0:00 passive suicidal ideation or passive S.I is a feeling of indifference or ambivalence towards your own life it exists on somewhat of a spectrum and on the lower levels of the spectrum it could present as just feelings of I don't really care what happens to me I'm not excited to see tomorrow if I don't wake up tomorrow that's all right on the higher levels of passive essay it may even manifest as actively hoping that something will happen to you to end your own life or maybe even intentionally putting yourself in Risky situations or neglecting important aspects of your self-care in the hopes that you will die earlier than you otherwise would have but it stops just short of the level where you're going to actively and
0:46 immediately do something to end your own life I've made content on this topic before and it's typically just been educational it always seems to touch a nerve with people and so today I'm going to do something different and I'm actually are going to give you some of my favorite tools to try to challenge and work through passive SI welcome back to the psychology of depression and anxiety if this is your first time here my name is Dr Scott I am a licensed full-time clinical psychologist I specialize in treating severe depression and anxiety I run intensive outpatient programs for depression and anxiety which are sort of a midpoint between you know seeing an individual therapist once a week or every other week and like being in a hospital or a residential treatment center I specialize in people whose needs kind of fall in between those two extremes I'm also the author
1:34 of the book for when everything is burning and obviously the host of this podcast and YouTube channel what we're going to do today we're going to tackle a philosophical question about a person's right to die I'm going to give you four strategies that help people work through passive SI and then lastly I'm going to address a very common misconception about passive SI which is that it is weak or cowardly or somehow less than you know active essay this is not true and at the end of this I will explain why let's talk about this philosophical question first because something that came up a lot in the last video I made on this topic was this idea that well shouldn't a person just have the right to opt out of life I mean none
2:21 of us actually ask to be here right none of us were consensual adults in the matter of our own creation we did not sign a contract we were not given informed consent we did not know what this was going to be like and we never had the choice to say no thanks that sounds terrible and I'm not up for it I'll just remain right here in non-existence thank you very much I get that I really really do and there can be a lot of reasons why a person might resent the fact that they exist maybe maybe you're in an abusive relationship and it seems like there's no way out maybe you have a chronic pain disorder or otherwise really on uncurable or untreatable medical condition that makes your life miserable maybe your mental health is crippling
3:08 you and and you just don't feel like you belong on this planet or with other people and you feel like an alien or a monster or something that otherwise shouldn't be here maybe you're facing extreme poverty and it doesn't seem like there's any way out of that and this is by no means an exhaustive list there are many many reasons why we can look at this so-called Gift of Life and essentially have the response of no thanks I'd like to take this back and get store credit please this is not working out for me I understand some of those situations I don't understand all of them so I'm not going to act like I can speak for all people here really what I'm going to be doing in this video is speaking for myself and I speak for myself as someone who has experienced passive essay and
3:56 the reason I'm glad or myself anyway that we don't have basically just a deactivate button you know a a Shameless painless dignified way out of all this is because I am pretty sure that if we did have such a button there are probably multiple points in my life where I would have pushed that button and as I sit here before you today as the person I am now I don't even have the words to express how grateful I am that I didn't have that option that I would have had to do something really extreme to to make that happen something that for whatever
4:41 reason I'm going to give you some of my reasons today but some of the reasons I still don't fully understand for whatever reason I was not ever able to get myself to that point and I'm essentially what I'm saying is I personally am very glad that it is hard for a person to die on purpose because if it was easy I think I would have done it and I'm glad that I didn't so I know that answer may not apply to all people but that is my take on that and I just want you to know that it's not it's not from a place of complete ignorance does that mean I understand every challenge you're facing every situation you've been in of course not no one does the only person who truly knows and understands your life is you it's not the person closest to you it's
5:27 not your mom it's not your best friend it's not your partner it's certainly not me so I'm not going to act like I speak for all people but I do know that for me things were able to change and I believe that that can be true for all people if you're listening to this today there must be at least a small part of you that believes that or is at least curious about that or else I don't think this video would be of any interest to you and my hope is that by the time you are done listening to me today that part of you will have grown just enough for you to feel ready to keep going one more day that's all that's all I hope for for today so let me talk about the four ways that you can challenge passive SI because there are a lot of things happening
6:12 inside of your brain to create these thoughts and create these feelings that you may not fully understand that our brains can kind of trick us sometimes first then we have something called mood congruent memory this is a phenomenon in our brains where whatever emotional state we are currently in all of the memories of other times in your life that you have been in that emotional state they all come rushing to the Forefront of your mind and they feel the most real the most important they can even feel the most recent even if they literally are not the reason this happens is our brains the way our brains store memories is almost like a really really intricate version of like the
6:59 system for books at the library and I I know there's a name for that system and it's escaping me at the moment I promise I'm smart um I just don't always remember my words tell me in the comments what what word I'm failing to think of right now um your brain has a system like that too and and there are many variables that your brain uses to like catalog your memories one of those variables is the emotion associated with the memory and so you've probably noticed that when you're really angry you tend to think of other stuff that made you angry even if it doesn't really have a lot of relevance to what's happening in life right now when you're anxious you tend to think of other times you were anxious when you're excited you tend to think of other times that you were excited when
7:45 you're content you think of other times that you were that you were content et cetera et cetera Etc and one of the effects of this mood congruent memory is that memories of periods of your life when you felt something very different from what you currently feel they tend to feel really far away in fact they can almost take on like a dream like unrealistic quality to them like like a skepticism and it works both ways it works with positive and negative emotions my worst phase of my life was from roughly ages 13 to 22. and I would tell you that my Early Childhood was really good and I was very happy and I remember as a as a teenager being in
8:31 the midst of this hopelessness and despair looking back on my childhood and thinking that can't have been real it didn't feel like I could have possibly changed that much or like my life could have changed that much I would look back on all these happy memories I had that I have these visual tools and memories of and think like that can't have really happened or if it did happen I can't have actually felt the way I remember it feeling there's no way that I was ever happy to be alive there's no way I was ever content because right now I feel like I've literally been placed on the wrong planet I had this I had this image in my head this little movie that would play in my head a lot when I was a teenager that God is like placing people
9:17 using his little like Sim life laptop game on his computer or something like that and writers he was about to place me he's like sneezed and the mouse moved out of his hand and I ended up on Earth on accident I was supposed to be on planet zardock or something I don't know and he looked at it and he's like whoops well he'll be fine and then you know if my life was if this was a biography video of my life the the narrator voice would pop in and say he was not going to be fine that's that's what it felt like I thought that I was misplaced that I was a mistake that I was not meant to be here and I couldn't understand how I could have ever been happy the opposite is also true so my life as it is now is very good and I look back
10:03 on this dark period of my life and I I'm almost skeptical sometimes sometimes I wonder if I'm exaggerating or blowing things out of proportion or misremembering because my life seems very good today and it's hard for me because of mood congruent memory to actually acknowledge and conceptualize that I was ever that depressed but every now and then I'll see a picture of myself from back then or I'll reconnect with a friend or as I was writing my book I wrote a lot about my past and when I really allow myself to go there when those memories start to come to the Forefront of my brain I remember no it was every bit as bad as you thought it was and so if you're in a really dark place right now
10:49 your brain is essentially highlighting other times in life that you've felt kind of like this and what that does is it creates this sensation of an inevitable pattern in your life so you're looking back on all these other times and it feels like that's all my life has really been it's just this misery and this torment and these times when life was good or even just like average those were either like fake or I was just in denial about how bad things were or I'm misremembering it or they were you know like one-off flukes because of a whole bunch of different non-repeatable events happening in my life at that time that made it good but that will never happen again and it feels like this is the real pattern this is the only thing this is the only truth in my life is that I always end up
11:35 miserable and hopeless and back in the same place it's a trick 100 it's a trick your brain is playing on you not on purpose but because of mood congruent memory because the times in your life that have felt emotionally most like the time you're in right now are the only ones that feel real because our emotions vary so dramatically from one phase of life to the next that it's hard for us to truly conceptualize that things ever could have been like that I want you to understand this because I want you to know that what you're feeling right now is not as Eternal as it seems there have been times in your life when you have felt different even if they seem like a distant dream to you right now and there will be more in the
12:20 future if you stick around second tool that you can use to challenge passive SI is Spite and I'm not kidding about this one um you can stick around just to piss people off a little bit I know that probably sounds weird but bear with me on this one okay you were not born hating yourself and hating your life I mean technically you weren't born with like enough self-awareness to to even consider whether you felt that way or not but you weren't you were not no matter how far back you trace this no one enters this life with those thoughts and beliefs in their mind and for the most part those ideas the idea is that you're you're this worthless
13:05 person and life is miserable and you're miserable and you're stuck and this is all it's ever going to be those are put there by other people those are not thoughts that are native to your ecosystem they are invasive species that have been introduced by others and if you have let those thoughts and ideas take root in your mind you are letting other people live your life and control where you go from here all the people who have hated you doubted you bullied you abused you treated you horribly refused to help you failed you those people all in the sick weird way that I hope you understand
13:51 if you leave they win then their perspective ends up being the right one they end up achieving what they wanted they wanted you to suffer they wanted you to fail they wanted to see you fall and never get back up again and that's their victory and by sticking around and continuing to try to make some semblance of a life for yourself despite everything they have put you through every way you've been unequipped to deal with this life every support person who has a let you down you are spiting them every day that you keep fighting you are showing them that what they said and did and thought and felt was wrong and will continue to be wrong and someday
14:37 when you have a life better than what they will ever dream of having because they spend their time and energy and attention trying to break people down and you're spending it on trying to build yourself back up you're going to get to a place they've never imagined being or maybe they imagined it but they're not going to be there because they're misallocating their resources and you're going to use them correctly and that's going to result in you having a different outcome than them and whether they see it or not who knows right now we live in the social media era they probably will see it but even if they don't I just want you to win I don't want your bullies and your abusers and your detractors to have been correct about you and spite is honestly something that
15:24 has kept me going it was there was a period of time when that was the only thing when all this other stuff I've told you about and I'm about to tell you about there's times when none of that stuff reached me I didn't care I didn't believe in it but my stuff at least has a lot to do with other people and how other people have treated me and no matter how miserable I've got I can never quite accept the fact that if I leave they win I was not okay with that and I hope that you can use that to help yourself today the third thing that I want you to consider in your fight against passive SI is that you are a dynamic being and so whatever your life is right now if you're just taking that and projecting it indefinitely into the
16:09 future that's a mistake that is a logical fallacy that would be predicated on the assumption that you are a static and unchanging creature and you are not now this might sound a little bit like it gets better which is not one of my four ideas for you today the difference here is when people say stick around it gets better that's an empty promise they're basically just saying your life will improve just because you continue to live I actually don't believe that's true I I don't believe it at all um my life did not improve just because I stayed alive I had to do things to improve my life and you will too and I know that that's that's unfair because most if not all of
16:57 what you're facing right now you did not ask for you didn't sign up for it you didn't volunteer for it you probably didn't want a lot of it but no one else is going to be able to do it for you you have the ability to take what you've been given no matter how awful it may be and re-craft it break it down to its basic elements and then recreate it into something that actually works for you maybe you were born into a family where you you just don't belong you you don't have much in common with them you don't like to do the things they like to do you don't feel the way they feel you don't see the world they see the world the way they see the world that's really really hard and I get that
17:42 but there will come a time if you're not there already when you will have more say in who surrounds you and you can choose to surround yourself with people who have more in common with you with people who don't make you feel like some kind of AI construct who doesn't function by the same rules that they do will you find a lot of those people I can't necessarily promise that I found one and I married that person because I realized what a rare thing that was for me it might very much be searching for a needle in a haystack for you it certainly was for me but I can also tell you that when you find that needle everything changes and I mean everything now here's something I want you to consider about trying to find your place in the world because this is one of the things that can
18:28 really make a difference in whether you see any hope or any future I want you to consider whether you've been looking in the same place over and over and over again and if so whether that might actually be the wrong place I say that because that's something that happened to me all my life I felt like a misfit I felt like I didn't fit in and belong anywhere and so I was always attracted and I don't just mean like romantically I mean just as people like as friends as a peer group I was always attracted to the Misfits and the outcasts so you know the Goths the punks the rejects like those were always the people I would look at them and the way they dressed and the way they seem to feel and the stuff they were into and I'm like okay those are my people and it never quite seemed to be the case
19:14 I never it was like okay you guys are kind of weird and I'm kind of weird but it's like not the same like we're different kinds of crazy and we don't seem to be compatible in our craziness and it took me years to learn that lesson because they looked the way I felt and so I thought this is my peer group and I kept getting so confused and frustrated as to why the people I thought were my people never seem to be my people it's something that I've come to understand is if you have kind of an unusual set of traits that don't really fit neatly in any particular group or category limiting your search for the person or the people who understand you and make you feel like you belong and
20:00 like you're connected to this world to some certain like demographic or archetype of people might be a mistake because you're often going to find the same traits in the same group of people people come together because they have certain things in common right you might be looking in the wrong place so consider broadening your search I will be completely honest with you here I still don't really feel like I totally belong here I still don't even though I have a lot of like great things in life what I have been able to do is kind of carve out my own little corner of the world both literally like my home but also just metaphorically like in my mind in my mind I'm not in the entire world
20:47 I'm just in a little piece of the world and that piece my own little world works pretty well for me most of the time and and that piece basically is just my relationship with myself it's how I treat myself how I respond to myself the situations I put myself in the ways that I respond to my emotions and my setbacks and my symptoms and my failures I have created an internal environment where I mostly feel safe and comfortable and technically that's all any of us are doing I mean the actual objective real world out there you don't actually experience that world I know this is a little bit weird but what you think of as the world is actually an internal experience it's like a simulation in your mind it's almost like the Matrix if you don't believe me
21:34 here's a weird example that'll kind of creep you out a little bit look around whatever room you're in right now and just notice the colors of the objects around you those are not the actual colors of the objects around you what you see if I remember the science behind this correctly because it freaked me out the first time I read this what you see what you perceive as the colors of each object are not actually the colors of each object but the colors of the spectrum that those objects cannot absorb and therefore are reflected back to you and you perceive that color through your Optical system and then in your brain you see that thing as being that color that's not what color that thing actually is no one actually knows what color
22:20 anything is it's all a perception in your mind so much of Life happens inside happens internally and that's why I think it's so that's why I emphasize working on ourselves and working on our relationships with ourselves do I think the world is just this awesome wonderful place that is faultless and blameless in the way we feel no No in fact for a lot of my life I would tell you I hated the world still feel that way sometimes but that's not where our agency lies none of us haven't as an individual I don't care who you are listening this I don't care if you're the president or Elon Musk or whoever you are none of us can really make the entire world be what we want it to be no individual human has
23:08 that capacity the best we can do is recreate our own inner worlds and make them work for us and so that's ultimately what I want you to try to do last thing that I want to put out there as a coping tool before we get into whether passive SI is weak or not this one's quick and simple no one actually knows what happens if you die right I mean people have belief systems and such but no no living person can accurately describe to you what comes next and so when you when you consider like this idea of looking at what you have in life and saying you know I just I just want to be done basically what you're doing is is you're saying I want to take everything that I have which may be not great and basically I want to trade it for the
23:54 mystery box what if it's worse like a super morbid thought I know really depressing right but what if what comes next is not better I mean you don't actually know that it is that's a that's a risky bet I mean think about doing that with like your job or your partner your spouse you know if you were really dissatisfied with what you had and someone said give that to me you know give that to me and I'll give you something else in return and you say oh well what are you giving me and they're like it's a surprise that's risky that's all I'm going to say about that because it's it's a tricky topic that's risky and I'll leave it there
24:41 last thing I want to address today passive SI is it weak is it cowardly is it is it pathetic because a lot of people said this in the comments of my last video on passive s i and they were there were kind of two reasons people thought this one some people fell into this Camp of like I should be able to enjoy life so is the fact that I cannot enjoy my life and I feel this way all the time is that weakness other people kind of went the other route so like am I weak because I don't have active SI am I weak because I hate my life and I don't enjoy the way I feel but I don't feel like I can really do anything about it is that weakness I don't believe either of them are and I can give you a very very simple visualization exercise to demonstrate why first picture your si thoughts or feelings picture them as like an animal so what
25:27 animal in the animal kingdom do you feel like accurately represents the intensity and the power of these thoughts maybe it's grizzly bear let's say next I want you to visualize the tools you feel like you've been given to manage this SI to fight against this monster or or beast or whatever it is how well do you feel like the support people in your life and the world in general have equipped you to deal with this feeling maybe your answer to that is like a plastic knife like it feels like I don't really know I don't really have the tools to fight against this no one's ever really helped me with this and the third thing I want you to consider is how long have you been fighting this battle how long have you had passive SI maybe not every day but
26:14 on and off at least let's say it's 20 years so keep all those three things in mind the the Avatar of your passive SI the tool you have to fight against it and how long you've been doing that now I want you to imagine that you are driving home today and you see a person who kind of looks like you on the side of the road fighting a grizzly bear with a plastic knife so ridiculous right but also amazing like if you saw that your jaw would drop you would be in utter amazement of what you're seeing right so imagine that you stop and you say what is this what is happening like like a how are you not dead B how did this happen what is going
27:00 on here and this person who's valiantly defending themselves from this grizzly bear with this plastic knife says oh this I've been here for 30 years how how in awe of that person would you be because that person is you that's what you've been doing this whole time is that weak is that cowardly is that pathetic I certainly don't think so and I have a doctorate in Clinical Psychology so I think I outrank you on this matter probably let me know what you think about this leave a comment send me a message if you liked it tell a friend I will see you next time take care
