Grief and Guilt
We often think of grief as sadness or even anger, but it’s never as simple as that. Grief contains many emotions, but one that doesn’t get enough attention, but is very common in grief, is guilt. In my work with clients, I find this comes up a lot, and it can be an excruciating part of the grieving process. So, let's explore it here today. We will dig into why guilt is a common experience for grievers, the impact it has on your life and healing, and some ways to overcome it.
Understanding Guilt in Grief
Guilt can come up for a myriad of reasons when we have experienced loss. Here are a few common ones.
We feel there was something we should have or could have known or done differently to prevent the loss from happening.
We have regrets about the way we handled our end of the relationship before the person died, or before the relationship ended in the case of breakup/divorce.
We can have survivor’s guilt after someone has died, and we were spared. This is common in accidents or where you had the same disease as someone who died, but may not necessarily be tied to a common experience.
We occasionally experience relief after a person has died — this is common in long-term illness, where the person was suffering, or when we have been tasked with caretaking. That feeling of relief is often followed by a big wave of guilt because relief feels unacceptable to us.
After a loss, we can experience guilt when we begin to feel joy again, laugh at a joke, realize we haven’t thought about our loss in a while, or start to move forward in our lives. Especially after experiencing the loss of a partner, we can often feel guilty about starting a new relationship or even being attracted to someone else for the first time.
Even though it can be painful, guilt is a natural emotion to feel, and there are several reasons why it happens.
The first is that we like to think we have control over our life’s events. Grief often stems from circumstances entirely out of our control (accident, disease, other people’s choices), and it’s comforting to our brains to try to exert control over chaotic situations. So our brains like to tell us that we had the power to change the outcome of a circumstance we don’t like, even if we never truly did.
Next, death and loss can often lead us to feel like our relationships and interactions are left incomplete when we didn’t get a chance to do or say things we wished we had been able to. These unresolved feelings can lead us to feel guilt about things we did or didn’t do, or did or didn’t say when the person was alive.
Our cultural expectations of what a timeline for grief should look like can cause us to feel guilty. For example, a lot of people are pressured to move on and start dating again a year after a spouse dies. If you're not ready to take that step but do so anyway to appease friends or family, you might feel guilty about it. Or the opposite may be true. You may feel ready to date again, but people in your life have expressed concern that it’s “too soon”, so you feel guilty. Remember, there is no timeline for grief. Everyone’s journey is unique to their relationship and circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all. You have to trust that you know what is best for yourself.
Sometimes, guilt, like grief, feels like a way to maintain emotional ties with someone you’ve lost. It can be a way we try to maintain connection and a relationship with the person who is gone.
How Guilt Complicates the Grieving Process
Guilt can be an emotion that motivates us to change, but when we can’t change the past, guilt can be unproductive and can complicate the grieving process. There are a few ways this occurs.
Guilt can prevent us from ultimately accepting what has happened. When we constantly wonder what the outcome would be if we had done things differently, we are unable to accept the reality of our loss. And accepting our current reality, even if it’s one we don’t like and would never choose, is a big key to healing and moving forward.
Guilt can intensify other emotions. When sadness, anger, and anxiety are amplified, it can create more emotional chaos for us to navigate.
Guilt can cause isolation. Guilt often goes hand in hand with shame, and when we feel shame, we tend to isolate. Worrying about what other people are thinking of us or that they won’t understand can cause us to withdraw from even people we love, which removes a crucial network of support from us.
Guilt can distort memories. Guilt can be such a force that it colors all our memories of the person we lost. We can find that we are so focused on our regrets that we can’t focus at all on the positive aspects of our relationship and memories. Most of our relationships contain a full spectrum of experiences and emotions, and guilt doesn’t allow us to access this.
Guilt can be self-destructive. In many cases, guilt can prompt us to change our behavior. But, when our guilt is related to a relationship with a person who has died, we often don’t have the opportunity to remedy the situation. This guilt can be so severe that it veers into shame and can lead us to self-destructive behavior or the belief that we are unworthy of feeling joy or healing.
Paths to Healing
Resolving feelings of guilt can be difficult, but it’s worth the effort to let go of this painful self-punishment. One thing we can do is to name our guilt without judgment. Saying, “I feel guilty because …” helps us create some distance between ourselves and our emotions. It can also help give us perspective and show us the truth about our situation. When we can verbalize, “I feel guilty because I didn’t stop her from going to the store that day,” we can also remind ourselves that we didn’t stop her from going to the store because we had no way of knowing she would be in a car accident on the way. If we had known, we would have stopped her. But as we had no way of knowing that would be the outcome, why should we hold ourselves accountable for it?
This is also where we can bring in some self-compassion. What would you say to a friend in the same situation? “Of course you couldn’t have known she would be in an accident that day. If you had, you would have done things differently. You’re suffering now, but at the time, you did the best you could with the information you had.”
Letting go of guilt involves forgiving ourselves for what we didn’t know, didn’t do, didn’t say. For the things we could have done, should have done. For the things we wish we had said, as well as the things we wish we had never said. This can be terribly difficult to do.
One thing I love about the Grief Recovery Method that I use with my clients is that we can address these aspects of our relationships that feel incomplete and can cause us to feel grief. If you want to explore what that would look like with me, please set up a free consultation call HERE.
Guilt is a normal part of grief, but one that can cause us intense emotional pain. It can make grief so much harder to bear. By identifying our feelings of guilt, we can address them, make changes if possible, and forgive ourselves for what can’t be undone. Releasing this burden helps us focus on remembering and honoring our lost loved one more completely. Grief is complicated enough without burdening yourself with guilt for things that you can’t change.
