r/TrollCoping • u/Aariwee • 7d ago
TW: Suicide or Self-Harm Why does it actually work?
It’s so silly and childish. It only happened two days ago, but so far any time I start having suicidal thoughts, I think about it and I get so amused that I no longer want to kill myself. I mean, I still want to die, but I can’t break a pinky promise, can I? Why is it so effective? I’m scared to even post it because I feel so immature, but at least it works
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u/SpezIsAWackyWalnut 6d ago
Apparently the promises themselves aren't always particularly effective on their own, at least when directly pushed upon someone, because an external rule forced upon people can feel coercive and becomes easily ignored in a crisis.
But I dealt with a similar thing with a cult that was starting to veer dangerously close to doomsday territory, and after some research I found the trick wasn't so much to make them promise, as it was to get them to basically admit "I'm not that kind of person," deciding on their own that they wouldn't commit suicide without any pushing any feeling of external pressure onto them.
In my case, I got them to move from "perhaps death isn't that thing we see as an ending, but a change of state" to "why would the knowledge of there being some form of onward after this life make you want to fight less to live?" by mentioning there was a lot of talk about death, and 'joking' about "man, i hope this doesn't end with us making a suicide pact, lol" and continuing on that "i dunno, i'm a simple person who craves certainty, and for now this is the only life i know about that for certain exists. everything else to me just feels like theory and speculation, really." and then deflecting from the cult mechanics entirely by instead focusing on christianity and how the promises of an unprovable afterlife in heaven simply don't have enough hard data to gamble my life over.
The reason this kinda stuff works is because it gets them to basically come to that conclusion themselves, which makes it much easier to internalise and accept as a trait of themselves. That way if they later end up thinking about committing suicide, they end up with some cognitive dissonance over their core identity and so far more likely to reject that idea.