Guilty Thoughts and Grief

Guilt can be a sticky burden and a useful teacher. We need people to feel guilty when they do something wrong. People who don’t feel guilty are generally not safe, and they miss out on important lessons on what it means to be kind, faithful, and compassionate. Guilt can be a good teacher of just these things. The problem for most of us, however, is not that we feel too little guilt, it’s that we feel too much and for too long.

Guilt can be a big part of grief, too. A very common and stubbornly persistent part. When brainstorming ways people feel after someone dies in grief support groups with children, teens, and adults, guilt always comes up and is usually pretty early on the list. And the guilt comes from a number of places.

Guilty Thoughts are Normal

Sometimes it’s because we feel responsible, at least partially, for what happened. This seems to be the experience of many bereaved parents. Our job as parents is to help our children grow up and outlive us. When that doesn’t happen, even when preventing death was fully out of our control, we can feel guilty because we feel like we have failed in this most fundamental parental responsibility. It may not be fair, but it is real.

But it’s not just parents and adults who feel guilty after someone dies. Children can feel responsible and guilty, too. They can wonder if something they did, said, or even thought might have caused the death. Or something that they didn’t do, say, or think. We often think of this as “magical thinking,” as it is thinking that greatly exaggerates how much we affect the world. I wonder when we are supposed to outgrow this way of thinking.

How many of us have thoughts that the traffic is always worse when we’re in a hurry, it rains when we wash the car or plan a picnic, or the printer can tell when we’re up against a deadline? As if the universe, including traffic patterns, weather systems, and technology, revolves around me (or you).

Guilt Can be a Roadblock

Sometimes, we blame ourselves because we find no other explanations that make sense. There are holes in the story and silence in response to our “why questions,” and we really, really need answers. Sadly, we feel the need for answers so badly that we will blame ourselves even when it’s not fair. Consciously or not, we may prefer to feel guilty rather than to feel helpless and live in a world of random, unexplained events.

Guilt can be a nasty and gnarly roadblock on our path to finding better approaches to living with our losses. There are some helpful ways to wrestle with and think about guilt, but there are no guarantees. Some of us find full relief and leave our guilt behind. Many others live with some amount of guilt for the long haul despite our best efforts. But it can be better even if guilt does not fully go away.

Be Fair with Yourself

One thing we can do is provide ourselves with a fair trial. Therapist John (Jack) Jordan works with many families left behind after suicide. He says that most must put themselves on trial to judge whether or not there was something they could have done to prevent the suicide.

The key is to make it a “fair trial.” One way it is not a fair trial is when we hold ourselves responsible for knowing in the past everything that we understand today. That is not fair because it is impossible. We can’t know everything then that we know now. We may have done the very best we knew at the time. We may also have fallen short. Sorting out whether or not we actually did the best with what we knew then is part of providing ourselves a fair trial.

Whether or not we find ourselves justifiably guilty after our fair trial, there is the question of repentance, restitution, or reparations. Do we owe a debt that needs to be paid? If so, making good on that debt can help us down the path of healing. If I break a dish at your house, I can fix it or replace it. If I say hurtful things to you, I can apologize and act kindly to you in the future. If I damage your car, I can get it repaired.

Don’t Suffer Needlessly

What doesn’t pay a debt, however, is suffering. If I damage your car, my suffering is not going to fix your car. The best way to repay debts is by putting good into the world, living a full and generous life, and providing care and support to others. We don’t pay our debts by living an unnecessarily small, self-focused life. Reparations and repairing the world need more than that. And it can feel right and good when we are guided by the lessons of our guilt to do what we can to help others and make the world a better place.

It is certainly true that we are limited in our options to reconcile a debt when the person who is owed has died. But we are not without options. Even if the person was alive, we could not erase the past. Apologies are still possible, nevertheless, and future actions can make a difference.

Which brings us to forgiveness. Sometimes even with a fair trial, we feel guilty. Sometimes even after we work hard to pay a debt, we still feel guilty. What we might need is an experience of forgiveness.

Guilty Thoughts and Forgiveness

Years ago, I heard a speaker talk about the death of his son. Realistically and in fairness, he wasn’t responsible for his son’s death, but he was a caring father and he felt guilty. He was also a pastor and counselor. He said that he needed someone to tell him that they recognized that he felt guilty and that they forgave him. He needed to feel forgiven.

For some of us, there are paths to forgiveness in our faith traditions. Letters written to the dead and then from the dead to ourselves often include themes of forgiveness from the dead to the living. The challenge for many of us is not believing that God or others, living or dead, forgive us, it is forgiving ourselves.

Be Self-Compassionate

If we continue to feel guilty and if forgiveness for ourselves is sought but elusive, one thing we can practice is offering ourselves compassion. We can see our situation for what it is—true suffering. We can remind ourselves that many others have felt this way and have similar struggles. And we can respond to our own burdened hearts as we would to the burdened heart of a beloved friend or family member—with patience and compassion. No additional judgment, no putting salt in the wound, no kicking when we’re down. Instead, a hand on our hearts and kindness in our eyes. It is a hard thing to live with feelings of guilt.

Guilt is hard and sticky. It’s difficult to get off and leave behind. And it’s sneaky and tricky. It knows our weak spots and can exploit them fairly shamelessly. Guilt can even get us to feel guilty for feeling guilty. Still, we are not helpless in guilt even when we are not all powerful, either. We are resourceful but limited humans trying to do right by the living and the dead. And we are enough, even when we fall and even when we feel guilty.

Greg Adams is Program Coordinator at Center for Good Mourning: www.archildrens.org

Read more from Greg Adams on Open to Hope: https://www.opentohope.com/after-a-major-loss-so-now-what/

Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.