Suicide Part Three: The anchor that saved my life

I was sitting on the edge of the bed.  It was another one of those peculiarly painful nights back in the psych unit about thirty years ago.  In my heart I cried out, “Oh Jesus.  Only you can uphold my mothering relationship with my children!!”

It was the summer of 1991.   I’d had a severe manic break a few months previous, and my ex-husband used my infirmity to gain primary custody of our young son and daughter, (ages 9 and 6).  My soul was in shreds, and I was left with every other weekend visitation.  Although I was heavily involved in crystals and channeling and many other New Age practices of the 1980’s and 90’s, that night it was to Jesus that I prayed.  

I was desperate, heartbroken, and very lonely.  I can still see the sparsely lit night outside my window.  I can still feel the choking shock and despair.  I hadn’t thought of Jesus in a long time but it was to He that I prayed with single minded intensity.   “Jesus, only you can uphold my mothering relationship with my children.”  It was a prayer from the very depths of my being; it rose up from the place where the children had been conceived and carried and birthed.  It wasn’t something I conjured up or reasoned out.  It was a hoarse cry in the depths of the abyss that found a niche in the heart of God.

Anyone with bipolar disorder knows just how individualized the condition is.  No two people with bipolar are alike, and often the episodes themselves are different from one time to another.  The lack of predictability exacerbates the difficulties of managing and living with this particular mental illness.  That’s why having an anchor helps so much.  Though the cycles rage in a hundred different shades of turbulence, a good anchor retains its shape and strength.  This is especially needful for those of us with the kind of bipolar that rockets up into delusional states and plunges down into dangerous depths.  (i.e., Bipolar 1)

I cannot even count how many times I seriously wanted to die or believed I would be better off dead.  Having an anchor didn’t prevent or protect me from the ravages of depression; it didn’t dull the pain;  it wasn’t a magic “fix”.  The anchor didn’t make dying less attractive, but it did stand firmly in the way of actively pursuing death.  It kept me from entering that state of obsessing over a plan and trying to make it work.  In the midst of not caring about anything, I was grounded in a life-giving imperative that God repeatedly reinforced and sustained.

It takes a deep desire to forge an effective anchor, and it needs to be named and set well before any thought of suicide appears.  You can’t just make it up at the last minute.  You also can’t make it up out of “should”s or a desire to please someone, even to please God.  God, through the Holy Spirit and in answer to prayer can help you see what is the bottom line for you.  You might see it in a “a-ha” moment, or it might spring out of you under stress, as it did for me.  But it’s something that has the feel of a “FACT”, that you don’t have to conjure up or work up.  

When it comes to life and death choices and situations, it’s really helpful to have an ongoing relationship with the Author of life.  Personally, I needed God’s help and support to strengthen and keep my anchor alive.  It was to Jesus that I prayed.  There may be other ways to forge and sustain a life-giving anchor, depending upon the severity of your death wishes.  I just know that I received from Jesus what I asked for, and that I was never alone in the fight to stay alive.

I never regained custody of my children.  Our life together happened every other weekend, and sometimes a week in summer.  It certainly wasn’t the arrangement I longed for, but in Christ’s hands it was enough to sustain the mothering relationship I wanted so desperately.  Now that my son and daughter are grown with families of their own, the goodness of Christ’s gift is clearly evident.  I have ongoing good relationships with both of my children and also with their spouses and my five grandchildren. I might have missed all this.  When I thought I’d be better off dead I had no idea what blessings there would be down the road.

If you have any degree of depression, I hope you will take the time to uncover your non-negotiable bottom line.  You might think you’re fine and will never go “there,” but it can happen to anyone.  

Suicide Part Two: You Gotta Have An Anchor

People who have survived very serious attempts to kill themselves tell me that there’s something of a trance state at the end.  I mean, they’re so focused upon carrying out their plan that literally that’s all they can think of.  Ordinary cognition narrows to the point that no other thought or feeling registers.  You’re just not aware or even able to think of your loved ones, or the consequences of your suicide.  If you haven’t already established an anchor that’s deep enough and strong enough to pull you back at the last moment, your survival will depend upon some unforeseen intervention beyond your control, or the failure of your plan.  

An anchor is something that you care about and are willing to go through anything it takes to get it.  An anchor is the difference between wanting to get through the pain and wanting to get out of the pain.  I was counseling a man whose family came home unexpectedly and thwarted his plan to kill himself.  I told him with all my heart that God would help him come through the things that had motivated him to kill himself.  He stared back at me with cold, dead eyes..  “I don’t want to get through it, I want OUT.”  (As long as I knew him, he never wavered in wanting out.  Many years later his depression and anger and despair led to a completed suicide.)  

Wanting out of pain is a normal and actually rational desire.  However to remain rational, a person needs to be able to see multiple ways of addressing the pain.  Depression severely narrows and darkens our cognition, to the point where death is the only visible option.  It’s then that you need a strong desire that is deep to the point of being unquestionable and has a below-consciousness root.  That desire is what keeps you pressing on over and over and over again, over a wide variety of challenges and trials.  Once formed, if it’s healthy, and if you ask, God Himself will help you through the times that you can’t help yourself.  I know that for certain.  And I’ll tell you about it in the next post.

Suicide Part One: Depression as a Terminal Illness **trigger warning**

The therapist comes a little late to our “after care” group for people who have recently been discharged from the hospital’s psychiatric unit.  He has a look in his eyes that I’ve seen in other group leaders.  Quickly I scan the room looking for the empty chair and try to remember who usually sits there.  I don’t need to hear the therapist’s words to know what that empty chair means; it’s written all over his face.  I’ve been through this before in other groups, with other people.  The person who usually sits in that chair won’t be coming back next week, or any week.  They are a statistic now.  Another person with mental illness has successfully committed suicide.  

The thing is, it’s often someone who seemed to be doing ok.  The first time it happened in one of my groups, I was shocked.  By the third time I soberly concluded that absolutely no one was “safe.”  Mental illnesses like bipolar and chronic depression were as potentially terminal as any kind of cancer.  Survival could not be taken for granted – ever.  

I myself appear to be someone determined to live, someone who would “never” act on the despair behind those thoughts that I would be better off dead.  However, two years ago, after a disastrous medication change, I went into the worst depression of my life.  After living with bipolar for over 30 years, I thought I knew everything there was to know about my depressions – and I was wrong.  I never imagined it could get that bad.  But it did.  Fortunately the safety measures I’ve developed over the decades held up and I stayed in the “wish I were dead” zone and never progressed beyond that.  I formed no suicide plan.  I took no action.  I survived.  But I was shaken, and now I live with the awareness that it’s possible I could have such a devastating depression that my strategies of safety might fail.  Put differently, I now know with a terrible force that I am not capable of managing my illness at all times, under all the forms it could take.  

Once again I have to admit that I am literally dependent upon God’s love and mercy to do what I may not always be able to do on my own.  As fiercely as I’ve determined to never be the one who used to sit in that empty chair, the truth is it really could be me unless God were willing and able to catch me if the ground were sufficiently shaken and my feet slipped off the precipice.  

Suffering Well

When I’m deep in depression articles like this don’t help and can even hurt. But once I’m in a better place I find the same article gives me great inspiration and consolation. This one helped me find meaning in my past suffering and goes a long way towards helping me trust God in a more steady way. Hope that someone out there can find the same assurance.

www.desiringgod.org/articles/five-ways-affliction-helps

Finally – “Zero”

In His mercies and love, God has given me the “zero” plateau I have  so fervently desired.  (I’ve learned to scale my depressions and manias with 0 meaning no manic or depressive symptoms, and 10 being either the worst manic break or depressive bottom I’ve ever experienced.  I seldom find myself at Zero, and, over the past two and a half years, have swung between a 10 in mania, and a 10 in depression.  It’s been a rough ride.)  This time I asked for freedom from both depression and mania for the purposes of seeing God the Father reflected  in the face of the Son, through the grace and mercies of the Holy Spirit.  No “projects” or “ideas” this time.  No running around doing things that I finally have the energy and motivation to do (as is my habit when I’m feeling good).  All I wanted, and all I’ve focused upon this time is seeing God apart from the cognitive and emotional distortions that are the hallmark of a bipolar disorder.  

My amazing Christian therapist and my excellent psychiatrist both concur along with me that I entered this coveted Zero state around the 18th of January, that is, a day or two shy of two weeks ago.  In that time I’ve been able to enjoy reading scripture.  I’ve also been able to hear the “still small voice” more clearly than before, and with greater discernment between God’s still voice and my own voice.  I used to be pretty good at that discernment, but for these last two and a half years I could hardly identify my own voice from the cacophony of voices in my head.  Those blasted voices are absent now.  My mind is a quiet, safe place, and I can hear the murmurings of my Great Shepherd.  (Thanks be to God!!)

However, I’ve lagged behind in my ability to sense and feel Christ’s love.  I also haven’t been as aware of God’s abiding Presence as I had hoped.  But thanks be to God!  As I write now, and am finally realizing it’s not even been a full two weeks of stability, I am not as bothered or down on myself for these “deficiencies” in my experience of God.  Hearing the Voice again with some degree of accuracy is a gift of great magnitude.  Instead of keeping what I “lack” in my mirror, I am going to enjoy and go deeper into the hearing, and relax and let myself enjoy reading scripture without having to write down every thought the Word evokes.  

Every day, and every hour in Zero is precious to me.  I pray I will steward the time well.  

What is Your Defining Moment?

God is Love.  You know that.  I know that.  We know it as surely as we know Jesus died, was buried, rose again, and is now alive, seated at the right hand of the Father.  We know it because the Bible says so, from cover to cover.  Yes, we “know” God is love – but to what degree do we live as if that fact were the dominant reality of our lives?  When we define ourselves to ourselves, or to others, how often do we define ourselves as the object of GOD’s love?  

I recently discovered, (that is the Holy Spirit showed me one night), that my own  personal identity was completely wrapped up in just one single, defining moment in my life.  Something pretty bad had happened to me once, and Satan twisted it around by planting lies into the open wound, until that one rejection completely defined who I was and how I thought about myself, and basically how I acted and made choices throughout most of my life.  

That lie was buried so deep, and so often re-enacted throughout my life, that no matter what I was defined by that lie.  Not even 40 years of being a Christian brought it to the surface.  THAT is what a “strong hold” is,  and that is how dangerous, deadly, and destructive the hooks of Satan can be in our lives.  Even as believers!  For, here I was, year after year, struggling to believe God loved me and accepted me unconditionally in Christ, all the while “knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt” that I was – and always would be – the “rejected one.”  Put differently, I was a rejected person struggling to believe she’d been redeemed.  And as much as that redemption healed and helped me, it still took 40 years to uncover the lie that Satan had gotten into me in no more than a month.   

That’s how potent Satan’s lies can be.  Only the power of the Holy Spirit can reveal  those kinds of lies; only the power of the written word of God can destroy them; and only the power of the Son’s shed blood can heal the wounds and reverse the life course those lies set you on.  I’m so glad to be free!  I’m so glad I know the Word of God well enough to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am truly  DEFINED by the moment the Father applied the Son’s blood to me – THAT is my “defining moment,” not the trauma and rejection of my first days of life.  I am not only accepted and acceptable to God, I am also forgiven and freed from the damage and consequences of all the times that I have been the “rejector.”  I am redeemed! Thanks Be to God!

Accepting My Limits

Today I am rejoicing in the LORD because I am in a steady state where the distortions of mania and depression are both absent.  Euthymia (the clinical term) is a wonderful state for me.  Over the 35 years that I’ve been formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I’ve come to cherish these level times so much that I am no longer thrilled with the pleasantries of low mania.  Stability is better than any manic state – and of course far superior to depression.  I learned this from experience.  

I have also learned from experience that bipolar imposes limits on me.  Accepting that in the present, that is, “today,” I have limits due to the disorder is the only basis upon which I can “accept” the diagnosis in the manner that most therapists and psychiatrists want me to.  TODAY I have limits due to having bipolar disorder.  However God in His Sovereignty can elect to lift the disorder from me at any time; He can heal me in many ways, on many levels that reduce the burden of the diagnosis.  Therefore, while I accept that I have a physical disorder that imposes limits upon me now, the future is yet to be determined.  Even now, at age 65, 35 years after the diagnosis, I maintain the confidence that God can relieve me of the bipolar burden at any time and in any way that He chooses.  Bipolar imposes very real and often painful limits upon ME, but not upon my God. 

Today, however, I’m freer than I have been in a long time.  (I’ve cycled through full blown manic breaks and intensely deep depressions with no respite of stability since June 2019).  The only fetter upon me from manic-depression illness is a need for deep emotional and physical and mental rest.  If I get too active or take on too many obligations I can sometimes get physically depleted, which sometimes precipitates depressive episodes.  Therefore it is only wise to rest.  “Fortunately” the horrors of Covid also impose limits upon my activities that, today, dovetail with what I want and need.  Tomorrow I may wish to use some of my stability in more active ways than Covid will allow.  But today, I am in harmony with my inner and outer life, and even with the pestilence.

I’ve invested some of today’s freedom writing this blog post to you.  You may consider it my invitation to share our experiences.  So long as I am stable I almost always have time and energy to respond to comments.  Would love to read whatever thoughts or feelings my writing today brings up for you!  

May the Lord bless you with inner harmony and deep peace. May you know freedom from illness, and freedom to choose well and wisely – Sande