Why Compassion, Not Judgment, Is Crucial in Suicide Prevention: A Personal Journey

**A little warning for you, before you read this newsletter. This one contains mentions of abuse, fire, and suicide. Please read with caution, and if this will be triggering for you in any way, please just skip this one.**

In 1992, I had a lot going on.

I was in middle school (that's a whole thing all by itself, amiright?).

I was getting bullied by half the school because a girl had started a rumor that I was gay, and they believed her. The early 90’s was not a good time to be considered gay, and the bullying was next level.

We had moved to a much bigger city, with a much higher crime rate, and people were stabbed and shot within mere blocks of our house. 

I had just been told about a history of sexual abuse that occurred years before between various relatives on one side of my family, the perpetrators had been and were still being protected by the family, and I was told about it because I was in danger of being the next victim.

And lastly, my life was at risk at the hands of my sister.  

I feel like that last one needs a bit of an explanation.  See, my sister was four years older than me, and we adopted her into our family. The fact that we adopted her only matters because it speaks to her back story. She lived with her biological family for the first 10 years of her life, and to say that there were problems would be a massive understatement. I can't share much about her history because it's her story, and it's private, but we can sum it up with this: her family didn't teach her about ideals like love, kindness, and compassion, and therefore, she didn't understand them. All she knew was hate, fear, anger, and violence.

Empathy and perspective are things that we need to be taught. We don't start out as humans understanding that other people feel pain just like we ourselves do. Our parents have to teach us that if we pull someone's hair, it hurts that person just like it would hurt us if someone pulled our hair, and that it's therefore not a kind thing to do, and also that being kind is good.  My sister was not taught this as a young child, and as such, she is a sociopath. Actually, she is a psychopath, but we'll get to that in a second. She feels no empathy, no sorrow when someone else is injured. If an animal was injured in front of her, she would not feel any compassion for their suffering. In fact, not only does she not respond with compassion to other living beings, but things like love and compassion actually frighten the hell out of her. When presented with them, she feels threatened and comes out swinging, like a scared animal who is being cornered.

Needless to say, this is less than ideal for a family, particularly a family with a young child in the mix. I'll spare you the gory details, but long story short, by the time I was in middle school, she was in a lock-up facility, and my parents had gone through her room and found her plans to kill both them and me.  

Even I don't know the exact details on that, but I do know that she had plans to set the house on fire and ensure that we died in the blaze. While no one told me how she intended for that to happen, it was clear that she didn’t mean for us to die from smoke inhalation. Whatever she had planned for us, it was something horrific.  My parents showed her plans to the police, and they told us to never ever let her in the house, because she absolutely intended to do it and was fully capable of it. 

I was 11 years old. And I knew that she wanted to kill us, slowly and excruciatingly. Moreover, I also knew that she had broken out of lock-up facilities in the past, and that she also ran with a group of friends who had quite the violent history themselves.  At least one of them was already suspected of murdering someone, and from what I heard, was absolutely guilty of it.

In other words, she was fully capable of getting to us. No lock-up facility was going to get in her way.  

Every night I went to bed wondering if this would be the night she put her plan into action. Every night wondering if I would wake to the sight of flames surrounding my bed, and no way to escape. Every night I tried to brace myself for the feel of the flames on my skin. And every night I was locked in terror, afraid to move or even breathe, but equally terrified not to.

After two years of this, by the time I was 13, I was getting very tired of staring down death every night, and I started thinking that if I was going to die anyway, I might as well have some say over how it happened. That's when I started spending some time sitting on the bathroom floor with a bottle of pills in my hand, my hand hovering on the lid, debating whether I should open it or not. I never actually opened the bottle, I never tried to kill myself, but I got very close on more than one occasion. 

We often hear suicide framed as a thoughtless, selfish act. The popular narrative is that the person who killed themselves, or who tried, took a reckless action without thinking about how their actions impacted those around them. They could only see their own pain, and lost sight of the bigger picture. They couldn't see all the people around them who loved them and could have helped them, if only they had spoken up about their suffering.  Ultimately, the victim becomes the bad guy in the story, and their suffering becomes a sign of their weakness. They failed because they weren’t able to save themselves.

What this narrative misses is the reality of the person who is struggling. I wasn’t contemplating committing suicide because I was ignorant of how much I was loved, or because I wasn’t thinking about the people around me. I was contemplating suicide because I was surrounded by people who loved me, and even that couldn’t keep me safe. I was contemplating suicide because I could not fathom living with that level of fear any longer. The people who would have judged me had I done it weren’t the ones who had to lie in my bed every night, facing what I was facing.

I never spoke up about how I was feeling, never let anyone know how scared I was or what I was thinking about. Had anyone asked me, I would have looked them straight in the eye and lied my face off. Why? Because if I had told the truth, someone might have tried to stop me. And if that had happened, I might possibly have ended up in the same kind of facility that my sister was in. That idea scared me more than staying at home. And even if I had been put somewhere temporarily, for my own safety, I ultimately would have been sent back home, and nothing really would have changed.

But also, and here’s the interesting thing, no one asked me. No one asked me how I was doing. My dad was a pastor, the entire church knew what was going on, and no one asked me if I was okay.

Why was it my responsibility, as the kid in the situation, to let someone know that I wasn’t okay, simply so they could put a temporary band-aid on my trauma and feel reassured that they had “helped”, instead of the adults around me actually taking charge and getting me out of that situation? And when I say "adults", I don't just mean my parents. I mean anyone.

One reason I sometimes hear for people not checking on the well-being of someone who isn't their own kid is because they don't want to interfere. They don't want to overstep their bounds. I get that, but there are ways to ask someone if they are okay without being disrespectful. Because here’s the thing, even though my parents were right there in the house with me, they were not able to truly take charge in the way that I needed them to, because they were also being traumatized. They were not functioning well themselves, because they were also terrified.

And this is where the whole expectation that people who are struggling are supposed to be able to know how to save themselves really falls short—because when you are in significant pain like that, you are not generally capable of making healthy decisions for yourself. You do things like stay in bed all day, miss work and school, withdraw from family and friends, put immense amounts of pressure on yourself, and believe every negative thought you’ve ever had about yourself and the world. Does this sound to you like someone who is functioning well enough to recognize what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and who to tell about it?

I don’t have any easy answers for this, because mental health and suicide prevention are complex issues. But I think that finding the answers starts with looking at each other with compassion, instead of judgment. When we decide that someone was “bad” or “selfish” because they “gave in to their suffering”, what we are really doing is judging how they handled an experience that was clearly too overwhelming, with the unspoken inference that we somehow would have handled it better. We are pushing them down farther, instead of lifting them up, while at the same time criticizing them for not being able to lift themselves up.

My reality at 13 years old was a horrible one, and every night when I sat on the bathroom floor, deciding whether or not to take an entire bottle of pills, I was the one who had to find the courage to get up off the floor and go back to bed, to stare down my fear for another night. Nobody else was on that floor with me, and nobody held my hand through the night. I was on my own, and I knew it. And when we don’t walk through someone else’s hell with them, we don’t get to decide how they should walk through it. What is much more helpful, and what I wish for all of us, is to be willing to hold someone else’s hand as they walk through their hell. If someone had been holding my hand, I might not have ended up on the bathroom floor at all.

Love, Amy