Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Suicide and Anger

I appreciate you sharing some of your personal experiences there suzy.  That's been my experience with suicide as well - there's often a perception that no one would care...

One tip - suicidality is (almost) always about anger.  If you ask a client "who would be most effect/impacted if you were to follow through on your suicidal ideas?" the answer you get will usually be the individual(s) at whom the anger is directed.

Sometimes the client is not aware of the anger, or has some strong beliefs that they "shouldn't" be angry.  If that's the case I usually ask "what's not fair?"  Anger is the outward expression of the inward thought "this is not fair."  So if I say "in your life, what's not fair?" I can usually get a pretty good idea of where that anger is pointed at and we can start to move toward some more effective ways of expressing the emotion as well as considering any cognitive distortions that might be behind it...

posted to my class today...