How to Get from One Life to Another Without Really Dying

This book is for the empty-nester who has graduated from raising children, but can't get out of bed because she no longer knows who she is. It's for the clinically depressed retiree who feels lost without the purposeful identity he left at the office. It's for the widow and widower who lost their familiar lives when they lost their spouses. It's for all persons caught between jobs, between relationships, between lives. It's for the person who's outgrown his life-connected identity but doesn't yet have a new one. It's for the upwardly mobile caterpillar who finds himself in the vulnerable chrysalis state without benefit of cocoon. It's for those who wouldn't mind going to sleep and never waking up again. It's for everyone who's ever considered suicide and/or known someone who has. It is also written for all our friends and psychotherapists who must deal with us when we are struggling with the confusing issues of this Between Lives State.

Sara Hart spent many years as counselor to approximately a thousand at-risk adolescents in residential treatment programs in three states, later designing and directing a program for behavior-disordered, abused adolescent girls. It became obvious to her that every teenager -no longer child and not yet adult - is in an extremely fragile between lives state, needing much support to get to the safety of a world-connected adult identity.

Her interest in the subject of suicide began early, when she observed the suffering of a friend who experienced chronic severe depression and thought often of suicide. Her brief encounter with such feelings of her own taught her that they are the most agonizing emotions that humans can endure. She began looking for answers to the issue of suicidal ideation while in graduate school and after earning her master's degree in rehab counseling she began to search in earnest intending to find what others had discovered on the subject. She was amazed to find that all the research had been done on the subject of suicidal crises, but none that she could find on the causes of suicidal ideation per se. If she wanted to find any answers, she would have to discover them herself.

She did her research by establishing a private counseling practice, developing a reputation as one who would deal with suicidal issues with compassion and respect; and over many years worked with scores of people who were struggling with suicidal feelings. At some point she turned a corner in her understanding and discovered the amorphous phase of life where most suicidal feelings seemed to be occurring; she found they were connected to endings of world-connected life roles. Over time, she counted forty symptoms that her clients were vulnerable to while in this virtual Time Out from normal life. She dubbed it the Between Lives State (BLS) and it became the focus of her research. This book is the fruit of that research.