After you commit suicide, the problems that your soul wanted to escape do not go away just because you are dead. They actually intensify. You may remain a spirit on the transitional plane for what would have been the rest of your natural life as suggested by Dr. Wickland. You have to watch your loved ones grieve and suffer the existential problems that your death has caused.
You inevitably suffer the guilt of wasting the opportunities that your life on earth once offered you. You watch your children grow up without you. You must watch the disastrous chain of events that has been triggered by your act. You can’t look away and ignore these things as you might have done in life. For younger suicides, the guilt will inevitably involve the things that you have NOT accomplished such as starting a family, accomplishing important goals, making lifelong friends or leading a professional life. The loneliness acts as an echo chamber. It’s like being locked in a tiny Imax theater being forced to watch your death scene as well as all the negative effects it caused over and over again year after year after year. You are alone with your remorse, and your thoughts and regrets are reflected back at you and amplified over and over again. There’s no rest; no sleep and no way to forget.
This may be a very unpleasant way to exist, but, if the consensus among mediums is correct, it will have an ending on the date the spirit would have died a natural death. By the time it ends, the spirit will have learned some of the lessons that it needed to learn on the earth, including the alternatives to suicide that could have prevented its post-mortem dilemma.
What happens after the initial confinement depends on the spiritual state of the soul when it emerges from its self-imposed captivity. At that point, it may be met by the spirits of those it loved on earth, and other friends and relatives who have been waiting to welcome it. After that, it will proceed to one of the levels in the mainstream sequence that is appropriate to its state of spiritual evolution.
One might expect that the soul would have to return to earth under degraded conditions in order to learn the lessons that it failed to learn in its truncated previous life. However, you will learn in the next two chapters that the doctrine of reincarnation is not as well established as most people think it is, and, as Ian Stevenson said when speaking of the evidence he uncovered about this subject, “I can discern no pattern indicating that the vicious have been demoted … and the virtuous promoted.”
Nevertheless, it makes little difference whether the spirit returns to the earth to relive the life that it cut short, or remains permanently in in the world of Spirit. This is because spiritual evolution can happen in the spiritual realms in the absence of another life in matter. Spirits have all of eternity to learn their lessons.