Suicide Prevention: Understanding the Black Box of Suicide | Rachel Powell
Suicide Prevention: Understanding the "Black Box of Suicide"
When we talk about suicide prevention, we often talk about what other people on the outside of the person struggling can do.
How do you recognize that someone is struggling? What questions should you ask? How do you respond? How do you connect someone with help?
I want to be clear: I am fully supportive of these things. Having done multiple trainings in these prevention methods and helping save lives myself, I believe that it is a part of suicide prevention.
But after losing my husband to suicide—and then experiencing my own intense struggle and attempts as a widow—I believe there is another part (dare I say, the most important part)—of suicide prevention we need to talk about.
How do we equip people to prevent their own suicide? What happens within a person before suicide occurs that is critical here?
Because suicide is a change that takes place within a person, within their mind (soul) and body (brain). I have come to call the space where that transition happens The Black Box of Suicide.
What Is the Black Box of Suicide?
Think about how incomprehensible suicide is to a child.
When I had to explain to my children in age-appropriate ways that their daddy / uncle daddy had died by suicide, it was impossible for them to even grasp.
Suicide starts as something that all human minds can't even understand at our early beginnings.
As we get older, we come to understand it as a concept; we learn what it is. The idea comes with shock and sadness. We may think, I would never do something like that. Or, That is so sad.
But somewhere, for many people, a transition can happen where it becomes an internal struggle and association with ourselves.
Something that was once unimaginable becomes something we ponder.
Then something that becomes a possibility.
Then an option.
Then a plan.
And eventually, in a suicidal crisis, it can feel like the only way or our only option.
This transition happens in The Black Box of Suicide.
I believe that if we can better understand what happens here, we can better understand how to interrupt the transition before someone reaches the point where they are in active suicidal crisis, acting on their "only way out."
It can change the way we think about suicide prevention.
My Own Experience With The Black Box
After losing my husband to suicide, I wrestled with extreme hopelessness and carried tremendous guilt, shame, and pain.
At the same time, suicide became a possibility to me... It was as if his leaving in this manner cracked and left the door open for me, too.
Research has actually shown increased suicide rates in those close to suicide loss, and a heightened risk in widows and widowers as well (especially those who lost their spouse by suicide).
Something I once could not imagine, then bore the brunt of the pain after, still became an idea I could find a strange consolation in, when I entered this space of thinking about and considering my own death.
I struggled intensely and attempted twice myself before I came to a point of change. I began to recognize what was happening inside my own mind.
Our thoughts related to our own suicide dig a slope inside that Black Box of Suicide. The more time we spend in that space, the steeper and more lubricated it becomes.
For me, thoughts about not being here anymore could begin to feel like a comfortable chair or a weighted blanket. A place where I could imagine relief from the pain. There was comfort, and a temptation to return there, which grew the more time I spent in it.
As a Christian, I know the work of our enemy who joins us in this dark work and space. Tempting us to return, helping us shovel a steeper grade slope, lubricating it up for the right circumstances.
Finally, in a time of crisis (which is often impulsive and short-lived, often from minutes to hours), we jump into that box and slide right down this steep, slippery slope to the bottom.... to our own end.
Because the danger was in thinking we had control over it; that we could compartmentalize it and decide when we entered the space and when we came out of it. But we are integrated beings who cannot completely compartmentalize in our brains; any time we spend there is the real danger.
My real turning point was when I realized that preventing my own suicide meant refusing to enter that space. Ever, if at all possible. I had to wage war, with a battle mindset, to keep myself from going there.
So how to we equip people to prevent their own suicide and not enter The Black Box of Suicide, more practically?
Here are four things that helped me.
4 Steps to Help Prevent Your Own Suicide
1) Shift the State of Your Body (and Mind)
When I was struggling with the pull to engage in thoughts of suicide or making a plan for it, it needed to sound an alarm. 🚨 And I needed to make a change immediately.
One powerful way of making a direct change was to move my body. Getting up from where I was sitting in the thoughts (or however I was engaging with the temptation) and physically making a shift.
Sometimes I would stop what I was doing and do push-ups, jog in place, or go for a run or walk outside (a prayer walk was even better).
Physically moving your body shifts the neurochemistry in your brain... And the state of your mind. That is exactly what we need in those moments.
It's a mental and physical way of saying, I'm not going to continue toward or in The Black Box.
2) Remind Yourself of the Truths you Need to Hear (yes, the raw real ones)
There were reminders I would return to when I needed to get out of the siren's song that pulled me toward The Black Box and reminded me of suicide's reality and horrors.
Here are a few of mine:
The reality of what would be left behind... Specifically, what I would bring to mind was a small pillow with my husband's picture that was given to one of my children.
My husband had become, for my children, a little pillow. I remember picking it up and being so angry thinking, You became a *bleeping* pillow, Andre! We need YOU here!
I did not want to become that.
I connected with the deep inner motivation to be there for my children's pain. I would specifically think of running toward my child if they were about to be, or were, hurt or in a serious accident.
I reminded myself that painful things will happen to them, and I would not be able to run to or reach them if they were hurting and I was gone. It kept me here.
Spiritual truths anchored me in something greater than earthly pain and suffering.
The Lord had given me a picture of our family in His army marching, and that when my husband went down, the enemy came through the lines easier to me and my children (the spiritual warfare was real, y'all). I needed to stay and to fight.
Also as a Christian, I believe my life has great purpose in glorifying God. Self-determining my number of days early was not an unforgivable sin, but it also wasn't living by faith. He reminded me I couldn't take myself out because I was here to bring Him glory. This is what Jesus said in his greatest suffering:
"Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!" -John 12:27-28
I used motivation and reminders of the real, raw things that suicide steals from you.
I also connected to something that was even deeper than the desire to die and end the pain: the human desire to live through it for the greatest purpose of all.
3) Worship
Worship was a big one for me. It was how I kept breathing when I lost my husband. It was also how I did battle.
I would put on worship music, whether I could sing or laid on the ground and cried while it played. Sometimes, I would pick up my guitar and sing.
Yet again, worship brought me back to why I am here: I am here to glorify Christ. It reminded me of His presence and strength with me that helped me to endure the battle today, to continue to tomorrow.
That mattered to me when the temptation was to take my life into my own hands.
4) Take Action to Get Help
Having the right, safe people I could go to with this struggle was another important part of this.
And since we talked about suicide prevention from the outside (from others) versus our focus on prevention from within ourselves, I want to be very clear about something:
This is not about making other people responsible for saving us, or needing them to respond a certain way to keep living.
Having a go-to person or people is about recognizing that we are human and human beings need one another. And there is no shame in that.
For me, taking responsibility for myself meant initiating that connection. It meant leaning into my resources instead of staying alone inside the struggle.
That can include safe people in your life, a counselor or therapist, or the 988 suicide crisis line to call or text. No matter who you are, there are people who will listen while also helping you take steps forward. ❤️
We Need a Different Conversation About Suicide Prevention
I believe suicide prevention needs both sides of the conversation.
Yes, we need people around us for support. There are times when a person's thinking can become so impaired that they are not seeing clearly. From my experience, you are not in your right mind and are not your true self when you are acting in suicidal crisis.
But before someone reaches that point, I believe there is tremendous value in helping people understand what is happening within them, inside The Black Box of Suicide... The place suicide goes from incomprehensible to our "only way out" of pain.
We must be equipped to prevent our own suicide, and fight for our own lives, while also remembering that we were never meant to do life alone.
More From Hope Speaker
If you are interested in the work I do with Christian widows or in speaking engagements on the topics of widowhood, faith or suicide prevention, you can find out more at:
With you here,
Rachel
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