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I don’t know Russell Armstrong or anything about him except what I’ve read about the estranged spouse of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Taylor Armstrong.  I do know something about suicide, however. I know it doesn’t have to be the fate of everyone who contemplates it. The core reason for suicide is the deep sense that either the world or I myself has not lived up to my expectations – and isn’t about to. The emotional response to this belief is despair and depression of such depth and intensity that it overrides one’s natural fear of death. The core reason for anyone reaching this conclusion is that the world is a very difficult place. I believe that we all come in from a realm that feels beautifully connected and safe and, in any hierarchal culture, we find ourselves in an alternative realm where most people are very well trained in how to create disconnect with others.  Notably, this includes our parents, because in part that’s how they have been trained.  (Fortunately, on a sliding scale of success, parents and the community also reinforce our natural connecting/loving abilities – and so we end up split: each of us with a Jekyll loving side of ourselves along with a Hyde darkness.) As I describe in the  Free Download  life mastery class on my life coaching website, it’s also a savagely judgmental world we enter. This  is extremely hard on all of us – and yet so innate in our development that it puts us all on guard. It is, of course, the exact opposite experience of safe connection.    Our basic childhood responses for dealing with this world are the six coping mechanisms   I mentioned in my earlier blog . These are: fight, flight, seek approval, control, manipulate, or sacrifice yourself to “fix” or enable someone else. They don’t solve the underlying issues – in fact they make them worse – but they are survival mechanisms in the moment.  Beyond learning to rely on such inadequate life and relating tools, is the fact that psychologically as children we develop a self-image of who we want to be. If the world later supports that self-image, we tend to be at least okay, if not happy and satisfied. If it doesn’t, watch out! The awful truth about any self-image, however, is that it is an image. It is not our authentic self, though it may include elements of authenticity, such as our native talents and aptitudes. And a good rule of thumb is: t he more distant you are from your authentic self, the closer you are to suicide. For some of us, when our coping mechanisms no longer work to keep us from despair over how the world or ourselves have not met our expectations, including the expectations that come with our self-image, we might as well say goodbye to this world. The pain is just too deep to stay here. Now, here’s a story. Some years ago I met a young woman, 23, who was one of the most remarkable, loving, compassionate people I’d encountered. She lighted up a room with her essence and was literally incapable of forming a negative judgment on another person. I suggested to her that she must have had extraordinary and loving parenting.  And she said no, she had not, and in fact she had been suicidal a year and a half earlier and had failed in a serious attempt to kill herself. What healed her despair, she said, was a simple mental/emotional technique she learned at a free evening workshop a friend insisted she attend. Not having anything to do – her father was at this point paying her rent – she spent all day every day using this technique, one that deals with negative thoughts and emotions. A year later she was in the remarkable shape in which I met her. Moreover, her mind had become completely quiet- it didn’t chatter away all day long the way most of ours do. The technique was called Heartmath, and it is one of the modern tools life coaches like myself teach to help people with their emotional pain and negative mindsets. There are numerous others we teach as we coach people toward success in life and their careers, as no one technique works on everyone and it is best to offer a smorgasbord of tools. Russell Armstrong obviously either was not taught such skills or lacked an ally to help him find the will to use them, another job of life coaches and the therapists with whom we work in suicide-potential cases. The great thing about these tools is you don’t have to be suicidal to work with them. You only need a desire to move past whatever pain you might be in from some area of your life where you believe your expectations have not been met.    *** J ay Levin, the founder and former Editor-in Chief of the LA Weekly newspaper, has been a highly successful life and relationship coach and trainer for 12 years.  He recently made the core of his work available as classes in Life Rehab and Mastery and in Relationships. See  relationshipcounselingtoday.com See the original post: The Universal Lesson of Russell Armstrong’s Suicide

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The Universal Lesson of Russell Armstrong’s Suicide