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- Survivor’s guilt, experts caution, will for many be the new normal. It is a “constellation of feelings” — “despair, hopelessness, guilt, shame.”
- Combating survivor’s guilt involves understanding what we are feeling and being willing to openly express our emotions. Yet in moments of great trauma, practicing mindfulness can be particularly challenging.
Los Angeles is a place that feels physically and emotionally fractured these days. For tens of thousands who are displaced, routine is a near impossibility. Others carry on with little visible change to their daily life.
Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a heavy inner struggle.
How do you grasp the fact that a sizable part of our city has been decimated, ravaged and left heartbroken while a significant majority remains untouched?
It is a confusing and paralyzing time, and it is, above all else, unfair. Smoke and ash are in the air, and so is survivor’s guilt, leaving many unsure how to act or grieve.
Experts in processing grief and trauma say there’s no right way to comfort a friend during a time of devastation. The most important thing is that you reach out.
“Everything you say feels like it’s the wrong thing to say,” says Shannon Hunt, 54. Her central Altadena home is still standing while those nearby are not. An arts teacher, her place of work, Aveson School of Leaders, is gone.
“Every time I cry, every time I feel broken, I think I don’t deserve that, because someone else has it worse,” Hunt says. “That’s stupid, intellectually. I understand that’s not right, but it’s how you feel, because these other people have no baby pictures and no Christmas ornaments and they are people that I love. How can I complain?”
Survivor’s guilt, experts caution, will for many be the new normal. I have felt it, as a single thought has jolted my mind over the last two weeks when I’ve left my place: I don’t deserve this. I’ve attempted to go to spaces I frequent for solace but have left, as comfort and enjoyment, quite frankly, felt inappropriate in this moment.
It actually shows that you have a great deal of empathy. Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we’re feeling survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot.
— Chris Tickner, co-owner of Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy
“You’ve hit the nail on the head there,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author of the book “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss.” “Survivor’s guilt is, in many ways, ‘I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to have been spared.’”
O’Connor brings up a concept of “shattered assumptions.” The term, she says, “is something we use a lot in loss and trauma research” and deals with our everyday beliefs — how life, the world and people generally work.
“Events, like loss and trauma, shatter those assumptions,” O’Connor says. “It’s not that we never develop new ways of thinking about the world, it’s that it takes time to address questions like, ‘What do I deserve?’ The process of having to pause and consider those questions we didn’t have to do before, because there was no entire Los Angeles neighborhood burning down.”
Wildfire victims may face stacks of bureaucratic paperwork, including insurance claims, requests for FEMA assistance and loan applications. Here’s the best way to get through it.
Acknowledge what you’re feeling
Chris Tickner and and Andrea-Marie Stark are romantic and professional partners, operating Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy. They’re also Altadena residents whose home survived despite, Tickner says, everything surrounding it being devastated. As therapists, they now find themselves in an odd position, attempting to process their grief and survivor’s guilt while doing the same with their clients.
First step, Tickner says, is to normalize it.
“It actually shows that you have a great deal of empathy,” Tickner says. “Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we’re feeling survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot, so much so that we’re willing to be stoic and not express ourselves.”
To begin to process survivor’s guilt, it helps, experts say, to not only be vulnerable but to acknowledge and do away with our instinct to concoct a class system of suffering. The initial step to take is just to better understand what is happening.
L.A. Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke feels equally grateful and guilty that his home in Altadena was spared as wildfire ravaged his neighborhood.
The L.A. wildfires are an impossible-to-comprehend catastrophe, and whether you were heavily affected or relatively unscathed, a sense of survivor’s guilt is to be expected. All of us, after all, are feeling loss given our communities and our city will be irrevocably changed. And yet our inclination is to carry on and be quiet. A friend even warned me against writing this story, wondering if it was “problematic” to admit I was struggling when I was not displaced.
“The reality is that so much tragedy is existing all the time,” says Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist with L.A.’s Root to Rise Therapy. “Burying our heads in the sand saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right approach.”
The reality is that so much tragedy is existing all the time. Burying our heads in the sand saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right approach.
— Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist with L.A’s Root to Rise Therapy
For one, it’s isolating. “Every single person, no matter what they’ve experienced, has started their session by saying, ‘I’m so lucky. I don’t have a right to complain,’” Leader says. “That is really rattling around in my brain. The collective experience right now — survivor’s guilt is seeping into every conversation that we’re having. It’s normal. But it’s also paralyzing.”
Turn your attention outward
Survivor’s guilt, says Diana Winston, director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, is a “constellation of feelings” — “despair, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” The longer we sit with them, especially shame, the more reticent we can become to discuss them. Winston recommends a simple mindfulness trick called the RAIN method, an acronym that stands for “recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.”
Consider it, in a way, as a beginner’s guide to meditation. “I think people, without a mindfulness background, they can work a little bit with RAIN,” Winston says. “‘This is what I’m feeling, and it’s OK to have this feeling. It makes my stomach clench and I can breathe and feel a little bit better.’ Anyone with a little self-awareness can do that.”
If you find yourself wanting to say to someone who lost everything, ‘You should make a gratitude list,’ don’t.
Just take a moment to focus intently on the last aspect, “nurture.” “A lot of people are feeling guilt, fear and panic, and what we can do is turn our attention out toward other people,” Winston says. “It tends to help people not be lost in their own reactivity.”
An exercise like RAIN also can help us articulate and share our emotions, which is integral. Don’t bottle them up. That can lead us into a nihilistic place of feeling as if nothing matters, or accelerate our grief to the point it becomes a part of our identity. Dwelling on things, Leader says, can inspire a resistance to letting go, of feeling guilty if we are not living in our memories daily.
O’Connor says to think of what grief researchers refer to as the “dual process model.”
“When we’re grieving, there’s loss and restoration to deal with,” O’Connor says. “Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk with a person who gives us a hug. The key to mental health is being able to do both, to go back and forth between the building and the remembering. People who adapt most resiliently are the ones who are able to do both.”
Take the smallest possible step toward comfort
It’s also important to acknowledge what we’re capable of in this moment.
“There needs to be a caveat,” Tickner says. “Practicing mindfulness right now is really hard.”
Hunt says friends have recommended she take a moment to herself. It’s just not possible. “A friend was like, ‘I have a pass to a spa day. Maybe you can take it and relax.’ I said, ‘That sounds awesome, but I do not think I can do it.’ I would just start bawling on the table. I can’t imagine sitting in a hot tub. My brain is spinning. That kind of self-care would not work for me right now.”
Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk with a person who gives us a hug.
— Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author
In such instances, says California Integrative Therapy’s Stark, simplify it. “Talking to friends, talking about how you feel, writing it down, making art, listening to music,” Stark says. Then, of course, get out and be a part of the community. Volunteering can be especially comforting.
And when friends offer help, accept it.
“We’re staying at a friend’s right now,” Stark says, “and their neighbors came over and they said, ‘We made too much pasta. Do you want some?’ And I started to say, ‘No, no, no, I can’t take.’ Then I heard myself say, ‘You have to accept. It’s just pasta.’ So I said yes, and they came over with the beautiful ziti and it was warm and lovely. And it made me feel so much better, even though I was in terror.
“So please,” Stark says, “say yes to anything people offer you.”
Say yes, write, put on music and volunteer if you can — easy tips, says Stark, but ones with long-term health benefits.
“Every time you do a practice like that, you’re literally opening up a new neuronal pattern in your brain that expands your selfhood, your ability and that wonderful word we use called ‘resilience.’”
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