How to Reverse Suicidal Thoughts and Strengthen the Will To Live

How to Reverse Suicidal Thoughts and Strengthen the Will To Live

Ebony Safiyyah:  The rate of suicide is climbing in our community, the Black community.  How can one maintain under the pressure of this time?  

Ishmael:  If you look at the despair, and there are so many levels of despair.  For those that feel like they don’t know if they can make it another day or make it another week, we all in a sense or a great majority are marking time.  We have to be constantly dealing with the trauma, if you will, and the effect of death and dying.  If you notice only in the extreme cases do you find, and even though it is increasing in our community, where a person will take their own life. 

Again, nature will prevent that.  You have to be completely ruined, and at the lowest point, to even begin considering it… If it were that easy people would be checking out of here just like that.  However, look at what they contemplate and the length of the contemplation before the actual act is carried out.  Yet, that’s a very small percentage, but it’s reflective of what a great majority or percentages of people are thinking.

Ebony Safiyyah: You mentioned in your lecture, “Suicide: Losing the Will to Live”, that it’s not necessarily the conscious thought about taking your life as much as it is our lifestyle that is self-destructive.  What is an example of the lifestyle you were speaking of?

Ishmael:  Why do we drink, abuse drugs, etc.? It’s to escape our reality.  Living this life is not fun.  There’s no joy in this because the real joy that life brings and the peace that life should be giving us is that good feeling you get when you are creating and producing.  So you have a people who aren’t producing for themselves. They’re not using their creativity for the benefit of themselves.  You’re disappointed, you’re depressed, you’re dissatisfied, you’re angry because you’re not producing.  So here comes heroin, here comes cocaine, here comes ‘Mr. Alcohol’.  You’re just getting lost.

Most of us who lose ourselves, either we don’t have a goal in our life, no hope for the future, or you don’t see yourself going anywhere.  For those who do these things, when you finish the party, what is your life like?  Where do you find yourself going? What are you realizing? So, this becomes the means of your destruction and even if you have a goal, you’re not focused on the goal as you should.  No focus or aim.

Ebony Safiyyah: In that same lecture you stated, “What man or woman who loves themselves, knows the value of life and discovers his or her purpose in life would willingly entertain death”?

From that question it appears as though self-love or self-hatred is the catalyst of such thoughts and behavior.  Do you agree?

Ishmael: Yes, it starts with rejection.  I have found that at the root is rejection and the moment the human being experiences rejection, and I’m talking about from as a child, that is what create insecurity. So, you as a human being begin down that road of feeling insecure, but it started with you being rejected either by your mother or your father. Somebody dealt you the blow of rejection.  So then what happens along the road? You lose your sense of self value even though you feel as though you have some value.  Now, that rejection takes on many forms.  If there isn’t somebody who appreciates your value and to listen to you, then you start questioning yourself.

The people you look up to and the people that you admire and the people that you believe, and rightly so, that should be there for you, they’re not there. However, it starts in the home.  Forget everybody else who comes in and out of your life.  These are not the important pivotal players in your development.  It starts right there in the home with mama and daddy.  In the pathology you trace it all the way back to the home.  Whether it’s in the womb of the mother at the time and what she impressed on the mind or the circumstances that surrounded the child coming out of that womb and the relationship with the father.  It’s all right there.

Those two are so critical to how we develop relationships. Who we let in, who we keep out; it’s all based upon the relationship with the parents.  So that rejection takes on many forms, because then I start underestimating myself because all the support should be coming from mom and dad.  If you don’t have the right support and guidance, you can make some very bad decisions for yourself.  However, it all starts early in childhood.

The key for all of us; you, me, and for all of our people…. where is the hope? Where really is the hope?  With this generation out here…we talk a lot.  Young people must see the word taking on some form.  We need to get out of a certain mindset that disallows us from being creative, being productive. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter who God decides to remove from the Earth. The Earth isn’t going anywhere and we’re not about to get transported to another planet, so let’s keep it real.  This is the land; this is the Earth…can’t we be a little more focused on living as opposed to just getting by?

The grief, the loss, the misfortune; these are the realities of life that are starring us in the face every single day.  What is the alternative?

It’s like the Matrix.  There is a program that He (God) allowed to be written into our hard drive, but that was an application necessary for the new software that would be put on the hard drive.  See you just can’t put any software on your system unless you do some updates.  Other applications must be put onto the system for other software and programs to run. 

Ebony Safiyyah:  So, it’s about the thoughts we entertain, what we are watching and listening to and the people we allow into our lives that have this critical effect on our minds and how we feel about ourselves. It’s about the goals we set for ourselves, staying focused on those goals and having the right support around us. It’s about our perspective surrounding loss and disappointment that shapes our reality, where either we see it work for us and challenge us to grow or we see it as a reality to escape and find harmful and destructive ways that lead to our demise. We must find a way of connecting to the Power Source (God). Powerful!

Thank you so much for your time!

Ishmael: Yes ma’am, thank you.