I've come at this in two different directions... the top down and the bottom up. Both were through therapies of different kinds. Neither worked.
The top down approach, or the "spiritual" approach, is about acknowledging that we are all oneness, or the divine. Or for the sake of discussion, let's say that we all come from starlight. The spiritualists tell us we are all just starlight, and we are not this personality, so there's no real need to suffer. Yet if you look at a lot of the gurus teaching this stuff, there are hidden addictions, sexual scandals, various suffering. "It's all just mind, this is all Emptiness". So it's not working. We can tell ourselves we come from starlight but it's not making the problem go away. There is a fundamental, human level SELF that is wanting acknowledgement which the spiritualists are bypassing. It's what a lot of "spiritual" people are doing. I've done it.
Then there's the bottom up approach, or the modern psychotherapy approach. They tell you that you're being too in your head and that you have to get into your body (in the case of somatics). Or that you just need to re-frame the problem, which is a re-telling of the story, and then once you perceive it differently you won't suffer anymore. Or that you just need to change your environmental circumstances, be more productive, make more friends, etc. It also doesn't work.
I feel that the thing that nobody is honing in on is the real self. It's the original you, before you were told that you're a you, that you have a name, an identity. You're born as this self. I'm not talking about universal consciousness or oneness. You come into the world as love wanting to experience life. To put this another way... God wants to live through you, as you. You are an individuated version of the universla consciousness that wants to BE YOU and nothing else. It's one thing to say that we're all starlight but you're actually starlight that has come into living in this particular form, for whatever reason. So you need to live as this real you. No other version will work. You also can't pretend that you're the universe because you're not -- you're you.
The real-self is born and then starts experiencing the body-mind. It starts to identify with the thoughts of the mind and the sensations of the body that it experiences. It experiences them as itself, when actually they aren't. Various traumas and teachings become patterns that cause the real-self to wall itself off from itself, into a sort of forgetting. On some level you say, "Oh shit! I don't want to do that! I want to be the REAL ME". At this point, most people begin grasping at the external in order to correct this... they go for materialism, or relationships, or "spirituality", or sex. All these things bypass the fundamental problem.
The real-self contains its own origin, through all the pain. So underneath these suicidal thoughts, the shame, the insufficiency, or whatever it is that comes up, is a real-self begging to be seen. It's not separate from you. It is you, in a very basic, practical way. It's not esoteric. When someone falls on the street and you go to help them up without thinking, or you put food in your mouth... it's all the real self in motion. There are no thoughts. The real self is the only thing that's present during deep sleep, which is a good way to differentiate it.
So I'm at the bank dealing with my accounts and a woman behind me in line starts getting impatient and annoyed. She gives me dirty looks. In the moment I'm thinking, "Whatever, she can wait." But then I leave the bank and I'm driving home, and the thoughts begin. What was her problem? I didn't do anything wrong. Fuck that pissed me off, now I'm angry. What's wrong with me? And so it starts... the dissonance. You start separating from the present moment because there's a pattern in your real-self that is triggered. Somewhere a long time ago I probably learned that it was not OK to hold people up, even if it was about getting my needs fulfilled. Other people come first, and if I don't listen to that I must be a bad person. The real-self, me as this person, learned that the only way to safely BE love in the world is to put other people first.
The top-down method would be... we are all just starlight and oneness, and my feelings are temporary. So I don't need to get so distracted by them. Go back into starlight, go back into the oneness, and let it go. I would abdicate this human level experience to the universal consciousness. The bottom-up approach would be to tell myself that the woman was probably just having a bad day, or she hates lineups, or whatever else I need to make up about her in order to feel temporarily better about myself. But that need to feel better is indicating that there is a deeper need not being fulfilled, a wounded pattern that the real-self is holographically duplicating every time there is an impatient person around me. I need to go into the real self (not the body, not the mind) and ask it what it needs, what the solution would be. What do I really want? And the answer I discover is: I want to be loved even as I am fulfilling my needs; I can fulfill my needs and it doesn't make me selfish, it means I love taking care of myself. Bam... the wound dissolves and the light of the real-self shines through.
But the real-self examination would be to quiet the mind, enter the heart, and gently ask yourself when the first time was you ever felt this particular way - shame, abandonment, anger, whatever it is... there are many favourites. Eventually you find the original thing... the time when the real-self, which is pure love, learned that it was not OK to be love in a certain situation. It turned in on itself. But paradoxically, the aberration cannot touch its origin. It still remains pure. So as you go into the painful experience that originated the walling off, you experience a burst of light, or energy... the wound begins to dissolve and the real-self shines through. The real you.
We all have this kind of forgetting, in some ways. I believe it is part of design. We come in as a pure form and then the stories and layers of confusion begin. We can look at the superficial aspects of why people are suicidal - yes the environment plays a role, but some people thrive in adverse circumstances while others whither and die. Being suicidal and ending up in a death knell often has a lot to do with how the real self is being honoured or not. It's not enough to realize how the real-self took on a distorted pattern; it's not enough to realize what the real self wants; you have to actually live from that, every day, in order to really thrive. For example, if you begin to recognize that the real-self really has a thirst for learning, an innate curiosity, a drive to know more and more, yet you make zero change to enrich your life with complex learning, then you're doing yourself a disservice.
I'm not talking about the inner child. Forget that. Working with the inner child is, in many ways, a road to getting more fucked up. The inner child is usually the first stage of distortion of the real-self, as children start to take on various patterns from experiences and their parents. The real-self is primal, it's #1. You usually know you're in resonance with it because the solar plexus lights up, like a tiny seed of light. You'll know you're breaking through to that presence, through the pain, once you get that nice little belly glow.
The truth is that we are universal consciousness. We are also individuals. As individuals we need to honour our unique natures, and not our contrived natures that the world has told us we are. It was to do with your original blueprint, as this person. It's the you that you've always wanted to be, the only one you care to be. And once you recognize this real self again, you won't long for anything else.
I strongly feel that being suicidal is about this. A core self seeking its own essence, through the lens of distorted patterning. The distortions create dissonance through being triggered, and then the dissonance leads to an internal sense of self-separation and falsehood, which becomes anti-life. Fortunately the solutions are already inwardly available. It takes acknowledging what the original you wants and needs... what the green lights are for you in life, rather than the yellow and red lights.
You still can.
