Aggie Fangirl

Reblog.

Pass this on!

For people who are or have been suicidal, does this or things like this help? I’m genuinely asking. I want to reblog something that actually helps, not just something I think helps.

This genuinely helps. I was suicidal for a large portion of my life, so my therapist asked me every time we spoke to tell her one thing i liked, or that made me happy. It could be anything at all. It could be something i’d already said. It didnt matter. That really helped me slowly. She also made me say something positive for every negative. If i said something like ‘i just feel so stupid all the time,’ id have to say something i felt good about, like ‘i really like the colour red.’ I didnt think that my favourite colour would make such a difference, but really, when you slowly piece together a bunch of minuscule things, soon enough you have this list of 1000 things to live for. So yes, reblog the shit out of this. Because this type of thinking saves my life every day.

Today I bought an Ornamental Kale plant (something I’ve always wanted to do) and named it Perry (something that genuinely made me happy) this is something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had actually gone through with my suicide plans last spring.

I used this method too. It seems implausible because it seems unlikely that just remembering some happy things could change your mind, but it’s more than that – it trains you to get out of destructive lines of thought. Every time you’re ready to kill yourself, you don’t plan that; you look for something happy instead. It becomes habit, and you start doing it earlier and earlier in the cycle until one day you realise you can break dangerous trains of thought at will, and somewhere along the line, living became something you could decide to do again.

The method of telling yourself good and true things goes for other mental issues/illnesses as well. I know perfectly well how much and what kinds of food I need to eat in a day to function, but on bad days it still helps to say it out loud, or even better to have someone else tell me. And it’s an important detail that you need to hear these things repeatedly. Your brain doesn’t integrate knowledge the same way when it’s sick; maybe the first many time you hear it you don’t really believe it, or it starts to feel fake after a little while. Say it anyway. Say it again. On its own it may not chase the darkness away, but it helps and in combination with other small steps forward it will eventually feel true.