How My Friend’s Suicide Attempt Broke My Heart Open

Lucas (name changed) was a young friend of mine who I had met in Melbourne. He had a bit of a temper.

I had seen him flare up at small things. He went from having massive crushes on girls to hating them, from deeply respecting a friend to getting into a huge fight with them. But he never had anything negative aimed at me. I think he looked up to me. Everyone has their demons, I figured.

It was the 17th of August 2010, just a bit after midnight, and I was about to go to sleep. My phone beeped. I received this text message from Lucas:

“I’ll be dead tomorrow. You have been the most perfect, inspirational and motivating friend. All the very very best with everything you do”

He had never before mentioned suicide to me. It came out of the blue. This was an obvious cry for help. Adrenaline was rushing through my body and I had but one thought – “I have to save his life.” I didn’t feel fear. I didn’t feel anything. I just had a mission to do.

I called his phone. No answer. I called 000 (Australia’s emergency services) and told them his address.

Then, I got into my car and headed straight to his house. I was there in 5 minutes.

At His House

As I was about to enter his house, a horrible thought went through my head. “These could be Lucas’s last moments alive.”

I knew he wasn’t very close with his family, but I felt like it was my duty to record what was about to happen. It could have been his last moments, his last words.

I started on the voice recorder application on my iPhone and put the phone in my pocket. The front door of the house was open, and I walked inside.

I found him in his room. He was sitting on his chair groggy, a shadow of himself, mumbling and slurring. Valium packs were strewn everywhere on the floor. On the table next to him sat a half-empty bottle of Whiskey.

As he looked up and saw me he didn’t say anything. Maybe he wasn’t surprised to see me there. Maybe he expected I would come.

“Lucas! What did you do?!”

“I had… umm.. 43 valiums and drank this Whiskey.

“It’s too much to handle. My life is shit. I’m a piece of shit. Angie is fucking another guy. In this house. I can hear them.”

He had hooked up with his housemate a few weeks prior. Then for some reason, he told me he didn’t like her anymore. And now, he was about to kill himself over her.

He kept trying to take more pills. I took them off of his hand. “Put the pills down and throw up.” I told him.

I don’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I had no better ideas.

After about 10 minutes in his house – which seemed to drag on forever – the ambulance crew arrived. As they announced their presence at the front door I yelled – “We’re over here!”

They came into his room and started talking to him, checking his conditions and asking what exactly he consumed.

“Is he going to be ok?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s just going to feel very very bad tomorrow.”

As I saw my friend being loaded into the ambulance I realized that I did what I aimed to do when I left my house. I saved his life.

In my pocket, my iPhone voice recorder had recorded the entire thing.

It was 1:30am and this intense event was over. I had gotten the text from Lucas an hour before. One hell of an hour. It was time to go home to bed, and so I did. You would think that I was lying restless on my pillow, unable to doze off, worried about my friend’s well being. But no. I slept like a baby.

The next day, as I woke up, I felt really weird. Every time I thought about Lucas I felt nothing. I felt numb.

And it wasn’t just towards him. I just felt numb in general. Food didn’t have much flavor. Jokes weren’t that funny.

What was going on?

How emotions get processed

I had always wondered how negative emotions get processed.

Sometimes they had a tendency to keep playing themselves out in my the theatre of my mind. Events and scenes would keep playing themselves ad nauseam as my mind tried to analyze and make sense of the situation.

On other occasions, what I thought was the opposite happened. I felt numb. I didn’t feel much of anything. It was like the volume was turned down on all of life. I just felt less. That’s called suppressing your emotions.

Coincidentally – or not so coincidentally – a few weeks before receiving Lucas’s text, I had started following a daily emotional processing habit as outlined in the book “The Presence Process”.

The theory that the book mentioned was that old childhood wounds keep coming back in our adult life. Their purpose is to heal – and the only way for them to heal is for us to completely feel it.

But we run away from completely feeling negative emotions. We can suppress them and make ourselves numb or try mentally analyze them. Finally, we can just distract ourselves – TV shows, endless Internet browsing, self-medication and even sports or overachievement can be ways of avoiding feeling our pain.

Interestingly, when we don’t fully feel an emotion, our breathing changes.

Fear, for example, makes us hold our breath. Sadness makes us inhale more than exhale (think of a sniffling child). Anger makes us breath out more.

“The Presence Process” had a very simple daily practice.

Sit down for 15 minutes twice a day – once in the morning, once in the evening. And just keep your breath connected.

What does “Connected Breath” mean? Breathing in and out through the nose, with no pause between the in and out breath. It was a very simple daily practice, that unlike meditation didn’t require any mental focus. Just keep the breath connected.

On the first few weeks of doing the daily breathing practice, I was surprised on several occasions. Namely,  during a few days when I was in a bad mood, I found out that I was holding back on fully feeling an emotion that got triggered that day.

During breathing, the event and the associated emotions would come up to the surface and as I kept breathing, they became more intense, until they subsided. I ended up feeling a lot lighter. I loved it!

I got Lucas’s text just as I was about to go to sleep, after finishing my daily breathing practice.

In the intensity of his situation, I pushed down my emotions. This was no time to feel, I guess was my gut reaction. It was time to save my friends life. I suppressed everything so that I could work with a clear mind.

That’s how I ended up feeling completely numb.

Numb

I knew I was experiencing some strong emotion subconsciously and not processing it.

The daily breathing sessions were bringing nothing up. Perhaps it was still too much.

I tried to think about it rationally. What was this negative emotion I was holding back? Was I angry with Lucas for calling me? Was I afraid he was going to try something again? Was I sad that he tried to kill himself?

Nothing came. I couldn’t think my way into feeling. All I could feel was numbness.

At the same time, logically, I knew my friend was in need.

I went and met with him as he was released from hospital. As I saw him, my friend who had just tried to kill himself two days before, I felt nothing.

So I put on a mask. It was the best I could do.

I kept behaving according to the answer to the question – “what would a good friend do now?”

And I still felt nothing towards him. The only thing I felt was guilt for not feeling anything. What the fuck was wrong with me?

We were both broke, so I managed to find a state-funded psychologist who would see him at short notice. I told her it was very important and filled her up on everything.

I didn’t know what else to do.

My emotional empathy wasn’t there. I felt nothing and was working with my head.

It was the first time I felt how strongly I could suppress an emotion. It was so negative and strong and I had pushed it way down. Now there was no way to access it.

Or was there?

Listening to the Recording

I still had the recording on my phone – the one I started as I was about to enter Lucas’s house. It was a burden. My phone weighed like a heavy stone in my pocket.

Following my intuition, I decided to listen to the recording while doing the presence process technique.

I started playing the recording on the phone’s speaker, while connecting my breaths.

As I heard my voice and his, I was shot back to the event. This time though, I could feel everything.

The first thing I felt was my heart rate going up. Adrenaline shot through my body and made me feel like my blood was freezing. These were all the emotions I held back on that night and they were very intense… My friend was trying to kill himself!

As I really felt my way in, keeping my breathing connected despite the intensity of what I felt – the emotional truth of the situation came up.

What I was feeling underneath my numbness was intense sadness. My friend was going to leave. It resonated with an old familiar pain of having to say goodbye to people I had loved and had gone in the past – friends, lovers, family.

It was a horrible, never-ending feeling of sadness.

I must have cried for 10 minutes as all of this sadness came up. I forgot about connecting my breaths and just let myself feel all of it.

At the end of that session I didn’t feel numb anymore. I felt sad, and raw.

And I was worried about Lucas. I felt so sad for how terrible he must have felt to try to kill himself.

It had been a few days since I chatted with him last. I knew he went to see his new psychologist and she prescribed some anti depressants.

I tried calling him. There was no answer. I sent him a text message.

Later in the day I got a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.

Lucas tried to kill himself again, this time by crashing his car into a house at high speed. He had no seat belt. The airbag saved his life. He was pretty badly beaten up.

He Got Better

This time the hospital called his father (I’m still not sure why they hadn’t done it during his first suicide attempt!). He met me at the hospital and we chatted about what Lucas had been going through in the previous weeks.

I was still dedicated to helping my friend, but now, I had my heart open. It wasn’t easy.

I went into his room. He was lying on his bed asleep, face cut from shards of glass from his broken front windscreen, bandages around his head. One of his legs was broken and in a cast. He was in bad shape.

The next few days were very hard for everyone. His brain was still swollen from the trauma and he was talking nonsense.

At some point he wanted a smoking break. I rolled him out of the hospital on his wheelchair. As we sat outside, he said he’s not going to “mess it up next time” and would just jump off of a bridge. He said he wanted to hurt that girl just as much as she had hurt him.

It hurt me a lot to hear him talk. I felt powerless. I couldn’t force him to not kill himself. I just kept in regular touch with him and his father.

Eventually Lucas got better. His dad took him away from his toxic living environment and asked that no one come and visit. He had a long physical and emotional healing journey ahead of him.

I texted him and got short replies. “Everything is OK. Getting better. Thanks bro.”

The next time I saw him and he was in much better spirits. He said the antidepressants had kicked in and he was feeling a lot more balanced.

Eventually, we broke contact. He removed me from Facebook. I figured I was one of those people he went from liking to disliking, like he had with so many people before. Or perhaps I reminded him of some of his lowest moments. Oh well. I guess people break apart at times in life. I feel like I had done the best I could for him.

The Hardest Week

But let’s go back to his time in the hospital and talk about processing emotions a bit more.

One of the things The Presence Process mentions is that as one starts the 10-week course and begins connecting their breath and processing emotions twice a day, somehow life becomes more challenging. An unexpected slew of events (or “Messengers”) will come and challenge you to rise up and process your past issues.

I don’t know exactly how these things work. I’m a pretty skeptical hippie.

But that’s exactly what happened.

The day after visiting Lucas in the hospital after his second suicide attempt, I got a text from a girl I was dating seriously. We were seeing each other for a few months and had already said, “I love you” to each other.

Now she said she needed “to talk”.

Uh oh. Great timing.

She told me she realized that she was still in love with her ex-boyfriend and never got over him, so we have to break up.

It hurt like hell. I was already so sad over Lucas, and now this.

But this time, I didn’t run away from it. I didn’t get lost in mindless Internet browsing and TV shows. I let myself feel everything.

And something weird happened. The sadness I felt over this breakup in my daily Presence Process sessions started giving way to gratitude for the time we spent together. I was still sad, but not destroyed. I never had a breakup before that started feeling better so quickly.

I mean, I was pretty raw and sensitive, but at least I was feeling everything. I was alive.

Two days later, I was teaching a course to my dating students. I had to be at the top of my game. I was supposed to be very much in touch with my intuition and my emotions, as I was giving them feedback based a lot on how their simulated conversations went.

It was probably the best workshop I had ever taught. I was incredibly present to all of the students and gave laser sharp feedback. All the numbness from the prior week gave way and I was able to use my emotions for good.

Usually, beforehand, if life got a bit hard before workshops, I’d just push myself. I would make it on a diet of many coffees throughout the day and a ton of adrenaline. When I pushed myself that hard while teaching a workshop, I would usually be sick for a few days afterwards. I think it was a classic way to bottle up my emotions.

This time, I was open.

A week later, I got the news from my physio that I wouldn’t be able to run the Melbourne Marathon that I had trained for a few months for.

I attribute the Presence Process, and feeling the pain of giving up on the Marathon, to actually quickly move past it them and finding the emotional fortitude to persist and be on the starting line to run the Marathon.

Conclusion

First off, I recommend The Presence Process to anyone interested in sorting out his or her emotional issues. It’s a very subtle and powerful system.

After being through the 10-week course that the book outlines, I really believe it. Negative emotions come up to the surface in order to be felt and integrated. If we decide to push them down, suppress them, mentally analyze them or ignore them, they will keep haunting us.

We should give ourselves room to feel bad when that feeling arises.

Because on the other side of feeling bad, is a big burden off your shoulders.

The only way out is through.