What you might not see about suicide: an essay from a highly sensitive survivor
Suicides won’t stop happening solely because you commit to reach out more to your family or friends. They won’t, because they happen when you’re in the middle of cooking dinner, or when you’re sound asleep. They happen when you’re laughing hysterically at a tiktok, or calling to check in with your loved ones. They happen when everything is seemingly okay. After all, most of the time it is, except for those few minutes in which it is shockingly not.
And this is what I think many people don’t understand about highly sensitives and their mental health, especially lately.
Operating in the Darkness
I don’t expect everyone to understand the way I operate, or even to understand the place I write this blog from. It is foreign to many, and I’ve had to learn about it mostly on my own, with the help of a few key players. I came here to operate in this highly sensitive way, and I’m thinking lately that it’s maybe to teach others more about it. I can think of a few close friends and family members who are very similar to me, sensitivity wise. It takes everything we have in us to not actively destroy our lives when we sink to a very low frequency.
For some, it sure doesn’t look that way on the surface, so they hide it very well, masking the internal pain. For others, they can’t hide that their lives are such a mess and many label them as toxic, or addicts, and they find it hard to rise out of that dark vibration, because they themselves and others hold them there. I don’t blame people when they do this to others, I know many a person who has been deeply hurt by a highly sensitive trying to get rid of darkness. People protect themselves the way they know how, and they need to have boundaries. That’s not what this article is about.
In the intense moments of my deepest darkness, walking the tightrope of life and death, I have been painfully alone, and no one has answered the phone. It’s not a bad thing, I believe it’s meant to be that way on my journey for a reason. I’m supposed to want to choose to live, despite what everyone else is doing in the world. It’s the key to my karma as a Pisces. Too many times I have been screaming on the floor for one person to reach out to me or to answer my text or my phone call when I am feeling the most pain I have ever felt in my life, and it has been silent. These dark moments never last for very long, but they are extreme when they happen, and they always catch me by surprise. I can only speak from my personal experience, but I imagine it is similar with others out there like me too.
In these moments, I can’t ever bring myself to reveal the darkness building heavy in my chest to anyone. I can’t express to others that I’m in real trouble, the lower my vibration gets. I can’t reveal it because of my highly empathic qualities. I can’t reveal it, because of how much I love other people, not wanting to transfer my darkness to them in those situations.
After all, growing up, I took those phone calls from family members. I was the child begging fear-filled adults to not kill themselves, because of how much I LOVED THEM. So I know how it feels. I am in a place where I can’t bring myself do it to another, and I likely won’t, though I have to admit I have done it before when I was a baby sensitive and knew nothing about processing emotion in my early 20’s.
Being someone who now knows how to energetically process heavy emotion through my body in a healthy way, I currently have this deep trust in myself to work through the darkness on my own and rise up out of it. I’m not on medication, and I don’t go to therapy, I understand emotions are connected to the soul, and connected to spiritual awakening. I manage my emotions on my own. But there are many who have no idea where to even begin in regards to that process. It is not natural, it is something you have to learn, through a lot of trial and error, and it’s different for everyone since we all have different energy. Different modalities support us all differently as people.
So— talented creatives and empaths may secretly slip away, to places they know they won’t traumatize family members/friends even more so than they inevitably will… to exit their bodies and life experience, because of how intensely they feel the trauma of the world in their bodies. I don’t blame them, and I honor them for how long they are able to carry it and still show up. If they are feeling pain similar to what I have felt, being a transmuter who naturally absorbs a ton of negative emotion from others, it is truly excruciating! The soul doesn’t want to be anywhere near it. The soul and light body wants to feel safe, in a much higher place and vibration, where happiness and joy abound.
Suicide & Attachment Issues
It is more often than not that those who deal with escapism, suicidal ideation & fantasy struggle with healthy attachment to others. They are often talented, empathic, creative individuals who yearn to be free. Perhaps, and most often, that is accompanied with very traumatic experiences they have endured due to lack of boundaries and a tough family situation or upbringing.
I can say that for myself, I don’t feel I have a strong connection to any one person. I didn’t feel close to my family, and have only felt authentically connected from the heart space with a select few throughout my life. These are who I feel safe with emotionally and energetically. It’s tough when it comes to understanding attachment in others. You can’t ever really look on the inside of people’s hearts to see how close they feel to people, and it often fluctuates. You also can’t make them feel securely attached to you. It’s all experience-based, it depends on how they process life. You can show up the best you can, do everything YOU think would brighten someone’s day and to show up for them the way YOU know how, but in the end, this likely deals with the individual and their own relationship to their life, experiences, and soul bonds to others. They are responsible for managing their own vibration. You cannot save them, and it’s often not in their best interest for you to do so on a long-term scale. It disempowers them and makes their vibration lower in the moments where you inevitably can’t show up for them because you have other things to focus on in the world.
The highly sensitive creative is one who needs to find power and healing in being able to manage their own energy and emotions.
For me personally, I never developed secure attachment because I was the emotional support for most others growing up. This led me to create beliefs that I was a person who couldn’t share my emotions, because I was too busy handling and diffusing the emotions of others. I took on theirs and escaped from mine. I was alive to make sure others felt secure, not the other way around, thus leading to incredible insecurity constantly growing within myself. I have had to make a lot of shifts to change it!
There are however, people who refuse to make shifts in their lives and won’t listen to anyone. Some choose to stay in the low vibrations. You can’t control others and the decisions they choose to make, all you can do is inspire change in them by being the change yourself.
What Can You Do For the Highly Sensitive People You Love?
☆Step 1: Set Healthy Boundaries with them, give them space while they process, and be respectful in communication.
You are not truly there for them if you allow them to just dump everything they are negatively feeling onto you. It does not serve the suicidal person or you to absorb their negative emotions. You both sink, it makes both you and them feel bad, and it likely ends with the relationship being too intense! But it also doesn’t serve them if you don’t answer their calls, because they need relationships with others to keep them connected and attached to the planet.
Instead, if they reach out, communicate to them that you care and understand they’re in their low place right now and not feeling like themselves, and that you won’t judge them for that, but that you also won’t allow them to cross your healthy boundaries for your own self-care. Encourage them to process, grieve, create, and explore on an inner level in whatever way is most comfortable to them. My best advice? Ask them to tell you what they’re going to do to process the emotion and give a check-in time, so you know what’s happening. What they need to do is raise their vibration right then, however they’re able to do so, but that doesn’t mean you need to be apart of it. You can make them feel supported by just knowing what they’re going through at the moment, it likely makes them feel less lonely, and then they can do the rest without feeling like a burden.
Please don’t label them. Their identity doesn’t need any more negativity than the darkness they already feel. And if they’re feeling suicidal, it’s likely they’re having an identity crisis, since they can’t feel the brightness of their soul. If they don’t know who they are in that moment, you sure don’t, so don’t try to assure them that you do.
☆Step 2: How Can They Process?
Through any and all artistic/creative avenues - dancing, singing, painting, collaging, playing, drumming, etc.
Writing/Speaking - whether that be on a voice memo to themselves, with a professional, or with a friend who has agreed to listen to the intensity and knows how to healthily release others’ energy from their own body following the heavy conversation. If a friend agrees to do this, they should be proficient in setting healthy boundaries so as not to encourage the behavior of them calling every time they feel bad.
Body movement
Breathwork
Crying/Grieving/Screaming
Therapy
EMDR
Energy Work, Meditation, & Other Healing Practices
Calling in Angels if they have Spiritual Attachments
☆Step 3: Integration Into Lifestyle/Identity
Emotions are a process, they are not an identity. Highly sensitives are people who have to transmute emotion more than other people because of their highly empathic natures. They are doing a great service to the planet. They are making it lighter as long as they actively move it through them and don’t continue to absorb it. They came here, most likely enduring traumatic experiences, so they could ascend to higher vibrations and grow their talents and abilities in incredible ways, so inevitably, they WILL be more emotional. Being someone who understands this about myself, I don’t care what others think about it anymore. With me, you’re going to get my authentic emotions and experience of my life, without any filter, because I know how to process it without the input from others. I have learned healthy detachment. And I feel fucking fantastic a majority of the time, because my emotions don’t rule my life or identity anymore.
This is what empowers the highly sensitive individual, when they become a master of their own emotional body. It is when they go to low vibrations and learn to be aware of where they’re at and take action to transmute the darkness, coming back to an authentic place of lightness. It is when they are able to communicate to family members and friends about the vibrations and frequencies they move through, and about what their needs are, and the identity they feel secure in as a soul, so that others feel secure with them, too.
You can rise from being an insecure, suicidal crybaby. I know because I’ve done it, so I have hope that you can, too. It just takes some deep understanding of emotional processing and a lot of work. If you’re currently in your deep darkness, I believe in you, even if nobody else does. You’re dramatic, it’s a gift, and you’ve got this!
Breathe, grieve, cry, scream, create your heart out in those excruciating moments. It makes you brighter and more beautiful the next day, I promise. The intense waves will inevitably keep coming, but you can gain the confidence in knowing that the experience is temporary. Having intense feelings doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. You don’t have to hold on to the idea that the darkness never leaves, because that just makes it stick longer and it will grow bigger in your body. Eventually, it will make your physical body very sick.
After all I believe we all came here to be light, so if having a dark identity your truth, you might not be around for very long… What? I’m just being honest. I’ve experienced the pain of it. This is an article about accountability, processing, and highly sensitive empowerment. If you wanted the article on always being in your feels, I’ve written plenty of those while processing my darkness, so go take your pick!
For now, though, I’m gonna tell you how cool it is and how good it feels to know how to process emotion in really intense moments and my truth in regards to it. Because you know, it just might save a life or two.
If you or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
