More Excerpts and Reflections from WHY DID SHE JUMP?

My Daughter’s Battle with Mental Illness, A Broken Healthcare System and My Ultimate Search for Peace

Reflections

Losing a son or daughter by suicide, no matter what age, can happen to anyone, anytime and anywhere.  Don’t ever think it can’t happen to you.  I would have never believed in a million years that my daughter would have leaped out of a 15-story window to her death; but she did!  

Pam was a brilliant clinical psychologist, with 2 successful practices in Santa Monica and Long Beach, California.  She had been on the staff of the John Bradshaw Center working with a very large recovering community along with adults who suffered deep childhood wounds from their family of origin and beyond.

We carry these wounds into our adult life reenacting our unresolved childhood wounds repeating the past, by the unconscious choices we make.  These are not because we want to, but because they feel familiar to our history.  In our effort to heal those wounds we unconsciously choose relationships, romantic, friends and even jobs to work through those wounds, but instead, find ourselves repeating the past unwittingly. 

Until a well-trained seasoned therapist helps us work through the shame we developed over the years from poor parenting, bullying, and chronic abuse, we find ourselves repeating the past to heal and grow. We unconsciously choose partners, friends, institutions, and jobs that are like what we experienced in our early childhood. 

An Excerpt

The loss of a loved one and the ensuing grief can often precipitate post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although our brains can intellectualize the concept of death, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system, handles that loss differently. 

Suicide adds unforeseen layers to this challenge.  The taking of one’s life is often considered unjustifiable, an abomination sin, a deliberate violation of God’s will, religion, and nature.  It’s thought of as an act of one’s own volition, as if it were a conscious choice. This is NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.  Quite often, the mental illness, such as acute depression or bipolar disorder, and even schizophrenia insidiously and relentlessly invades and fractures the mind, as in my daughter’s case.  It can be an impulse reaction to a hallucination, rather than a thought-out decision.  Pam had both visual and auditory hallucinations due to her mental disorder.

This is what I believe happened to Pam. I don’t think leaping 15 stories to her death was a conscious decision because she valued life.  The disease became her executioner.  It had a life force of its own, controlling her will that had run riot and her actions, and ultimately caused her death.