Sleuthing My Way To The Source Of My Shame

I've been troubled by fits of overwhelming shame since my hospitalization. It's time to figure out why.

“Fear is a powerful thing. I mean, it’s got a lot of firepower. If you figure out a way to wrestle that fear to push you from behind rather than stand in front of you, that’s very powerful.”

Record producer Jimmy Iovine

Most Thursday nights you can find me at a support group for people fighting mental health illnesses, and each meeting starts with introductions: name and, if you’re comfortable sharing, your diagnosis.

Those first few minutes of group can feel a lot like going for a swim in alphabet soup. We use CBT, DBT, and ACT as therapies to help manage ADHD, ADD, PTSD, and BPD. This week and next I’m missing group because I’m in a PHP — a partial hospitalization program or, more simply, an outpatient program — where I will learn to better manage my ADL, or activities of daily living¹.

After a few months of going to group, I was familiar with most of the jargon and no longer needed to Google the different letter combos when I got home from group. After a few more months, I was comfortable enough to just ask what someone was referring to when they slipped into therapy-speak and used a term I didn’t understand.

Then one night, I heard a new one: SI, for suicidal ideation. That’s thoughts of suicide. They’re not passing thoughts, but they don’t necessarily have to be constant, either. It’s DEFCON 4, the first step of quitting the game. You don’t have a plan — yet. You haven’t made an attempt — yet.

But you’re getting there. That’s the time you’re supposed to ask for help, particularly when you have bipolar disorder and are prone to impulsive actions.

But damn that suicide stigma. How many people have died because the stigma prevented them from asking for help?

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My own SI peaked on Christmas Eve, and by Jan. 2 it had landed me in a psychiatric hospital. I crossed over from SI to “plan” but stopped a safe distance short of an attempt. I’ve already written about how when Billy Corrigan sings “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known,” he’s talking about the day he did not kill himself. And now I can relate.

Since then, I’ve been carrying around a lot of shame and guilt. Not because I was hospitalized, but because of what I nearly did to my daughters. When people ask me “How could even you think of doing that to your girls? They love you so much!” I wonder why they can’t understand the pain that goes along with feeling like it is the only thing you can do for your kids.

I did not want to die then, and I do not want to die now. As I write this, I have Dave Grohl singing “Walk,” the song he wrote about Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and screaming “I never wanna die! I never wanna die! I never wanna die!” in my headphones.

I agree. I never wanna die…I never wanna die…I never wanna die…

“It kind of comes from the day after Kurt died,” Grohl told Rolling Stone when asked what the song was about. “Waking up that morning and realizing ‘Oh, shit, he’s not here anymore. I am.’

“Like, I get to wake up and he doesn’t. I’m making a cup of coffee and he can’t. I’m gonna turn on the radio and he won’t. That was a big revelation to me.”

My SI was the end result of eight months of a bad (for me) medication combo. My brain was fried, and yet I’ve felt guilt, which comes when we violate our own values, and shame, which comes when we do something that violates society’s values.

This morning, the therapist I’m working with in my partial hospitalization program reminded me that feelings serve a purpose, but only if the facts support the emotion. Shame is a flight response, which makes sense. If you are feeling shame, you want to hide from society. You move past your SI and onto making a plan.

I can understand the guilt — my main value is “don't abandon your family,” something that can be difficult when you have bipolar disorder. I understand, and will get over, the guilt I had for even thinking of abandoning my daughters like that. Because a thought is nothing if it doesn’t result in horrific action. I’m still here and now able to function as a good father with much less effort.

But where was the shame coming from? It’s pretty clear by now I’m not trying to hide my mental health from society. So why was I letting society make me feel shame?

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The stigma surrounding suicide dates back to the fifth century, when some early Christians thought they found a workaround to the laws of heaven and hell: kill yourself before you sin and get a one-way trip to the Kingdom of God.

Augustine, the religious scholar who went on to become the patron saint of brewers and printers, among others, closed the loophole in City of God, where he argued suicide violates the divine law against killing (Exodus 20:13) and the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself (Mark 12:31). "Anyone who kills himself is certainly a murderer," he wrote.

Before Augustine, ancient societies generally opposed suicide but offered room for exceptions: poverty, mutilation, sickness, sudden misfortune, habitual vice, or disgrace. But after Augustine, those who kill themselves are sinners. It’s a stance the church has stuck with, even as society begins to see assisted suicide for the terminally ill as compassionate.

The stigma is very real. Suicide, assisted or otherwise, is still illegal in many places. People who lose a loved one to suicide tend to get stuck on “anger” and “guilt” when they’re working through the five stages of grief. People who survive a suicide attempt often spend the rest of their lives being treated as fragile. If we’re a long way off from ending the stigmas around mental illness, we’re even further away on suicide, meaning people are even less reluctant to discuss the thoughts leading to “the scary place.”

"Suicide is deeply unnatural," Dr. Jared Ortiz wrote in a 2019 essay exploring St. Augustine's edict for The Catholic World Report. "It does violence to our natural inclination to avoid evil and preserve our own good."

Like a lot of church edicts, Augustine’s implies a firm “don’t do it, or else.” It doesn’t offer any advice on how to not do it, or any compassion for people who are in enough pain to think about doing the unthinkable.

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I know I should not feel shame, but what should I feel? Buddhists believe when we say something is “empty,” we should ask “Empty of what?” The glass is always full, although it may be half full of water and the other half is full of air.

Turns out what I was, and still am, feeling is fear. And fear, as Mr. Iovine said at the top of this essay, is firepower.

Sinead, the therapist I was working with this morning, said if the emotion you’re having is not supported by the facts, you should have the opposite reaction of what the wrong emotion is telling you to do. So if shame is telling me to flee, fear is telling me to fight.

“The fact is, there was a threat,” she said. “You’re fighting for your life right now.”

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Let's say it again to be 100 percent clear: like most people who are suicidal, I didn't want to die then, and I don't want to know now. SI is part of my bipolar disorder and depression, and I didn’t choose any of them.

“It’s not that I don’t want to live,” I once heard someone say at group. “I just don’t want to live this life.”

“People who don’t have SI don’t understand,” another person said. “It’s not wanting to die. It’s wanting to break up with yourself.”

And on Christmas Eve, I wanted to break up with myself.

But not now. Now, I’m scared as hell and itching for a fight.

1. Acronyms are infuriating to a writer who follows the AP Style Guide like a holy text. You’re supposed to be clear and accessible for readers when you write and, outside the most obvious acronyms — FBI, CIA, etc. — AP advises avoiding them as much as possible.