All the advice, everywhere, about abusive relationships tell you to get out – to leave – to stop the monster that is hurting you. But what do you do when the person making your life unbearable, the person that is making you desperately want to die to make it stop, is you? What do you do when ‘I hate myself’ isn’t just a throw away comment, but is, instead, a pain so deep that you would do anything to make it end?

I’d Be Better Off Dead

Sometimes it feels like it is impossible for anything to get better – you’ve screwed things up so badly that there is no coming back. Nothing you do is right, nothing you do is good enough. It feels like there is no escape, because the person you need to run away from is the one person you can never leave behind. I understand that feeling well; I have been there myself, standing in the ruins of a life I have obliterated so completely that I cannot even find the pieces, let alone start to put them back together. How do you start to repair things, to build a life that feels worth living when the moment things seem to get better, the moment something good happens, you self destruct and blow it all to pieces again?

Here on SF, I see it every day. Kind, warm, caring people who give up their time and energy to reach out and help other people in pain, because they know what it feels like to hate yourself – what it feels like to loathe yourself with such venom that you want to die. The world is full of good people who hate themselves so much, feel so disgusted by their mistakes, by their own thoughts and actions, that they believe they would be better off dead. I have spoken to literally hundreds of them. If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you came here because you are one of them.

Forgiving Yourself

Maybe you are here because you feel like you don’t deserve forgiveness. You do. I don’t know what you have done, what choices you have made. I don’t know anything about you, but I know that if you were not a good person you would not feel so bad – you would not care so much that you want to die. If you deserved the hate you direct at yourself, you would not be able to feel it. You deserve to be forgiven. You deserve love and support and people who care about you. You deserve to be heard.

I am not trying to tell you that you are perfect just the way you are. Nobody is perfect. But imperfection is what makes us able to empathise, to love, to do the amazing things that humans do as they strive to be better. I am not telling you that you do not need to change; everyone changes, over time, and if there are things about yourself that you truly hate then you can work on changing those things. I know how easy it is to think that you need to change everything – that there is nothing good worth keeping or saving. You’re wrong. You may need help to see the good things; that happens when you have spent so long in such a dark place – it is hard to see the light. It is okay to need help. It is okay to ask for it. You may not feel you deserve it but you, like the other hundreds and hundreds of people who come to SF hating themselves, are wrong.

It’s Easier to Believe the Bad Things

Sometimes self hate doesn’t even come from things we did, or the mistakes we made. Sometimes self hate is built by other people – people who lie to us about who we are. Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are people who pretend to be friends, sometimes they are parents. When they are people who are supposed to love us, it is easy to believe that they are mean or violent because we deserve it.

It is hard enough when the negative words in our heads are our own. When they belong to people we love, it is that much harder to ignore them. To be told that you are not enough – not smart enough, not pretty enough, not g00d enough. If you get told often enough that you are a failure or that you are stupid or broken or ugly, especially by someone you love, it is easy for those lies to become your reality. Please, don’t let them. I know it is not easy and I know it hurts. I know that the only thing you want right now is to be someone worth loving, to be someone who deserves to live. I know you don’t believe it is possible and that is okay – let us believe it for you until you are ready to hear the truth from people who see you without the blackened tint of self loathing. Talk to us.

Depression is a Liar

Depression lies. It is a dark insidious thing that creeps into our brains and whispers to us that our more negative feelings about ourselves are true. Many people have no idea that the sucking black hole inside them that makes them feel like people would be better off without them is an illness. Depression makes people pull away from their friends because they believe they are bad for them, that they will hurt them. It tells people that ‘nobody likes you anyway’. It distorts and it warps and it leaves you believing there is nothing good left. Depression can make you believe that you are a worthless failure that will never amount to anything; it can make you believe you are too ugly to leave the house and that the world would be better off if you were dead.

If you feel any of these things, however much you believe that you feel them because they are true, you need the help of a doctor and you need the support of people who understand those feelings. I understand you do not believe you deserve that help. I understand you hate yourself because you believe you deserve that hatred. Let us show you that isn’t true. Join our community and talk to people who have beaten those feelings, people who can help you change the things you want to change and accept the things that you simple do not need to. Let us hold a candle in that darkness and show you the good things you cannot see for yourself.

In this particular instance there were lots of really good hints and tips, but one was way above the average post reply and stood out as worth sharing on a bigger platform. This is the reply from SF Member Citizen Insane, a member of the community for nearly 5 years. In that time he has had a lot of personal experience, as well as talking to literally hundreds of others in similar situations and getting tips to help himself. Hopefully his sharing will help others too.

“What do you do when suicidal ideations are too much?”?

Suicidal ideations are especially tough when the people in your environment do not seem to care and when there’s no hope for relief in sight. Relief from pain, emotionally and in some cases physically.

 It could feel like the world is completely blind to that fact and then the mental filter, the person who suffers has, will keep trying to confirm it that he/she indeed is alone and feels alone in this battle.

Finding a way to express these feelings is quite important, I think.

If I were to be suicidal, am I even asking myself the right questions?

Q1: Why do you wish to end it?

A: “Because I do not feel that I can recover from that which has happened to me in this life. There’s no cure for this illness and/or disorder I have. This is no life for me to live this way, every day I’m suffering and to what end?”

What the (sort of imaginary) person is describing is mostly about his despair and loss of hope. And thereby not talking about his/her actual desires. Not the desire and wish to end it.

Desires that could be: “I wish to be happy, I wish to live a life worth living and fighting for”. Somewhere in our minds, we got to actually believe that this is what a life should be about.

Happiness is never a permanent feeling, though you can be content with yourself over a longer period of time. The body is for sure not made to make a person “happy” and the brain is looking for a lot more than just that as well. Nowhere in evolution was there a single entity who was happy all the time.

Often I ask myself: “Even if I got those happy feelings in my head right now, would I really be doing anything differently in my life?” I already tell my family that I care for them and have love for them, even if my emotions are mostly numb. I am able to be entertained with my hobbies, like reading, music and playing the guitar, despite my concentration not always being optimal.

I would advise that you find something that you can still enjoy doing or an activity that makes you not feel the discomfort you usually have. I can’t answer which activity that may be, you are the person who knows yourself the best and what you like.

As opposed to the body having a limit to physical ailments, sickness and injuries, a person his/her mind is more flexible.

So what does a life look like in the end, when the person has endured all of the mental & emotional pains his/her brain has inflicted onto them?

Perhaps the question should be: What happens when the person finds his desires not fulfilled, should that person adjust his/her expectations of life in general?

-Citizen Insane

There were of course other answers and advice – all useful as well and all having the benefit of real experience behind them-

A few more from other members-

My number 1 recommendation for “being in a bad place” is to do something. Get up, go out, do something and “get away” from the trapped hopeless horrible – as in physically get away from it by going somewhere else. Sounds a bit nuts maybe, but being busy and changing your surroundings I really believe helps. Even if I go get a coffee in a coffee shop and doodle for a while. I also find planning incredibly helpful. Lists and colour codes and mind maps and “what my life is going to look like in 5 years, 10 years” etc. Give myself something positive to focus on that does not consider the option of dying.

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I like to listen to sad or angry music, or a touching film. Sometimes I feel the only way to get past it (depression/suicidal thoughts) is to go straight through it. That’s not always true though. Sometimes I try and force myself to do things I don’t want to, like: listen to upbeat music, leave the house (anywhere, even a trip to the shops if I don’t need anything), dance, sing, treat myself to nice food, and watch a new film or show. Sometimes it works, other times not, but a lot of times I have managed to free myself of those thoughts is by just getting back into the swing of things and making that change to feel better. Maybe some of these will help you too, I hope so.

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These are some things I do…read, write, talk to people, listen to music, play music, clean, spend time with my nephew, find something that makes me laugh, watch tv and movies I like. Just try to block the thoughts as best I can.

If you have your own questions that you would like to ask real people that have felt the same way – and want real answers to them stop into the community. Not all the answers will work for everybody, but there will be real answers from real people, and not just telling you to “get over it”.

If I put this as a poll I am sure there would be all the obvious guesses and some creative things as well, but the methods and things that are killing more than 2000 people per day around the world have very little to do with what they endured the final few minutes of their life and everything to do with what they endured during the weeks or even years before those final few minutes. The things they felt in the time leading up the final minutes are what killed them and more importantly, nearly all of these things could be addressed in other ways if only somebody had taken the time to really listen and try to help.

The list I am going to share is the list of things that are killing nearly a million people a year. From the site, I have come to understand what many suicidal people I have personally spoke with were dealing with. These are the things that are killing the people, and unlike the searches for painless methods and easy methods, these are all marked by incredibly intense and unendurable pain, a pain so bad that somebody would literally rather die than face another hour of it. In no particular order –

1. Break ups – Whether it is a divorce after year sand the loss of a family or the first love of a young teen that lasted a few months. The thing to remember about this is it is not a break up and go on to the next for all people. For some it is the first or only person in the world they ever loved or felt loved by and without that person they cannot see a possibility of love in their life again. Life without the possibility of love is hard thing to face. The real issue here is if there was enough love around them when they felt this way, most would realize that it is not going to be a life without love, but simply a life without that love- still painful, but maybe bearable. It is the lack of love they feel from all sources that make them believe it will be a life of no love at all, and it is what they feel that fuels their pain, not what others think.
2. Failure– Real or perceived is really of no matter. Maybe they were fired from a job, or did not make a sports team, got bad grades in school, or just didn’t finish a project on time. The difference in spending a lifetime of savings and years into a failed business, or getting cut from the Varsity team is measured by the person feeling it, not what happened. Whatever the failure or series of failures, in the end they do not see themselves as anything but a failure and their shame will not allow them to entertain the possibility that others see them differently.
3. Money – Life is hard and everybody is ultimately controlled to some extent by money. The adages od money can’t buy happiness are true, but it is also true that it is hard to be happy if you are facing homelessness, or feel ashamed when people ask you what you do. There are some that would rather die than face the idea of accepting help freely offered, and the real truth is there is not enough help anyway for those that really need it. When every thought of your day is on how you will pay for something or how to support yourself and your family some people start seeing themselves as just another bill and part of the problem.
4. Rejection and feeling excluded – Everybody faces rejection at some point in their life. Some people cannot ever remember feeling anything else. It may be because they never have, or it may be because the overwhelming sense of rejection from an incident blinds them to past successes, but in the end they die because their feeling of rejection is greater than the total of positive input form others in their lives to help them feel something different. They know they will never fit in because everything they feel tells them that. It may be they feel excluded from all the others and rejected by friends that were too busy to call, or that every girl they ever spoke to said no to a date, but they would rather die than let another rejection add more to the overwhelming pain they already feel.
5. Being left behind – Some people look around and see everybody they went to school with already has a job, marriage, house etc. Maybe it is even a simple as their friends already have girlfriends or boyfriends, or perhaps they are approaching middle age and realizing the dream of family and children is becoming impossible, or elderly and need to accept those possibilities are gone. In the end, they see everybody else as so far ahead of them and they cannot see a way to ever catch up.
6. Loneliness – some people truly have no family and no friends. Some people are surrounded by others all day but feel like they have to hide their real selves so much that nobody really knows them. If nobody knows them then they feel just as alone as somebody that has nobody in their lives at all. Humans are social animals, and isolation and seclusion have been used as punishment and even torture for centuries. It is hardly surprising that if somebody equates their life to something used as torture that ending that existence seems a better choice.
7. Feeling irrelevant – All anybody really wants to do is make a difference. When the feeling that it no longer matters what you do or think has any value to anybody becomes pervasive enough it is hard to hold on to a will to live. If a person believes were they gone nobody would be impacted, it is hard to find a way to face even the simplest of struggles in daily life because they feel there is no reason to anymore.
8. Physical health – Some social scientists have theorized when a person’s body begins to fail them it is a clear evolutionary sign that it is time to die and that invokes a response in the brain to do that. If that is true or not is open to debate, but when disease, frailty of age, or simply bad luck results in the loss of physical ability, plus the fact this is sometimes combined with very real physical pain, it is seen by many as a sure sign that it is time to give in and die. The loss of health regardless of cause is a reminder of ultimate mortality and then it is becomes more of a question of when and how. Fear and pain added to the natural urge to control one’s own fate make this result in premature death for millions.
9. Being a burden – This is when a person feels the cost of others for their own existence is greater their contribution. It may be completely inaccurate or it may be a fact that using a slide rule would have a financial advantage if they were not there, but being a burden and contributing are based on far more than dollars and cents. The intangibles are there, but if a person cannot see them or does not feel them all that is left is the feeling that the people they love would be better off if they were not there and the taking of their life as the last thing they have to offer to make life better for those around them.
10. Mental Illness –In nearly all of the above situations some form of mental illness may play a part. Depression and anxiety can certainly result from many of these situations and feelings. The illness then takes on a life of its own and needs to be treated and dealt with. There is however the very real fact that sometimes it is just the mental illness that made a person feel a certain way, or caused them to be in these situations. Since many estimate a full third or even more of people with mental illness never receive any treatment at all it is unsurprising that even the more treatable mental illnesses have a higher mortality rate then some forms of cancer.

If you or somebody you know has ever felt like these situation apply, or maybe feel some of these things now, get help. Even just consider talking to others that do and have felt the same way. It will not solve the problem, and it will not make the problem disappear overnight, but it will be easier to understand. A chance to talk without worrying about what the people listening are thinking because they have felt the same things is a valuable experience.

Knowing others have felt the same way and finding out that there are ways to make the pain stop without dying has value. In the end, people die because it is the only way they can find to stop the pain. If someone is looking for a way to stop the pain and have not found it by themselves, they should talk to a professional. If they cannot or don’t feel ready for that, then try talking to people that understand, are willing to listen, and that will not judge in our community forum and chatrooms.