I have daily suicide thoughts?
It's all passive and just part of my life. I think about it a lot in detail but I don't think I will ever follow through with it. Is this normal? It's all just thoughts.
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It's all passive and just part of my life. I think about it a lot in detail but I don't think I will ever follow through with it. Is this normal? It's all just thoughts.
Suicidal ideation.
Intelleculally speaking, it might seem like a passive process because it just involves thoughts without any actualized intent, but that's not true.
Think about someone who loses a loved one through a prolonged illness. People will often describe deaths like that as 'easier' to deal with than, say, a death caused by a sudden, unexpected accident. That's because it allows people to parse their grief over time. They deal with it bit by bit as things progress, and begin to process the loss before it actually happens. It allows you to slowly accept the reality that someone you love is dying, to accept it and slowly desensitize yourself with the grief and loss.
This is what suicidal ideation offers. It's a way to desensitize your mind to something that is otherwise terrifying- your own death. If you intimate yourself with the idea of taking your own life by emotionally experiencing it, thinking about how it will feel to die in specific ways, beginning to process your emotional reaction to what you would experience if you, say, jumped off a bridge. Feeling those emotions in a controlled way.
It might seem harmless because it doesn't involve specific plans, but it absolutely is dangerous because going through the theoretical motions of death will familiarize you with it. It desensitizes you. It makes the idea less scary and more comfortable and routine, just as exposure therapy can eliminate a phobia.
Plans or not, becoming comfortable with the idea of taking your own life is extremely dangerous and very serious. It pushes you many steps closer to an attempt. This is not something to brush off. You should be in therapy if you aren't already.