5 Ways Guilt Can Impact Grief

It’s very common to feel guilt when you’re grieving. It’s a normal experience to lose someone special and think there’s something you could have done or there was something you did do that created or contributed to the loss.

It happens a lot. Have you ever asked yourself why though? 

You can feel guilt in grief because you miss someone so much and you want them to still be around. With such a desire, your mind works in ways that can make you think you somehow could have done something different to help them still be here today. 

But the reality hurts. And often, the default is to punish yourself for the guilt related thoughts. Over and over again, internal blame happens. So much so that it creates a pattern, a belief.

Guilt is a feeling and feelings need to be validated. It’s important to find ways to accept, integrate, and move forward with these types of feelings. There’s a need to accept that guilt is a common and normal feeling in grief.

I previously wrote an article for how to feel less guilt in grief. In that article, I overviewed 5 aspects of guilt that were mentioned in Dr. Alan Wolfelt’s bestselling book, Understanding Your Grief. The 5 aspects are:

• Survivor Guilt

• Relief-Guilt

• Joy-Guilt

• Magical Thinking

• Long Standing Personality Factors

In this article, I’m going to dive further into each one, helping to deepen the understanding of how each one may impact your grief, your feelings, and how you perceive the world from this point going forward. 

Survivor Guilt

Survivor guilt is what is often scripted into movies and dramatic novels but it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Infact, survivor guilt is one of the more common types of guilt related grief. 

Commonly, survivor guilt is thinking that death should have happened to you instead of the other person. “It should have been me” pretty much sums up what survivor guilt is about. 

Survivor guilt related grief can really consume your mind, especially if an accident related death happened and you were at fault. Regardless of the type of accident or any mistake in judgment, your thought process can go to a dark place. You can constantly ask yourself why you’re still alive, why you did or didn’t do something, or what you should have or haven’t said to cause a death.

When faced with survivor guilt, your mind can work against you. Commonly referred to as irrational thinking, your mind can replay events, conversations, and other events that reinforce the belief that you were at fault or the cause of the death.

Feeling guilty or thinking you are guilty doesn’t always mean you are at fault. There are times when just being a bystander or witness creates a lot of post traumatic stress. The stress feeds irrational thinking and makes the thought of being at fault more convincing and believable. 

If you’ve witnessed the death of someone and although logically you know you’re not responsible, but still feel so, check out this research study in the Journal of Loss and Trauma. The study concluded that 90% of participants who had survived an event when others had died reported experiencing feelings of guilt. 

Grief is highly emotional and if you’re unsure if you’re experiencing survivor guilt, the most common indicators that you may be experiencing it include having flashbacks or obsessive thoughts of the traumatic event. Severe post traumatic stress is also common.

The takeaway here is to know that survivor guilt can make you hold false beliefs about what happened or transpired in the traumatically fatal event. Although you may have not had any way of predicting or preventing an outcome, your thoughts and feelings fully convince you otherwise. 

You may have to endure a long and grueling process to come to terms with your loss and no longer feel survivor’s guilt, doing therapeutic modalities and/or talking to people who fully listen can help. Being in an environment where there are supportive people who have no judgment and have a lot of compassion and empathy can help to shift your perceptions. With some perceptive shifts, your thoughts and feelings will likely change. You may find yourself feeling less survivor guilt with this type of support.

Relief-Guilt 

Can you think of a time when your loved one came to mind and you said “I’m kind of glad I no longer have to do that anymore?” It may bring up uncomfortable feelings to think about but it’s more common than not for people to feel some sense of relief for the disliked things that were part of your loved one’s personality traits, behaviors, or ways of navigating the world.

Uncomfortable feelings like these are related to what’s referred to as relief-guilt. Relief-guilt can be thought of as loss related to increased amounts of illness or suffering. Although it’s easy to think that relief-guilt is more for people that were caretakers for a loved one, the feelings and experience can broaden and reach further to relatives, friends, or pretty much any type of relationship. For example, although you may not have had a close relationship, you may feel some relief-guilt in your grief because you feel a burden lifted off your shoulders for certain aspects of the relationship or some of the dynamics you encountered with the person who passed no longer happen.

It’s common for death to succeed a period of intense and prolonged pain, anxiety, worry, fear, and/or suffering. When any of that pain or suffering comes to an end, it’s common to feel a sense of relief. It’s also common to want other people’s suffering to end. Although you may not wish death upon them, there is a reality that their suffering ends when their life ends.

Part of the guilt felt is wondering why you feel relieved. You may feel like you should be ashamed for having such thoughts and feelings. But these feelings are natural and common. Although everyone experiences grief differently, there are circumstances like illness, pain, and suffering that naturally bring up these feelings.

Addiction is also a circumstance that can also feelings of relief-guilt in grief. When you lose a loved one who suffered from addiction, the addiction ends and that can help you feel a sense of relief. You may feel sad. You may long for your loved one. And you may be glad the addiction is over.

Transforming the feelings of relief-guilt may take numerous acts of forgiveness, which may include forgiving the person who died and also forgiving yourself. Forgiveness is an ongoing process that can take extraneous effort so please be patient with yourself.

Joy-Guilt 

Have you had an experience where you were at a memorial service or an event where people were expressing a lot of sadness and sorrow and you couldn’t match their feelings? You felt content at first but then started to think that maybe your feelings, which were more joyful, were wrong in this type of setting. This is common to what is known as joy-guilt in grief. 

Joy-guilt in grief means thinking that your thoughts of happiness, joy, or content are bad or wrong at a time of loss. When you think that way, you can get overwhelmed with the guilt that follows. You may start questioning your integrity, intentions, and even authenticity. The moment you question your deeper values is the moment you begin to feel more guilt. 

Happiness and laughter are things that bring people closer together. So are sadness and sorrow. It can be easy to alienate yourself when you tell yourself you shouldn’t be happy at an unhappy time. You can lose the sense of feeling connected to others who are expressing grief in their own unique ways, which is very different from yours.

However, there is room for joy in the grief process too. As my mentor, Dr. Alan Wolfelt, articulated in his book Understanding Your Grief:

“You have the right to feel happy. Joy should not be limited to only the happiest of times in our lives. Joy can be found even in the saddest of times. Let me say that again. There is joy even in the saddest of times.

How can it be? We all possess sadness, and we all possess joy. They both dwell within us and if we allow them both the space they deserve, we can live well within that balance. We need to give ourselves the space and permission to grieve deeply and be sad, so we can feel happiness without guilt. Two parts of a whole, a dichotomy of emotion that contributes to a more balanced individual.”

When you recognize you may be feeling joy-guilt related to your grief, you may start to give yourself permission to embrace the joy. You’re not bad for feeling that way. Nor would anyone whom you lost want you to feel only sadness and despair for the rest of your life. By honoring everything that comes up, including joy, you will grieve and live authentically.

Magical Thinking 

If you’ve ever thought the loss of your loved one had to do with your thoughts, you’ve created some beliefs centered around magical thinking. Magical thinking is the belief that your thoughts can influence unrelated events. It’s common, especially when you feel responsible for your loved one’s death.

Magical thinking can be associated with guilt in grief because it can be easy to think (and believe) “if only…”. If only you called and talked to them to help keep them awake. If only you noticed the signs that their health was declining. If only you told them to stay. 

Thoughts like these are very frequent. Sometimes you can’t stop yourself from thinking this way. If you feel this way, try not to judge or shame yourself for the way you feel. Acknowledge the fact that this is one way you’re coping with your loss. There’s no right or wrong way to go about this. 

Acknowledging and accepting the fact that your influence is limited can help to feel less guilt. You may feel helpless in certain moments but the helplessness is more true than the guilt. Guilt can’t really be justified by magical thinking. It’s kind of this false hope or illusion that helps your mind wrap itself around what just happened.

Yet, all the guilt makes it difficult to cope with loss. Magical thinking is only a temporary solution, a false one, to try to make sense of what is sometimes too hard to make sense of. 

Long Standing Personality Factors

For many, growing up in a household that taught you to feel guilt for your actions is very common. You may have been conditioned (whether intentional or not) to default to the feeling of guilt for many of your behaviors. An upbringing as such would likely impact your personality, making you feel guilt for most of your life. You may have developed a guilty complex.

Having a guilty complex in grief will likely make you feel responsible for your loss. There are commonalities between a guilty complex and magical thinking, but one of the unique distinctions between the two is with a guilty complex, you may feel the way you do although you may not be thinking that your actions (or lack of) caused their life to end. The guilty complex, unfortunately, is a response to most situations in your life. This includes loss and feeling guilt for the death of a loved one. 

One of the ongoing challenges to having a guilty complex as part of your personality is that grief can bring to mind past experiences of unresolved guilt. One event can activate feelings from other events, which can feel overwhelming, unbearable, and exhausting. It’s not fair and it’s not easy to manage. It makes it difficult to cope with loss, as well as daily activities.

If this is your experience, you have to be diligent about your self-care. It would be beneficial to take things easy, simplify, slow down, and schedule breaks. Otherwise, guilt and overwhelm can hit you too hard and too fast, which can put you in a downward spiral.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you are more familiar with the 5 ways guilt can impact your grief process. Guilt is a common feeling to experience when grieving. The emotion can come from a variety of factors, experiences, and events. Recognizing how guilt shows up in your grief can help to manage the emotion and provide insight and awareness to help soothe the feelings.

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Reid Peterson lives in Santa Barbara, CA, and is the Founder of Grief Refuge. The Mission of Grief Refuge is to provide daily companionship throughout the grief journey. Download the Grief Refuge app to help cope with loss and manage your grief.