So when trauma happens to you over and over, it’s not only that your brain is taking in the stress, it’s also altering its predictions that it’ll have about the future. This is why for complex trauma survivors, it feels like there’s a sense of hopelessness. Because this week is National Suicide Awareness Week, we’ve got to do everything we can to make it so that this information reaches the people it can.

And this is how we break out of that cycle. My name is David Archer, and this is your weekly consult. Let’s go.

Understanding the Weight of Suicidal Thoughts

So for those of you who might be like, suicide, like, I don’t even understand why a person would do that. Man, there’s nothing that’d be able to stress me out like that, bro. This isn’t for you.

This is for the people who understand because this is a national problem. And this is taking a lot of people’s lives away. So even if you think you’re too cool, you’re too macho for this to be a problem, the same for you.

So we’ve got to talk about Jason Arday. He was a young Black professor who recently took his own life after there was this intense digital lynching smear campaign kind of thing, whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day, because of the allegations, because of all of the stress, he decided that he could not go on living.

So we want to let him know to rest in power and many blessings to him, his friends, his family. And I wish that he could have had this information. And so for my clients, so for people who go through these stresses, the fear of being attacked in academia as a Black male academic, I get it.

I understand the stresses that come with it. We got to make sure that we keep our people great. We got to make sure that our people feel safe while we’re in academia. And we also got to make it so that all people can recognize their awesomeness.

The Biological Impact of Trauma and Stress

Let’s talk a bit about this. Remember that trauma is not what you think it is. The perception of adversity is based on the individual. This is why some people are afraid of sharks.

Some people are afraid of heights. It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the way how the person’s brain interpreted distress.

Let me give you this example. We have this response to stress that’s related to what’s called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. This is the HPA axis.

It releases cortisol in response to stresses. When you’re going through an acute stress, you might get the cortisol response. You might get the adrenaline response.

And that’s how we’re built so that we could escape tigers, lions, things that want to eat us. The problem though, is that we evolved to have this to save our lives. And although many of us are not encountering tigers and lions, unless you go to the zoo or some other thing like that.

Well, guess what? If you get a notification on your cell phone that is saying that you’re under investigation for something or saying that you’re a bad person or the comments sometimes under these videos or the comments on other people’s videos, specifically Black woman’s videos. All I’m saying is sometimes a person who receives this can interpret that at the same level of stress that the brain and the body would interpret the stress of an actual physical stressor, like something that can harm you.

Allostatic Load and Chronic Stress

So our bodies responding to psychological stresses in a similar kind of way as an actual threat to your physical being. So when you have the accumulation of these things and there are stresses that are coming in, not just acutely, but chronically day in and day out, that’s where we get to allostatic load and allostatic overload. When cortisol is released at this level, it can lead to some biological dysregulation, some overcompensations for other chemicals being released through the body.

But also when you’re going through these stresses, not only is it that your body’s responding differently, your behaviors might be different because you’re stressed. You might eat your emotions because you’re stressed. You might want to smoke.

You might want to drink and guess what? Those lead to other problems, fat accumulation, difficulty sleeping. You’re not sleeping well. You’re not digesting information.

You’re not making sense of things. If you’re not sleeping well, it leads to even worse issues. And so then these thoughts might come up that otherwise would not even come up in the first place.

Allostatic load leads to mental health and physical health vulnerabilities that can put us in really precarious states.

Complex Trauma and the Structure of Personality

The other side of this relates to complex trauma. Trauma causes a fracture in one’s personality structure. It leads to different parts. You can watch my other videos on parts to get an understanding here.

When a person tells me in my office that they’re suicidal, I always assume that they’re talking about a part of them is suicidal. It’s not always all of them. From my theory, I’m not thinking about it that the person wants to commit suicide. It’s that a part of them wants to take an action to reduce stress.

That’s it. It’s just that it might be thinking of a decision that’s going to have long-term consequences, but there’s usually parts of us that also have an urge to eat ice cream, there’s parts of us that also feel an urge to watch a movie. These are called non-dissociative parts.

But in some cases with complex trauma and dissociative identity disorder, you can get dissociative parts that are going to want even more different things than amnesia barriers and all that. We’re talking about non-dissociative parts for this example here. There’s a part of them that may want to kill themselves.

Finding Solutions and Resourcing Parts

We as therapists, we as people who care about other people, we don’t need to just stop there. We need to understand that that makes sense, that the person wants to end suffering, but we need to find ways of making it so that that part of themselves can feel not as shamed about that, but feel as if they can talk about it. And as we talk about it, we can gain solutions.

As we talk about it, we can understand that that part of themselves just feels under-resourced for the current circumstances. That part of themselves might need to feel a bit more peace or might need to feel relief instead of ending the suffering. They might just need to find a way of manipulating the suffering or navigating the suffering differently.

That’s why when I use rhythm and processing strategies, you can use this in EMDR therapy, you can use this in a wide range of other therapies as well. But the goal is to make it so that we can have a resource for that part of themselves so it can either gain hope, so it can either gain peace, so it can either get some other state shift outside of this hopelessness shame spiral that they’re stuck in.

There have been times that I’ve helped people who’ve had suicidal urges to be able to calm their stresses by being able to visualize nature. Why? Because nature is something that has existed before you and after you. Why? Because nature is something that allows us to realize that we are of nature, that we belong to something much greater than ourselves.

And when a person can truly connect to that aspect of themselves, the aspect of nature, the aspect of the world, and if it’s not just the world, it could be a range of other things, but just know that when they connect to something that’s much greater than themselves, that sometimes can cause the physical disconfirmation of that part of themselves being stuck in that, and that’s what we are looking for. If we get a person to feel different, they think different.

Cultivating Hope and Stopping the Stigma

There have been many people’s lives who have been saved knowing that there is hope. It’s not them. It’s not the whole person that wants to end. Sometimes it’s just a part that is stuck.

Sometimes it’s the lack of sleep. Sometimes it’s the lack of resources. It’s the lack of compassion in our society, generally speaking. So that’s why we ourselves, we all just got to be better people with each other.

But what I’ve seen is that when we can help a person to bring in nature, when we can help a person to bring in their culture, bring in their video games, bring in their books, bring in their characters from their favorite movies, bring in that smile into their lives, we can cultivate that feeling, we can magnify that feeling, and we can use the urge to kill oneself as an indication to tap into your awesomeness. That’s all it is.

It’s not the end of the world because you feel that way. It’s just an indication to reach out and to ask for help. And sometimes that help is outside, and sometimes that’s that aspect of yourself that is also infinite as well.

So my name is David Archer. This is the Weekly Consult. So again, when we’re thinking about suicide awareness, let’s help people to know, we don’t want to do that victim blaming thing.

These suicidal thoughts, if we’re afraid of talking about it, then other people are not going to share about it. So that’s why we just need to stop the stigma for all mental health disorders. Let people know these are just ways that people have learned to cope with stresses, and there are new ways that they can predict better futures.

All right? So take good care of yourselves, stay safe, stay blessed, and keep being awesome. All right? Peace.

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This information is purely for educational purposes, seek a mental health professional in your area if in need of specific interventions or assistance for your specific experiences. For more information you can visit International Association for Suicide Prevention https://www.iasp.info/wspd/

In the US for immediate assistance, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline provides free, confidential support 24/7 by calling or texting 988