Should I stay or should I go.

“Anyone desperate enough for suicide...should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.”

Richard Bach

One of my most salient memories as a child occurred when my family and I went to visit San Francisco when I was about 8. While there we saw the sights, toured the city, and did the kinds of things that happy families do.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. On our last afternoon we went out to the Golden Gate Bridge to enjoy the view and take some pictures. It was a crisp, clear autumn day and the sun was shining brightly.

While we were walking I saw a man and it was clear that something was not right with him. He was talking to himself, pacing back and forth, and seemed to be in a great deal of distress. My mother told me to keep walking and not to stare at him, but I simply could not.

A minute later the man stepped over the railing, made the sign of the cross and dove into the water. Although it only took him seconds to reach the water below, in my mind he was suspended in the air for what seemed like forever.

I didn’t really understand that I had just witnessed a suicide until several minutes later. Eventually a crowd formed and began looking down into the water, but the man was gone, having been swallowed up by the water below.

What I didn’t know then was that the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most popular suicide destinations in the world. Approximately 35 people a year do exactly what that man had done by diving into the water from that beautiful vista. Perhaps it is the beauty of the spot, the symbolic nature of the structure, or simply a matter of convenience, but whatever the reason it has become the most popular place in the world for people who simply can’t face the reality of living another day to end their lives.

Watching that scene left a permanently imbedded memory in my mind that I have never been able to shake. I was so stunned by what I had seen that I couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t cry, and had no real outlet to process what I had seen.

But something profound happened to me in that moment, and looking back the roots of wanting to “save” people probably started then. Although I was deeply troubled and even scarred by what I had seen, I knew that I never wanted to ever see anything like that again, and the seeds of the young “rescuer” of people were planted.

But… rescuing people is not what a psychologist always need to do. It is in fact dangerous to think you can save all of the people who come into your office, as essentially the client has to do the heavy lifting that provokes real change themselves. The therapist may guide, assist, laugh and cry, and even plead with a person to change, but until that person is ready these things may all fall on deaf ears.

Furthermore it can be seriously draining to the self to become wholly invested in saving all of the people that come to see us. It is our job to plant the seeds of change and use all of our own skill and power and empathy to plant these seeds, but ultimately the outcome depends on a great many factors that we can never fully anticipate or comprehend.

So I’m learning, slowly, how to not think like a lifeguard. I have often been effective in my career because I have poured every bit of myself into saving others, but along the way I have also forfeited much of my own happiness. I’ve also realized that some people are simply to damaged or in too much pain to change their lives. Although this is a seemingly cynical outlook, my work has taught me that it is unfortunately the truth. Psychology is often an impossible profession, but ultimately it is the one that we chose.

So you learn to live with the little victories. The wonderful surprises people sometimes come in with, the tears, the laughter, and all the emotional growth we see all make it worth while. I am learning this every day. Will always be learning this every day. I need to keep thinking, examining and reflecting. As I was pulling people from the water, I myself was drowning. Perhaps this is because I forgot that the one person who needed saving the most was myself.