Richard A. Heckler, Ph.D., made a fascinating study of individuals who survived suicide attempts. In his book “Waking Up, Alive,” he described what individuals reported experiencing prior to their attempts.
Heckler wrote that they experienced a state of mind, ie, a cluster of internal thoughts and emotions, that he called the “suicidal trance.” He was not alluding to anything magical or mysterious, but rather a mindset of sorts … a way of being, thinking or feeling. Essentially, they began to perceive life through a filter that overtook them and blocked out all else.
As he listened to and analyzed their stories, Heckler identified common themes, which he considered to be critical components of the decline toward suicide. He wrote:
“The stages of the descent are as follows: Pain and suffering remain unaddressed. …The person then withdraws behind a façade designed to protect themselves from further hurt and to cloak the suffering underneath. However, the façade only intensifies the slide toward a suicidal trance. Ultimately, the trance narrows the person’s perspective until the only inner voices are those that enjoin him or her to die. …
“Early in the withdrawal phase, people still make some effort to stay in touch with the world and hope for at least some promise of better things. But when hope finally dies, people no longer see or hear anything outside their own minds – the tight spiral of thought that tells them to die. While this shift may occur just moments before a suicide attempt, it can be months or years in the making. A colleague of mine from Louisiana, an experienced therapist for many years, contemplated suicide for over a decade. She describes this mental state as an almost totally separate reality, in which your world may not look or feel so limited and painful to anyone else, but it does to you. You enter a very powerful trance.
“During the latter stages of the descent, people lose faith that their predicament will ever change. Their strength is depleted, and they are deeply stressed. Some people are never able to leave their chronically destructive surroundings. In other cases, there is just no one able or willing to push past their facades. In yet other instances, people are no longer able to recognize support when it is, in fact, available.
“The trance is a state of mind and body that receives only the kind of input that reinforces the pain and corroborates the person’s conviction that the only way out is through death. The trance marks the moment at which the world becomes devoid of all possibilities except one: suicide.”
According to Heckler, despite differences in detail, everyone who attempts suicide enters a suicidal trance. He writes that suicidal trances can be identified by certain common characteristics:
- “They appear extremely logical, with a premise and a rational series of arguments that encourage suicide as a reasonable response to pain. These arguments are powerful, especially when created by someone who has become emotionally deadened–whose reservoirs of faith, trust, and hope have run dry.
- “Suicidal trances appear as resignation. A person may stop caring about the state of their life. They are frustrating and frightening to family and friends; it seems that no force is strong enough to persuade the person to act on their own behalf.
- “Suicidal trances beckon. As the trance intensifies, it becomes more insistent that the person finally complete the act.
- “Finally, this type of trance includes a particular vision of the future: an illusion of eternity in which the future is projected as an endless repetition of the present pain and disappointment, never-ending and hopeless.”
Perhaps Richard Heckler’s theory of the suicidal trance offers us the ability to see that our loved ones weren’t choosing to abandon us—they were trapped in a painful, distorted reality where suicide felt like the only way out. This understanding doesn’t take away our grief, but it can bring some comfort knowing their final decision wasn’t a rejection of our love.
