(Faure - "Pavane")
Whatever the circumstances of your trauma, as you have worked through this information, you have probably found your feelings gradually shifting. For a while, you may have noticed only your fears or your rage, but as you found different ways to cope with those strong emotions, other feelings (like guilt, for instance) probably began to emerge from the shadows and demand your attention. The purpose of this chapter is to help you get a handle on these emotional reactions and begin to understand the level of responsibility you feel.
For some people, guilt will be the emotion most strongly connected to their trauma, especially if there has been a death involved. At first, these feelings of guilt may be related to surviving when others have not. You may feel unworthy to have lived, when someone else, whose life you thought was very important, has died. Later on, you may feel guilty for beginning to enjoy yourself again. Engaging in normal social interaction, relaxing and temporarily forgetting about the past may feel like a betrayal of others who were lost or left behind or whom you consider to have suffered even more than you did. These are feelings of blame and you may try to take complete personal responsibility for the way in which you made your decisions before or during the trauma.
When family members or friends encourage you to come out with them or to try something new, you may react with anger at their expectation that you should be getting on with your life when, to you, that seems impossible. You may find that activities that you would have participated in without hesitation, like a neighbourhood barbecue or your child's school sports day. Somehow now it doesn't feel 'right’ for you to be there. You might put on a brave face, inside you feel as if you’ve been marked, or singled out in some way to permanently carry the burden of responsibility for the tragedy that has occurred.
In your attempts to create meaning from what has happened, in other words, to make sense of what was senseless, there is a danger that you will develop a heightened degree of self-blame, holding yourself responsible for a tragedy over which you had no control.
It is a natural human tendency to want to find a reason for things. Very often, when there seems to be no other possible
reason for a random occurrence, we think in some way that it that it is our fault, that we should have been able to anticipate it or prevent it or, in some superhuman way, have been able to minimize the harm. Frequently, the standard of behaviour we expect from ourselves in this respect far exceeds what we would expect from any other human being. The following exercise may help you to see if your guilt reactions are 'out of balance'.
Try, as objectively as possible, to determine the level of guilt that you are feeling by assigning it a number, from 0 - 10. For example, if you have no feelings of responsibility related to your trauma, or you are bothered very little by any sense of guilt, the number you choose would probably be 0 or 1 out of 10. If you are troubled by guilt some of the time, but feel that other emotions are much stronger for you, your rating might be more or less in the middle, a 4, 5 or 6. If your guilt is so overwhelming that you dwell on it nearly all of the time, can't think of anything else, feet you are marked for life, then your rating would be 10.
Like the other emotional reactions we have dealt with, guilt is not static, but can be changed as a result of examining the underlying causes, the thoughts and beliefs related to it, and by trying out new ways of looking at things. Using the numerical rating will give you a way to gauge whether there has been any change in your feelings. Write down the answers to these questions in your notebook:
1. How high is your level of guilt? Can you give it a rating out of ten? (Write down the number and today's date.)
2. Have you been able to talk about your guilt feelings with
anyone? Are you keeping secrets? Are there some things you have not told anyone?
3. Do you blame yourself for things that others do not blame
you for? (if yes, be specific in your answer.)
4. Do you dwell on the past?
5. Do you consider yourself responsible for what
happened? To what degree?
6. Do you think that, by doing something differently, you
could have prevented what happened?
7. Are you afraid to examine your guilt? Are you afraid to
admit it to yourself?
8. Do you use a different standard for judging yourself than
you do for judging others?
9. Are you ready to forgive yourself? To let go of some of
the responsibility?
It may be puzzling that some people are more susceptible to a guilt response than others, but the answer often lies in their earlier, pre-trauma experiences. For instance, a common practice in child-rearing is inducing a sense of guilt in children as a means of teaching them the difference between right and wrong. While this may be necessary in order to pass on a moral code of conduct (for example, if they have injured another child deliberately, it is appropriate for them to feel guilty, in order to learn responsibility for their actions), unfortunately it often tends to be over-applied, even to simple mistakes or accidents. AS a result, guilt is perhaps one of the most over-learned emotional responses (Thompson, 1993). Often the child ends up feeling responsible and guilty for anything bad or negative that happens to others around him or her. Gradually the child begins to view himself or herself as bad or negative, and the cause of misfortune for others, just by being there or by not trying hard enough to control what happens.
10. Was guilt a common feeling in your childhood experience, and did it influence your early sense of yourself? What messages did you receive from your parents about your worth? And taking responsibility?
Sometimes parents who administer harsh punishments, or who abuse their children physically or sexually, will tell the child, 'You made me do this', 'If you weren't so bad, 1 wouldn't do this 'or 'Now you're getting what you deserve'. Even though the child has been hurt and violated, at some level he or she starts to think that the parent must be right, and begins to take responsibility for the parent's abusive behaviour, as if somehow he/she 'brought it on'.
11. Have you ever thought that abuse was your fault? Are you still taking all, or most of the responsibility for others bad behaviour?
As children grow older, this pattern of reacting in a guilty manner begins to be more widely applied, sometimes to any new situations that the child or adolescent experiences. Fears of making mistakes and thus 'causing' everything to go wrong may make the growing teenager overly watchful and perfectionist in their outlook.
In adult life, men and women sometimes channel these feelings in different ways. Women tend to find themselves more often in caring roles, where they take on a great deal of the responsibility for others. For men, the feelings -may be as strong, but may be masked by a super-conscientious work performance or a tendency to blame others to conceal their secret blaming of themselves.
12. Have you recognized any of your own patterns of behaving described in this discussion? As an adult, have you continued patterns that were established in your early years?
Obviously, guilt is a complex emotion. It keeps us stuck in the same patterns of reacting and generalizing over and over again. Guilt is often connected to secrets - things that we have been afraid to admit, even to ourselves.
13. What have you been keeping secret? Is there something, some bit of your traumatic experience, even a thought or a feeling that you have considered so terrible you could never tell anybody about it? Something that you are ashamed of or humiliated about?
14. Try to write it down, say it aloud (when alone), or even tape-record it, so you can hear it played back to yourself. Do this without making any judgements. Try to read or listen to it with the same level of understanding that you might offer to someone else, by standards that are less harsh than those you use for yourself.
The act of putting guilt outside of yourself, so that you can look at it more objectively, may help you to determine how much responsibility really belongs to you and how much was actually beyond your control or your ability to predict what would happen.
During the aftermath of a trauma, many people find then ruminating over what happened. Again and again, they themselves for what was done or not done regret actions taken or generally feel responsible for it all. The disorientation and uncertainty that accompanies a trauma can act as a trigger for the guilt or the feeling of over-responsibility.
If the phrase 'dwelling in guilt' seems to describe how your thoughts are stuck, you may be looking at past situations or actions in the same way, over and over again. Just telling you not to think about it would not be helpful. You have the right to interpret your part in the traumatic experience as you see fit and there is no intention to minimize how profoundly you may be affected by what happened to you or to others. Ai the same time, you need to recognize that guilt is such a familiar emotional response that it can be over-applied to situations where things go very wrong. In this way, guilt becomes the surface emotion or the primary way you interpret your role in events.
If you think of your emotional reactions as having layers, like an onion, it might make sense to look underneath the 'guilt layer' and work out what other emotions you are experiencing. Is there a layer of anger? A layer of hurt? Are there layers of sadness, regret, confusion, and despair? Try to identify as many other emotions as possible.
If guilt is a very familiar emotional response to you, then assuring that you are responsible for bad outcomes is likely to be the first conclusion you jump to. While you can't prevent your thoughts from going in that direction in the first place, you can keep yourself from stopping there and looking no further.
Try asking yourself: my natural response is to shoulder all the guilt, but what are four other possible ways of looking at what happened'?
(One other possibility might be that you have only part of the responsibility; another might be that there was no way you could have predicted what was going to happen; a third might be that you did your best; a fourth might be that what happened was totally beyond your control.) Even if your guilt feelings remain very strong, keep working to find other realistic alternatives to think about. Use the 'four other possible ways of looking at it' strategy any time you are having a strong emotional response.
It is likely that you have lost a lot of your former confidence by going through the trauma. You may blame yourself for the way you reacted and consider yourself weak. Sometimes it is easier to take the blame than to acknowledge that some things just happen and are beyond our control. The idea that no matter what you do, how hard you try and how watchful you are, certain terrible events are bound to occur, can be a terrifying thought.
Ask yourself these questions
* If you let go of your guilt, acknowledged your humanness, forgave yourself, how would things change?
* What would stop you from doing this?
* Are you punishing yourself? Blaming yourself for not being super-human? Treating yourself as if you could have predicted the future?
Your thoughts that the trauma might not have occurred if only you had acted differently before or during it give you the illusion that you could have controlled the event. These thoughts make your healing and recovery process very difficult because they stop you from accepting and coming to terms with the trauma. You cannot rewrite history, no matter how you long to do so: disasters and accidents don't make sense and you cannot control or plan for them.
You have to acknowledge that under the circumstances you made certain decisions and, even if you had some doubts in your mind at the time, decided to follow a course of action. At the time you could not be certain of the outcome of the event, even if some part of you may have anticipated some tragedy' Until you allow yourself to accept that you cannot control your own and other people's destiny, much as you would like to be able to do so, you won't be able to heal properly. This is a very difficult concept to accept because it recognizes our vulnerability and fragility as human beings. By working to accept it you may be able to connect to a deeper, more spiritual understanding of life.
(Faure - "Pavane")