McMusing: The Complexities of Guilt & Grief

Giving ourselves permission to grieve.

Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash

When I was expecting my second child, I attended a church and worked at a college during a year of an unusually large number of pregnancies. And one by one, sadness arrived. There were miscarriages, a stillbirth, and the baby of a close friend was born with multiple complications. My son was healthy and I dreaded going to church with my healthy baby boy. This was when I came face to face with what I would eventually learn was survivor’s guilt.

“Survivor’s guilt is the response to an event that some people experience when they survive a traumatic event or situation that others did not. This psychological phenomenon can be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, and complicated grief.” (Source)

I was a survivor who never talked about my own story of trauma and now I suffered from feeling guilty about somehow escaping the trauma that those around me experienced. Guilt and grief are so complex!

People often say, “Well, I didn’t experience anything near what you experienced.” I always respond with, “I am so glad, but it doesn’t mean you weren't impacted by the trauma you experienced.” In some strange way, I always feel slightly guilty for having such severe trauma that it makes others feel guilty for mentioning theirs. Guilt and grief are so complex!

It is as if our traumatic experiences are something we carry around in our back pocket like a phone and hope no one notices. Once in a while, we pull it out, open an app, and share it hoping no one thinks we consider our story worse than theirs.

Where did we get the idea that trauma was an anomaly instead of a normal part of this thing we call life? Not even a worldwide pandemic broke us of this trauma avoidance—maybe it made it worse. We survived, right? We shouldn’t talk about what we lost, because so many lost so much more—including being alive.

We all lost something. Even if we want to discount what we lost compared to others, we still lost something. So, let me tell you what I lost and permit you to lament what you lost. Whatever you lost, it matters. You don’t need to have survivor’s guilt because you lived.

I did not access healing until I was 61 and by the time I had found my footing and was about to publish my third book, the pandemic hit. We had an entire adventure planned to market the book in which Dorothy and her adventures in Oz played a prominent part. We were headed on a book tour down the Kansas Yellow Brick Road and beyond. Poof! Only Trauma in the Pews has revived the book sales that took a nose dive when my marketing plan ended.

Now at 71, that trip doesn’t sound nearly as appealing! Many our age lost some of our best travel years. Does it compare to dying? No. Does it matter? Yes. Grief not released harms us, plain and simple. And last week this reality hit me and I had a very healthy meltdown that was mixed with the fact that trauma has impacted my body in ways that I began healing far too late.

When we do not lament, we teach a younger generation that their pain doesn’t matter either. A teen family friend stopped me at a gathering and asked me a remarkable question. “How do you shake hands?” I was dumbfounded for a minute. Why wouldn’t she know? I questioned why she asked and this was her answer: “I was at an event and people were reaching out to shake my hand and I didn’t know how. It was awkward. Why don’t I know?”

Then it struck me! “You don’t know because you spent your mid and early teens isolated by a pandemic that kept people from shaking hands!” She looked so relieved and said, “That makes sense.” We practiced a few times and then she smiled a thank you and went her way.

We expected kids to pick back up like they had taken a summer off. We did the same to ourselves. It is normal to distance ourselves from events that are sad or uncomfortable. It is a form of dissociation. It is how we survive. It is not easy to remember what it felt like when everyone was walking around in masks. We are often only dissociating (distancing) from that “weird time” instead of grieving our losses and it is not healthy.

Why isn’t it healthy? Because so many of us plunged our pandemic-stressed bodies back into life as if nothing happened. And when it was hard, we wondered what was wrong with us. We expected kids to achieve and have social skills despite losing so much of what should have been. They don’t understand why they don’t know how to do things!

Stopping to grieve the losses without comparing them to the loss that others have experienced is a healthy thing to do. You have permission to do this. And then find a kid who needs to learn how to shake hands.