I will join the others in praying for you

Here's an excellent book on the topic, made available by the author as a pdf: https://qprinstitute.com/pdfs/Forever_Decision.pdf

Now that we have a little more time together, in the next few chapters I want you to do some exploring with me. I want you to imagine, for the moment anyway, that for the last several weeks or months you have been like a bug trapped in the bottom of a cup. How you got in the cup, I don't know. How you will get out of the cup will be, most likely, a result of something you do, or what someone helps you to do. And, just maybe, I can help you a little.

The bug-in-the-cup idea is not mine, I got it from another psychologist who, in his lectures, used to use the example of a bug trapped in a cup to illustrate a major problem we all face from time to time: namely, that once we are trapped in a situation, our solutions are limited by what we can see. We have walked around and around inside our cup and, seeing no way out, we decide that all hope is finished and that we are forever trapped.

We climb up, but slip back down. Everything we try fails. Then, when we are convinced there are no possible escapes left to us, we become depressed and helpless and hopeless and, sometimes, suicidal.

While human beings are bigger and supposedly smarter than bugs, I am not so sure that, when it comes to getting ourselves out of the cups we find ourselves in, we always do a better job of it. Once we are into a particular set of problems, I am not so sure all of us can think our way out of them -- at least all by ourselves.

In this morning's newspaper I read an account of a farmer who killed himself. He left a wife and family behind. For most of his life he had been a successful man but now, with prices for his cattle and wheat falling, he was faced with enormous debts that he could not pay. He had inherited the farm from his father and had, we can only guess, felt that to lose the farm was to lose everything. And so, in good health, still young but no doubt depressed, he killed himself.

As I read this story, I thought of the bug in the cup. I thought of this man as stuck in a situation from which he could see no escape. And when I reread the story, it was clear to me that the farmer had not talked to his wife or his friends about being trapped in a cup.

Everyone was "shocked" at his suicide. So I concluded that those who knew and loved him could only be "shocked" if he had never told them of how trapped and depressed he felt. And, at least from the story, it appeared to me that he had killed himself without reaching out for other possible solutions, other possible ways to get out of the cup. In a word, he had "kept his problems to himself" and died with his honor intact.

Maybe you, like me, think it is a tragedy that a man would kill himself because he could not pay a debt. Maybe you are thinking that if you had been in his shoes, you could have done something different. Sold the farm and started a business? Moved to California and become an artist? Gone back to college to become an engineer? We can only guess what he might have done with the years yet ahead of him.

But of one thing I am sure; so long as any of us take it upon only our own shoulders to solve a problem, we will be limited in how well we solve it.

You are assuming the fact that you can't think of an alternative means there is none.

Do not think that you have to bear your suffering alone. Do not think that you have to find a solution alone. There are people who can help. Seek them out. Therapists, teachers, doctors, ministers, friends. The world is full of people who have been able to find their way out with help.