~a column by Colleen O’Brien
A neighbor kid I knew in the 1980s, youngest of four boys and friend of my kids, grew up to earn a doctorate in psychology and become a nationally certified counselor and a marriage and family counselor.
Steve, now Dr. Steven W. Nicholas, recently wrote a book on how to deal with suicides, writing in his dedication: “This book is in memory of my dear brother, David. What I wouldn’t do to have him back in my life.”
Steve’s longing is what many suffer when left behind after the shock of a family or friend suicide. Along with What could I have done? What should I have done? Why wasn’t I paying attention? are the million other feelings of guilt at the suicide death of a loved one.
Dr Nicholas has been practicing for a long time in family therapy, percolating his thoughts to a ripe conclusion that became a primer for “helping professionals and those interacting with people experiencing emotional pain.” The book is also totally accessible to parents, teachers, healthcare personnel and colleagues in “a multitude of professions.
It is, in other words, a universal book with a universal idea – Living Ideation* – whose intent is to save lives.
Traditional suicide prevention and intervention ideas and practices work to minimize the depressive traits that indicate a potential suicide. Nicholas’s thought process goes beyond this to build on and utilize existing strengths in the potential suicide and encourage the person to recall the good things in his or her life, for it’s not so much that the person wants death, more that the person figures he or she does not “want to endure with their current mindset.”
Living Ideation fits in with the psychology that works from a patient’s positive aspects rather than the patient’s pathology. The positive approach to healing is a natural descendant in the long history of healers, and Nicholas is making giant and important strides with his theory.
Living where he does in northern Nevada, in the vortex of the U.S. tinderbox of wildfires, Nicholas works each summer with the warriors who fight the fires, often living in the workcamps where the weary firefighters sleep and eat and try to work it through their heads how such horrific fires persist, how friends suffer and die.
Feeling that this new wrinkle in human time – what climate change has wrought – turning out to be one of the reasons for his long years of study and practice, Nicholas concentrates his time and energy on the increasing hotbox of America’s storied Wild West. He is even thinking that off season, he should be working in Australia to help our Aussie friends make sense of their seasonal destruction and death from wildfires.
As a nearly lifelong Nevadan, Nicholas has bent his entire adult life toward the high rate of death by suicide in this part of the country. Out of his brother’s death so many years ago, he has learned that “pain exists with non-pain,” and he can teach endangered souls and their healers the “co-existing ideations of living.”
The whole book is worth a quote, but since it’s illegal to copy the entire thing, I leave you with just a few of Dr. Steven W. Nicholas’s good words:
“What if you put your thoughts toward beauty, meaning, and opportunities? Ideations of living rather than ideations of loss and despair…? All moments cans be steered into new moments. Choose how you go….”
“…when we engage in deeper conversations about each other’s interests and talents, then we reinforce how competent we all are at the game of life…focus on our unified and common strengths and much less on the divisive differences and perceived weaknesses.”
“Connectedness is the solution.”
Not just for suicide, dear readers, for all of us in this divisive world we live in right now.
*Living Ideation by Dr. Steven W. Nicholas
Available wherever you buy your books.
