I had a therapist that I really liked once because he taught me a great way to look at dreams. He taught me to completely abstract all the crazy imagery down to simply the bare bones of what was occurring and then to focus on my emotional reactions to the metaphorical actions and occurences in the dreams. I wonder if it would help to apply that to your thoughts of suicide? It has always been my opinion that that people who want to die want the life they are living to die--in other words they desperately want to live, just not this life. Self hatred can be seen as harboring an enemy within your own house. That enemy keeps telling you that you should die when in fact your biology tells you you need to live. It is the voice in your head that says you are worthless and that every attempt at change will be futile that has to die. What if you have lived with this enemy in your head so long that it is now your family; it is what is familiar and in some way comforting?
Another thing this therapist taught me to ask myself was ,"what positive am I getting from this thinking?" At first this seemed ridiculous to me--how could there be a positive to beating myself with guilt and remorse and self-hatred? I came to understand that it was not "positive" in the simple sense of the word but that it held a positive charge for me. What finally got through to me was the Buddhist concept of compassion for myself. I knew that I would never see someone else as simplistically as I was seeing myself. I could understand the motivations and circumstances for someone else but not myself. Buddhists say that compassion for the self is the hardest compassion to develop and IME this is true. But it is the first and most necessary compassion and it has to be attended to every single day. All other compassion flows from this place in you.
Often the struggle that is masked by suicidal ideation is the struggle to understand what you can and cannot control. When a newborn is first subjected to life outside the safety of the womb most cultures recognize the need to hold them close to the mother and, when this is not possible, to swaddle or tightly bind the limbs so that they do not feel as if they are falling through space unprotected. Sometimes I think that no matter how old I get I will need to metaphorically be swaddled by the boundaries of my own body--to go
within looking for answers rather than in the chaos of the larger world. Right now you say the world makes no sense to you--it appears heartless and senseless, overwhelmingly so.
It is. So you are seeing a truth. But that is one facet and you are blinded to the other facets by your own heartless and senseless treatment of yourself and your life. It is as if we embody the autocratic parent wagging a finger at us and saying"you are terrible because you are not perfect". So much of growing seems to be unlearning as much as it ever is learning. Maybe they are the same thing.
I hope that you are able to kill the fatalism within yourself, the need to convict yourself every waking moment. This is what needs to die--not the beautiful child that could once feel the world as a miraculous place full of surprise and adventure. That is the part of you that wants to live, that wants to be saved. When you can accept your own darkness as a part of being human, you can not only live with it but begin to see its usefulness. When you can own it it ceases to own you.
Try to go further into these feelings like a warrior. But be clear about what the enemy really is.
