On Thanksgiving morning I checked my facebook, as I often do. I clicked on a link a friend from the Middle East had posted, and all of a sudden I was face to face with pictures of a man whose head had been blown open during the Arab Spring protests. As I clicked the images closed, I felt almost as violently assaulted with the juxtaposition of this suffering and pain against cheery Thanksgiving messages.
All day I struggled. Physically, I was in the world of turkey and stuffing and apple pie, but mentally I was feeling guilty and ashamed to be celebrating in a safe place with my family when I have friends hurting in other places.
When I talk about this kind of survivor’s guilt, other people’s heads nod in solidarity. It’s a common experience, but not a road that ends well.
Here are some thoughts I have about survivor’s guilt and combating it:
Recognize dichotomistic thinking. When we see thousands of people dying, wounded, and homeless from an earthquake, our brains tend to go to a place where our lives are perfect and their lives are terrible—and why should we have it so good? We separate “our lives” from “their lives,” and we paint a sharp contrast between the two. Not only is the reality is less clear cut, but this automatic way of thinking separates us from those who are hurting rather than connecting us.
Focus on our connection rather than our separation. In truth, our lives are not all good, and their lives are not all bad. Though we may not have experienced the same disaster or magnitude of suffering, we do know pain. Whether we are faced with a large-scale tragedy or a friend who is hurting, opening our hearts to the common experience of loss and heartache allows us to replace guilt with empathy.
Accept our shared helplessness. I think feeling guilty is one way we cope with the terror of seeing the helplessness of the human condition. We cherish our sense of control and the related fantasy of fairness in life. When we are confronted by undeserved tragedy, it helps to allow ourselves to grieve over the powerlessness of both the sufferers and ourselves, rather than mentally fighting to maintain our illusion of control.
Choose actions carefully. Acting from guilt or from separation rather than from connection can do more harm than good. For large scale problems, we may desperately throw money at the tragedy without carefully considering the most helpful channels for those resources. For more personal problems, we may feel inclined to try to fix the problem or make it go away in order to deal with our discomfort. This often ends up coming across as “helping” from a position of superiority, rather than from a place of equality, and it belittles the sufferer. In either situation, slowing down, allowing ourselves to connect and be vulnerable enough to empathize, and waiting for wisdom can lead to more purposeful, calculated, and useful action.
Do you struggle with guilt when you see others in pain? What helps you overcome guilt and move to a more constructive place?
What a very thoughtful analysis of the problem of guilt and what to do about it. I’ve read lots of psychology on this, and this post is one of the best brief sources I’ve ever seen. Bravo!
It has to do with acknowledging our shared helplessness as well as the hope and even beauty found in times of crisis. It has to do with feeling our shared fragility and also our oneness. It has to do with acting out of connection. You’ve said it so well. Thank you for this.
This post made me think a lot. Rather than craft a new response, I am just going to post a paragraph from one of my emails home, my third month of Peace Corps service in Moldova in 2006 when I was battling severely with the survivor’s guilt you mention:
“I didn’t realize how nice the house I live in is (my host parents are retired and on a pensioner’s salary, which is 400 lei for Mama and about 650 for Tata, supplemented a little bit by a daughter who lives in Greece sending some Euros when she can) until the other day. I have been carefully guarded (by someone, although I couldn’t tell you who, because it feels like more of a community conspiracy) from the degree of poverty until the other day when we went on a visit to my counterpart’s husband’s parents. Things held together by string, ceiling falling down, mother sick with no money for a doctor, a cough that rattles the thin windowpanes, guard dog’s ribs jutting out painfully. And they fed us soup and mamaliga and brinza and we passed around a single cup, taking shots of homemade vodka and homemade wine, and we talked and we laughed and when I got home, I buried my face in my pillow and cried, for these people with nothing, for these people who are so generous, so willing to give everything they have, to a stranger who is here and who no one knows is thinking, all the time, about leaving them. How could I? If you could see these people’s eyes, if you could see their hands, blackened from the field, their skinny horses and their toothless mouths. If you could see them limping on their broken legs, hunched with their broken backs. If you could see the children, so beautiful, having not a single toy, nothing to play with at all, so they poke at the piles of burning trash on the side of the road and call it a game. If you could feel their hope and their gratitude, you would understand my terror that I will, in fact, not be able to do anything to help them at all. You would understand this horrible, horrible guilt that I feel every time I find myself wanting to go home to greater comforts. It’s the guilt of having an escape at all, when these people don’t, and never will.”
A few months after I wrote that passage, the woman who lived next door to my organization froze to death inside of her own house and was found days later, and I felt the same guilt all over again.
Thanks for this passage, Christen. It’s humbling to be reminded of how much we have, how lucky we are, how blessed we are every day.
Thanks so much for posting that, Becca. I remember when that woman froze to death. How incredibly overwhelming. Marianne Elliott (30 Days of yoga) just had her book come out about her experience in Afghanistan, and I know she talks about her experience of helplessness and guilt in the face of horrible poverty and tragedy. I wonder if you would find that it resonates with your experience. I appreciate you sharing.