
When someone creates unrealistic expectations of you that are impossible to uphold, it’s a form of emotional abuse. Examples of this might include a partner, close friend, or caregiver expecting you to spend all your time together (impossible), putting your needs aside to tend entirely to theirs (unrealistic), or expecting you to have the exact same worldviews or opinions as them and lashing out when you don’t (Gordon, 2020).
Examples of this might be someone who says “we never spend time together” while you’re hanging out with them. This could be quite confusing, and make you wonder how much is enough and how can you ever meet this person’s expectations?
Superiority
When someone acts as though they are better than someone, or as though the other person is somehow inferior, it can be emotionally abusive. Someone might exert superiority by blaming you for their problems. Other examples include making fun of you or jokes that are at your expense. Sometimes people might speak as though they are always right or they know what’s best for others (Gordon, 2020).
Examples of this might be making statements like “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” or “that’s a really stupid decision, no one would do that,” or “I guess you just don’t love me” in a sarcastic tone.
The Relationship Between Emotional Abuse, Trauma, and Suicidality
If you haven’t read The Body Keeps the Score, now is the time to do so. Trauma lives in our bodies. Abuse—whether physical, sexual, emotional, or neglect, lives in our bodies. The brain rewires in response to trauma and abuse, especially when it happens in our formative years while our brains are still developing.
Dr. Van der Kolk’s book talks about how our brains and bodies remember trauma and abuse:
“The elementary self system in the brainstem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal. To people who are reliving a trauma, nothing makes sense; they are trapped in a life-or-death situation, a state of paralyzing fear or blind rage. Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger” (Van der Kolk, 2015).
When someone experiences perpetual, repeated, and lifelong emotional abuse—especially when it starts in childhood, it can create a painful internal structure that is incredibly difficult to navigate.
This is just one of many reasons people—including kids—feel suicidal.
When I think about my younger self, I wish I had been surrounded by cheerleaders. I wish my friends were my biggest fans, like they are now. I wish adults had encouraged me and believed in my “childish” dreams or ideas.
I know I can’t go back in time, but hopefully, I can share my experiences, research, and discoveries to invite awareness and open conversation around bullying, emotional abuse, suicidality, and the complexity of it all.
I invite you to become a part of the choose kindness trend. To practice validating and honoring the feelings and experiences of those around you. To shoot for non-judgmental responses rather than critical ones. To find the courage to stand up for people when they are being bullied or hurt. To check your ego and notice when you find yourself not being kind, caring, or understanding.
What to Do if Someone is Suicidal
It would be unethical for me to engage in a conversation about suicide without tools for addressing it.
I want to end with an offering of what you can say or do if someone tells you they are suicidal. This can be a really scary experience, for everyone involved. I invite you to practice these statements. To imagine hearing someone saying “I want to kill myself,” or “I feel suicidal” and practice responding.
If someone tells you, in any type of language, “I am suicidal,” I invite you to try the following:
DO
Keep the person safe—if you can be with them physically or virtually until they feel safe enough to be alone. Tell them you are going to stay with them (physically, on the phone, wherever the communication is taking place) until they feel safe. Making sure they are not alone is priority number one.
Listen. Let the person share whatever they want and be a safe space for them to do so.
Let them know how much you care. Tell the person you really care about them, and your life is better because they are in it. Let them know because you care so much about them, you are going to ask them some questions and try to offer support because you want to help them through this hard time.
Determine risk level. As scary as it might be, it’s important you find out more about their thoughts to determine if they have a plan. Ask, “do you have a plan?” You will not be encouraging them to think of a plan by asking this.
If they have a specific plan, make sure they do not have access to materials that could have them follow through on that plan (pills, weapons, ropes, anything relevant to their plan). At this point, I would call 911 as having a plan is quite serious, and if you are not a trained professional you are now out of your depth.
If they don’t have a specific plan, stay with them, and focus on the present moment and near future (next 24 hours). Help them think of a safe place to be for the next 24 hours, and plan a comforting activity before bed.
If you are unsure whether their response means they have a plan, offer to call a hotline with them and get help from a professional.
Make a plan to follow up. Tell them you plan to check on them and be specific. “I will call you tomorrow at 9am to see how you are, ok?”
Follow up. Check in with this person the next day like you said you would. Find out if they have other resources or people who can also check in on them.
DON’T
Act shocked. Saying “I had no idea” or “why didn’t you tell me you were struggling” might feel supportive, but these are your feelings and makes the situation about you—the person likely already feels guilty and ashamed, so your shock only adds to their feelings of “I can’t do anything right.” As hard as it is, save your shock for later and express it to a third party.
Invalidate or diminish their pain. Avoid saying things like “this isn’t a big deal,” or “why would you say that?” Or “you’re overreacting” or “you’ll feel better soon.”
Leave them alone. Leaving someone one alone right after they’ve said they are suicidal does two things: one, it reinforces the idea that people don’t care about them, and two it reduces the amount of barriers between thought and action.
Ask them why they want to kill themselves or argue with them. This will make the person feel like they have to prove how bad things are, which creates shame. It also keeps the person in the past, and our goal is to ground them in the present moment.
Try to fix or solve the problem. Try to resist giving advice or suggesting solutions to their problems.
Keep in mind you are not a professional, so be gentle with yourself if this situation comes up. The most important thing to remember is to take the person seriously, to be kind and loving, and to make sure they are safe.
If you have trouble with any of this, think about the nine year old boy with achondroplasia. Imagine it's him who has come to you and told you what he told his mom. How would you respond? Would you tell him he was overreacting? Would you think it would be okay to leave him alone? Would you accuse him of seeking attention? What would you do?
I imagine you would say “sweet darling, I am so sorry you are in so much pain. I am right here, and I am not going anywhere until you feel safe. I am right here. I care so much about you, and I am going to do everything I know how to help you.”
Keep Coping,
XO -Rachel
References
11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/11-warning-signs-gaslighting
Gordon, S. (2020, January 21). How to Identify and Cope With Emotional Abuse. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/identify-and-cope-with-emotional-abuse-4156673
Legg, T. J. (2019, November 21). What are the effects of emotional abuse? Retrieved from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327080
Popova, M. (2016, June 27). The Science of How Our Minds and Our Bodies Converge in the Healing of Trauma. Retrieved from https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/20/the-body-keeps-the-score-van-der-kolk/
Spinazzola, J., & Hodgdon, H. (2014). Childhood Psychological Abuse as Harmful as Sexual or Physical Abuse. PsycEXTRA Dataset. doi: 10.1037/e557682014-001
Suicide: What to do when someone is suicidal. (2018, January 31). Retrieved from https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/suicide/in-depth/suicide/art-20044707
Van der Kolk Bessel, B. (2015). The body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. NY, NY: Penguin Books.