24 Hours
The minister began the service last Friday by confronting the issue of the suicide head on. "Embrace your anger. The 'Why?' The 'If only I had said or done...' Embrace the doubts and questions until you are sick of feeling them, until you have exhausted the anger." That is how she bagan the service.
This is the new psychoanlytic preaching.
I found it cathartic. I am not sure how the rest of the congregation felt, especially the older members, although the minister was not especially young herself, perhaps 50.
I remember taking a course for my M. Div. at Yale Divinity School entitled Psychoanalysis, Parents and God. It was taught by a Protestant minister with a Ph.D. in Psychology. It was one of the best courses I ever took, in 17 years of college at four different institutions: Ithaca, Kent State, Yale and Middlebury.
The professor said this about suicide: "It is a very selfish act. It leaves everyone feeling guilty."
I won't disagree with the latter half of that statement, but I disagree that it is self-ISH. It think it is self-LESS, and not in the unsual sense, but in the literal sense.
The SELF has begun to disintegrate, or has never fully assembled (borderline personality configuration), and suicide is the effort to accelerate the sense of disintegration or dis-assembly which has been driving the desperate person crazy and thereby achieve termination of the pain of fragmentation (think Picasso's fractured faces).
For me, the crisis was in 1973 as I appraoched 30.
I do not want to trivialize the fact that I had seen the carnage at Kent State in 1970 and that three years later I was perhaps experiencing panicattacks. That may be part of it. PTSD had not even been thought of back then.
But there was a definite heavy and burdensome cultural message that was being sent to me as a male, that I should have FOUND MYSELF by the time I was thirty; and that was anything but the case.
It was during the fuel crisis days of the 1970's and the economic downturn (as we are experiencing its cyclical return again today) , and even though I had completed two college degrees, I simply could not find a job in New Haven, Connecticut.
Finally, after panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and therapy, I became a real estate agent (at which I failed in the economic downturn), an apartment superintedent (at which I succeeded since it required only hard work and dependability), and also a student at Yale Divinity School.
Some would say that was my destiny all along, since my parents had named me after a professor at that school who had been their youth minister.
But I don't believe in destiny, although it was an odd route getting there.
So I say, thirty-two years after graduating from Yale Divinity School, the minister was right to say to the survivors, "Embrace your anger until you have exhausted it.".
But for those who might be contemplating ending time with their own hand. I say:
Go easy on yourself.
Accept the fact that your self is in medias res (in the middle of things).
Gradually, it will get there.
Embrace your self, however incomplete or fractured it may seem.
Seek help. Seek therapy. Seek prescribed and supervised medication.
Above all else, live one day at a time: Anything can be endured for just 24 hours.
And give Time time.
Where there's life there's hope.
theantiyale Feb. 3, 2012 26 minutes ago