Guilt and Grief

Feeling guilty? You’re not alone…

Like ivy winding around a tree, guilt can start to become intwined with grief @JulesLoweCounselling

Grief can bring with it a whole host of emotions. It can feel overwhelming, and one of the ways that I can help as a counsellor is by helping you to identify each emotion that comes up, to acknowledge it and work out where it’s coming from. Your own unique blend of emotions will be as unique as your grief, which is unique as the person you are, the unique experiences you’ve had and the unique relationship that you had with the person who has died. Have I said unique enough?! However, an emotion that I see coming up time and time again is guilt. The ways that we can want to blame ourselves seems endless. More often than not it’s that we look back at the events leading up to the death and feel like we could have done something differently, if only we’d known. This brings with it enormous pain, and before I go on, let me just ask you to make sure you are feeling safe enough to do so, to be kind to yourself, and to remember that you don’t have to feel this pain alone.

You are not alone.

You see we humans like to feel like we’re in control. The very notion of death can be most unsettling for us as we can’t control it – we cannot control when somebody dies and we cannot fix it. Our brain is a predicting machine which likes to plan ahead and predict the future – grief often comes when we realise that that life we predicted is no longer possible. So where does guilt come in?

I wonder whether to begin with it’s worth asking whether it’s really guilt that we are feeling? Guilt is the emotion we feel when we have done something wrong – it serves as a useful lesson that we can learn from, so we don’t do that thing again. Now it may have been that there was in fact something you could have done differently – but ultimately you still can’t go back and change it. More often than not, though, there was nothing we could have done, we had no warning, we didn’t know, and we did the best we could in the situation we were in. Guilt can be helpful if it helps us to make changes, but if there’s nothing we can do, it can become a way of punishing ourselves. Are we blaming ourselves for something we didn’t actually have any responsibility for, because somehow this feels more manageable, however painful, than somehow accepting that it was just a really awful thing that happened, without explanation?

When somebody dies, so often we desperately want to change things. We want to go back in time and somehow do things differently so that we don’t get the same outcome – because we’d do whatever it takes to bring them back. I wonder if there’s something in the feeling that if we could just pinpoint what we did wrong, we could somehow go back and fix things and make everything better. We could feel better, and the people that we love who are also hurting, our family and our friends, could also feel better.

It can feel like you're stuck on a hamster wheel @Jules Lowe Counselling

It's almost like our thinking brains think if we just spend a bit more time thinking about it, working out where we might be to blame, we can solve this, and no longer feel so awful. But ultimately, sadly, we cannot solve it. Because we cannot bring them back. All we are left with is rumination, torturing ourselves with what we could have done, what could have been. Like being on a hamster wheel, constantly going round and round in rumination, hoping desperately to get to the destination but slowly realising that we never will.

So what do we do?

Well, for a start, we can get off that hamster wheel. We recognise when we are getting stuck in that never-ending loop of rumination of guilt and we make the decision to stop – because this is something we do have control in. As Julia Samuel pointed out in a recent Good Grief Festival webinar, it’s often a battle between the head and the heart. The head recognises that we are not to blame, that we were powerless in what happened and we could not control it. Yet the heart still feels that there might have been something else that we could have done if we’d just loved them a little bit better. And that it’s important to give space for both - rather than continuing this battle, it’s important to acknowledge what we are feeling and why.

I wonder whether part of the reluctance to decide to get off the hamster wheel is that by stopping thinking about it we worry that we will somehow be choosing to forget our person? Sometimes this is where the Dual Process Model can be reassuring – we will continue to return to that loss orientation where we remember and grieve our loss, but this doesn’t have to be in such a self-critical way. We can also oscillate into the restoration orientation, which is where we can work out how we can continue bonds with our loved one, bonds that focus on love rather than feeling responsible. Remembering our loved ones doesn’t always have to such a torment – we can feel sadness and miss them and acknowledge ALL of the emotions that this brings AND we can remember them with joy and fondness and make them a positive part of our future.

And how do we get off the hamster wheel?

In practical terms, it may be a case of getting all of it written or talked out – once it’s out there and shared, sometimes it feels like there’s some sort of end to it and we don’t have to have it on a continuous loop in our head. I’d also suggest a large dollop of compassion – easier said than done! So much of this feeling of guilt comes from a place of self-criticism and blame, and a way to turn down the volume on this so it isn’t quite so loud is by turning up the volume of your self-compassion channel. Look for ways to give yourself a break, and try to see it as an important way to cope and heal (it’s part of the Dual Process Model after all!), rather than seeing any kind of joy or compassion as another reason to feel guilty. Strive to make time for the joyful memories as well as the sad, but also allow yourself to have at least moments where you enjoy your present life and know that it’s ok to do so – it doesn’t mean you’ll forget them and it doesn’t mean that you don’t care, and it is a vital part of healing.

Guilt is a painful, gut-wrenching emotion, and we often don’t want to talk about it as we don’t want others to think badly of us. But once it’s out, acknowledged, heard and understood, it can feel so much less painful and heavy, so please do talk to someone if this is how you are feeling, and know that you are not alone in feeling this way. And of course, if that someone is me, and you’d like a warm, compassionate space in which to explore your own unique feelings, please do get in touch.