Features Of Working With People Whose Loved Ones Have Committed Suicide

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

It is not customary to talk about those in whose families or close environment suicide occurred, even in a modern tolerant society. This topic is still taboo. Why are people in need of support, understanding and acceptance left alone with their grief?

Probably because it is difficult for us to build into the worldview that someone, outwardly quite prosperous, can decide to die on their own: such a recognition seems to threaten us, admits the idea that something like this can happen in our family. And it is easier and safer to think that, unlike us, relatives and friends were not attentive to the suicide and did not see (did not want to see) how he was suffering and asks for help. With this attitude, the “survivors” are stigmatized by the catastrophe of suicide, their grief must become “invisible” to society if they do not want to receive messages that the tragedy is their fault.

What happens to people who are already experiencing the pain of loss, shame, and guilt, the feeling of abandonment, the feeling of “not like everyone else” and other equally difficult experiences. They, avoiding the tacit accusation of society, and often family members, close in silence, isolate themselves in self-accusation. This partly protects them, but also forms a feeling of total loneliness, increasing suffering and, possibly, leading to psychosomatic disorders and suicidal behavior.

Over the years, many similar stories have been heard on the emergency telephone. And through all the stories, loneliness, isolation, the inability to talk about their pain, about what happened, shone through like a red thread. The situation with the possibility of receiving psychological help in St. Petersburg for these people was analyzed, and the result was that there is nowhere to get such "specialized" comprehensive help in our city.

The first step in this field was the creation of support groups for people whose loved ones committed suicide. Further, it became clear that the "destruction" as a result of such a tragedy is more extensive, i.e. problems arise:

• at the social level - labeling, accusations from society, a ban on voicing truthful information about what happened, etc., which leads to isolation from society and a sense of separation and stigmatization in general;
• at the family level - the redistribution of roles, responsibilities, guilt and other things in the family system. The inability of the family system to cope with the consequences of the tragedy can lead to the destruction of relationships and, often, even to the disintegration of the family (emotional and actual);
• at the individual level - getting stuck in one of the phases of living the process of mourning, neuroses, psychosomatic diseases, alcoholism, intrapersonal conflicts, etc.

Thus, there was an understanding of the need for an integrated approach to people affected by this social phenomenon.

In this article, I think it is important to voice the possibilities of individual work with people who have experienced suicide of a loved one using the Jungian sand therapy method.

Suicide of a loved one is always a complex trauma, most often it is experienced as unbearable. This loss always leaves behind a lot of questions that there is no one to ask, there are many hypotheses starting with "what if …", attempts to find the "guilty". In view of the frequent situation of the impossibility of recognizing the suicide as responsible for the tragedy, others are being looked for, including quite often there is self-accusation, which leads to the activation of primitive psychological defenses, which greatly complicates the process of verbal psychotherapy.

The sand tray is a fertile ground for bringing inner latent conflicts outward and a safe opportunity to react. Jungian sand therapy is distinguished in particular by the fact that in this work the ability for mental changes is activated at a very, very deep level - this is what K. G. Jung called the transcendental function. He understood the unconscious as something that functions to support the developmental possibilities of the individual.

The Jungian sand therapy method allows you to work out such a complex psycho-traumatic situation at the symbolic level, to respond to negative emotional experiences, to change the attitude towards yourself and to significant others, and to end relationships interrupted by suicide. And this is precisely what allows the deeply traumatized client to get a more objective picture of what happened.

Thus, plunging into working with sand and figurines, a person traumatized by the suicide of a loved one gets the opportunity to "bypass" psychological defenses and, having worked through the traumatic situation at a deep unconscious level in a safe environment with the receiving sand therapist, restore a holistic picture of his own psychic reality.

Helping relatives and friends of suicides is a new, not yet fully formed direction of psychological work. In the case of solving issues related to training, unification and professional support of specialists working with relatives of suicides and the possibility of mass information about this option of psychological assistance to people who need it, this area of work has great prospects in the field of helping people who are still are forced to cope with their grief alone, without the support of caring others and professional help.