Please note that the following blog contains a discussion on suicide and death.
Sonja Rose, trainer and Advanced Diploma Research Lead at the Trust, shares her personal and professional experience after facing the suicide of a client. This articles discusses her research and explores how a psychosynthesis approach can be used to help understand a person’s struggles.
Touched by Suicide
For as long as I can remember, my life has been touched by suicide. Then, soon after I qualified as a counsellor, a client died by suicide. What followed were the required protocols, the supervision questions, and the organisational tasks. All necessary, yet none offering a home for my experience; neither the bodily shock nor the shame that gathered quietly at the edges. And there was no language for the spiritual bewilderment that left me reeling. I was at sea, unanchored, without a base or a place for what lived in me.
Turning Towards Enquiry
Eventually, in 2016, this experience shaped the direction of my psychotherapy research. I chose to explore how psychosynthesis practitioners understand and speak about suicide and suicidality. I wanted to look at how suicide is lived and felt within our therapeutic culture and how broader systemic discourses influence what can and can’t be said.
Marsh’s¹ critique of medicalised suicide narratives and Hjelmeland’s² analysis of how cultural assumptions shape how suicide is understood formed a vital backdrop. Both authors argue that contemporary suicidology tends to narrow the phenomenon into individual pathology, stripping away context, history, culture and relationship. Their work helped me to recognise how specific ways of speaking are legitimised while others can fall out of view, leaving some experiences without a language that can hold them.
Alongside this, Shea’s³ writing on the intense and often unspoken embodied countertransference that can arise on meeting suicide drew attention to the private, bodily dimensions of practice that sit beneath professional discourse. Together, these ideas opened a wider frame for my understanding of how suicide is encountered, not only as a clinical event but as a culturally shaped and deeply felt human experience; one that often stretches beyond what we can easily name.
Listening to the Body
In my interviews, the quality of speech would often shift. Sentences thinned, rhythms slowed, and voices softened, as though language itself were adjusting to the weight of what was being touched. There were long pauses, and from within them the body’s raw physical metaphors arose as signals from a deeper place. Images emerged, often intense, violent physical ones: being bulldozed into the earth, flattened, spun, ripped open or pulled into an underworld. These were not performative. They were attempts to speak from the body where ordinary language failed.
And when words fell away entirely, something else opened, a nondual space of shared experience, transpersonal moments in which images or ideas surfaced simultaneously in the field, as though the encounter itself were speaking.
Butler writes how particular experiences can disturb the limits of our knowing, leaving us in places where no existing discourse is adequate⁴. In such moments, speech falters and orientation slips. Abram’s understanding of the body as “the very possibility of contact”⁵, and of perception as something that arises through our participatory, sensory entanglement with the world, illuminated this further. For Abram, the body is not simply a vessel that registers experience but the medium through which the world discloses itself. Again and again in the research, suicide appeared somatically long before it became anything that could be narrated.
The Demands of the Role
Alongside this, my participants acknowledged that professional expectations leaned towards needing clarity. Therapists are required to risk-assess, formulate, and document plans. This can help create stability, yet it can also move attention away from the immediacy of embodied knowing. Even within psychosynthesis, with its emphasis on embodied experience, the pull toward meaning-making can override less cognitive forms of awareness.
Another key theme across the research was the weight of responsibility that surrounds suicide. This was not located in personal vulnerability but in a wider cultural atmosphere where suicide is framed as predictable and preventable. When prevention doesn’t happen, someone must have failed. Such pressure can shape internal experience, drawing practitioners toward vigilance rather than presence. Soth’s⁶ work on embodied countertransference and Totton’s⁷ analysis of cognitive retreat under pressure reflected what I saw in the data: the quieter, relational aspects of practice can shrink when therapists feel policed by an invisible, systemic, organisational, evaluative gaze.
Ethical dilemmas also emerged, not as philosophical abstractions but as lived tensions. Ideas about autonomy, agency, despair and the right to die appeared in tangled ways. Cultural assumptions about which deaths are tragic, understandable, selfish or unthinkable were woven through attempts to make meaning. Attempts to categorise suicide using tidy oppositions, such as rational or irrational, preventable or inevitable, are rarely held. What surfaced more often was much more indistinct, an experience in which the desire to live and the wish to die could coexist.
Transpersonal Depths
I discovered that Transpersonal Psychology and Psychosynthesis offered both openings and invitations. Their orientation toward experiential depth and meaning creates room for ideas of symbolic death, existential rupture and opportunity for transformation. Hillman’s⁸ understanding of the suicidal struggle as movement between psychic states and Grof and Grof’s⁹ exploration of the Dark Night of the Soul can broaden the imaginative field, loosening the grip of more reductionist accounts. However, at the same time, Ferrer¹⁰ cautions that transpersonal ideas can drift into abstraction unless they stay rooted in the body and within our social context, which helped anchor my research in lived, felt experience. It was within this movement between expansion and embodiment that another strand of the research emerged: a review of the concept of disidentification.
A significant shift came through a re-imagining of the idea of disidentification. Rather than a somewhat detached ‘stepping back’ from our identifications, what emerged was a more fluid, participatory way of being both present and reflective. I discovered that sensation, affect, and meaning-making could coexist. Drawing on Abram’s⁵ view of the body as immersed in reciprocal participation with the world and as the place where meaning arises helped me clarify disidentification as a more conscious ‘stepping towards’, an embodied relational stance. This felt more aligned with Ferrer’s¹⁰ participatory spiritual knowing than with any notion of detachment, separation or distance.
Into the Unfathomable and Unexpected Gifts
Jaworski and Scott’s¹¹ observation that some elements of suicide remain unfathomable to the living echoed through my conversations and within my own experience. A quieter recognition emerged: something about suicide will always remain unknowable, outside the reach of conceptualisation. During the analysis phase, I found myself moving through periods of disorientation, a descent into darkness and liminality, a movement towards deeper contact with the phenomenon. And, as in the Persephone myth, I recognise that such descents are not one-off events. There is a rhythm of return, a way the work asks us to revisit these depths each time with a little more awareness.
I learnt that coming close to suicide, whether as a therapist, supervisor, loved one, friend or simply as another human being, asks for a particular quality of attention. It strips away easy narratives. It reveals vulnerability. It asks us to remain present in places that society often prefers to avoid. Through my research, unexpected gifts emerged, a softening of certainty, a deepening relationship with my body and a stronger sense of kinship with others who encounter such terrain. It has strengthened my commitment to creating spaces where the unspeakable can be approached without shame and where complexity can be lived with rather than resolved.
The research continues to inform my practice. In becoming a researcher-practitioner, I’ve recognised how my enquiry didn’t end with the dissertation; it lives on in me, shaping how I work and how I move through my life. This learning extends far beyond my work with suicide. It helps me to meet clients at existential depth, where meaning can feel fragile. I have found that the work is not to resolve the unresolvable, but to accompany with as much presence and honesty as I can bear with an ongoing willingness to stay in soulful contact with suffering and with those who find themselves in its depths.
References:
- Marsh, I. Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Hjelmeland, H. “A Critical Look at Suicide Research.” In White, J., Marsh, I., Kral, M. & Morris, J. (eds.), Critical Suicidology, UBC Press, 2016.
- Shea, S. The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment. Wiley, 2002 (orig. 1999).
- Butler, J. “What is Critique?” In Salih, S. (ed.), The Judith Butler Reader, Blackwell, 2004.
- Abram, D. The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage, 1997.
- Soth, M. “Embodied Countertransference.” 2005.
- Totton, N. Embodied Relating. Karnac, 2015.
- Hillman, J. Suicide and Soul. Spring Publications, 2016 (orig. 1964).
- Grof, S. & Grof, C. The Stormy Search for Self. Tarcher/Penguin, 1990.
- Ferrer, J. Revisioning Transpersonal Theory. SUNY Press, 2002.
- Jaworski, K. & Scott, D. “Understanding the Unfathomable in Suicide.” In White et al., Critical Suicidology, UBC Press, 2016.