Explain Survivors Guilt

I’m trying to wrap my head around survivor’s guilt. According to Wiki… “Survivor’s guilt (or survivor’s syndrome) is a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives themselves to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not.”

I can see why someone would feel bad (badly?) if all of their friends got killed in some horrific act… but why would someone feel bad because they survived it? I would feel incredibly lucky, not that I had somehow done something wrong. How could surviving something horrible be turned into me doing something wrong (unless I caused everyone else to die because of something I did)?

Can someone provide an example of how this kind of thinking might come about? And for bonus points, how common a syndrome is it in real life?

I don’t think it is feeling culpable, but more of asking the universe “why did I out of everyone survive”? Especially if they view themself as inferior in some moral sense to those that died, what kind of universe does that?

Probably more common in those who believe in a just universe, or that life has meaning.

Second-guessing themselves based on hindsight might also be a factor. “If I had only done …” or “I should have known [Y]…” It doesn’t matter if X would have been impossible, or there was really no way to know Y–hindsight makes it seem possible. In hindsight, tiny, mundane decisions become fraught with significance, and everyone is a potential superhero. I suspect it may be connected with the “bargaining” stage of grieving.

pick any disaster involving major loss of life, and I would guess there are at least a few people dealing with some degree of survivor’s guilt. One of the pilots of United 232 said in a documentary some time after the crash that “the survivor’s guilt was just incredible.” This, from a member of a flight crew that did the impossible, nursing a virtually uncontrollable plane to a crash-landing that allowed 60% of the people on board to survive.

Who the fuck am I to have survived? I’m 21 and single. Coworker with four kids died and I survived?

I imagine its something like that.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.*

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Noting that literature had this one pegged before there even was such thing as psychology.

Still not getting it. Over 100 people die in the US every day in car crashes, but I have never once thought why not me? Don’t I deserve to die instead of somebody else?

It’s sad when anyone dies, but I would never think of trading my life for someone else’s, even my own family’s lives. Perhaps I cherish my life too much, or I’m too selfish. Maybe when I’m 90 years old I will feel differently about it.

If I was in a plane crash, and I was the only one to survive, I would feel very sad for those who didn’t make it, but I don’t think I would ever say that I wish I had died too, or instead of someone else.

Does feeling guilty about surviving make someone feel better about life? It sounds like it makes them feel miserable for not dying… :smack:

How many of those crashes are you in?

No one gets survivor’s guilt over other people’s crashes. They get them when they’re one of the survivors by pure luck or God’s grace or whatever of an accident or disaster they’re in. Perhaps if you were surrounded by grieving families, some of whom might be looking at you and wondering why you, some stranger, was able to live when their beloved was taken away, you might understand.

When people on the news in disasters blithely mouth platitudes thanking God for saving their family when so many others died, I wonder if they ever consider whether God spared even a thought for the other good people who surely died alongside their loved ones.

Yes, it’s a real thing, and yes, like many other emotional issues both good and bad, it does not obey the laws of rational thought. If you survive an event where others did not, and you see the mourning of their families (as is often the case either in a national disaster or a local one), you may feel that they look on you and think: Why this person and not my son? Indeed I would be very surprised if those families didn’t think that, even if they don’t wish you dead, of course. Eventually (and usually not long afterward) you learn things about these other people. This man was a father of six. That woman was a nun who did charity work. This boy was only six with his whole life ahead of him. Each life you hear about, you may compare to your own. Are you as valuable as they were? If you have any elements of low self-esteem to your psychological make-up, this is where they’ll start coming to the fore. No, you aren’t as valuable. Life was a crapshoot and all these others lost, and you won. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s embarrassing to walk around, feeling like an insult to your mourning neighbors–a constant reminder of the person who lived, while their loved one didn’t.

Real life example. My brother died before I was born. He was my parents’ oldest child, smart, funny, talented, vivacious. My parents had two kids at the time he died. Then they only had one. My mom got pregnant with my older sister a few months later, who was considered a life-saver because it gave them something to focus on. Then, a year later, I was conceived as a companion for my middle sister. There’s no way I would have been born without my brother’s death.

When I learned of this strange fact–that in a very real sense I had my brother’s accident to thank for my life–it didn’t take me long to start comparing myself to everything I knew about him. And I came up wanting. I still do. He would be 60 now, and although one can’t predict perfectly what his life would have been life, I am fairly sure it wouldn’t have been nearly as empty or disappointing as mine has seemed. I grew up with parents who mourned their son. They loved me, no doubt about it, but they always felt the loss. Why couldn’t I make my parents happy? Aren’t parents supposed to be thrilled by their children? Obviously I was a poor substitute.

Meanwhile, my oldest sister, who was in the pool at the time of the accident (only 6 years old), has more direct surivor’s guilt. She should have recognized that her older brother (10 years old) was in jeopardy, instead of just playing around trying to scare her, which is what she thought he was doing. Like me, except even more directly, she felt guilty for not being enough for Mom and Pop.

The rational parts of us know that it’s not a kid’s job to make her parents happy; we also know that nothing could have ever taken that loss out of their lives. We know my sister was way too young to understand our brother’s flailing around underwater as a sign of jeopardy, and she couldn’t have saved him even if she’d known–she was just too small. We know I was loved by our parents and, at times, did make them somewhat proud.

My mother had her own guilt and it ended up giving her a half-lived life and an early death. Again, all of her children wondered why we couldn’t save her. Now I know there wasn’t anything short of a lot of counselling that she would never have gone to, because she didn’t feel she deserved to feel any better. We know she avoided doctors because she felt she deserved to die.

Feeling isn’t the same as knowing, and vice versa. Humans don’t weigh everything according to pure logic. Once one realizes that, a lot of human behavior starts to make sense, and from there springs, hopefully, the compassion for this unfortunate, misguided but very understandable mental torture.

My mom watched her mother, holding the hands of her younger sister and young cousin walk to the gas chambers. My mom was allowed to live on a whim of the nazi guard. Her mother, sister and cousin died.

Of course she feels tremendous guilt that her mother died and she was allowed to live.

It may not be rational, but it’s certainly common enough to be a fact.

People even get a form of survivors guilt when big layoffs happen at companies and they keep their jobs. It’s a surprisingly common occurrence in my experience.

I’ve never understood this either. As for asking “why me instead of them?” isn’t it obvious that there’s no answer to that, just randomness and (bad) luck? There is no reason. It has nothing to do with anyone deserving anything. Seems almost immature to me. By the time we’re adults don’t we all know the way things work out have nothing to do with who deserves anything. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people.

Seems to be most common among soldiers who survive an attack when many of their squad was killed and didn’t make it back home. Missing your mates is one thing, but wanting to be dead instead of them is such a strange reaction, i’ve never understood it.

I lived in NYC for 25 years, from 1970 to 1995. During the last 15 years there I lost hundreds of friends and lovers to AIDS. At times it seemed that my entire generation had been wiped out. Every one of them broke my heart, and it still hurts to think of those irreplaceable people. My partner and I are both “survivors,” and we feel the loss on a daily basis. It’s not exactly “guilt,” as if we’d done anything wrong. And it’s not exactly “Why me?” either. And it’s definitely not wanting to die in their place. It’s more like a challenge to be better, to live up to the guys who left us so early, all that they were contributing to society, and to continue in our own ways. But when I think of the specific things they were doing . . . the artists and writers and doctors and teachers and actors, etc. . . . it seems overwhelming, and impossible to contribute to society enough to make up for all that’s been lost. It helps to do volunteer work for an AIDS-related organization. And it also helps to give myself permission to think about those lost lives, to miss them and to mourn them, no matter how many years later. I wish it were possible to tell them how much they are missed.

panache45: I can absolutely understand and relate to that. But you’re not sitting around saying “why didn’t I get AIDS and die, it should have been me, I wish it had been me” and that’s what I see as typical survivor’s guilt. I should have died, and I feel horrible that I didn’t…

This. Funny that you mention that because it is happening to me. Funny, because I’m the last person to feel guilt. A guy I used to work with now rings up my Bud Light and gas. Never knew who he was until I went inside one day and he saw my uniform. Asked if they were recalling any of the furloughed people yet.

That’s what you see it as. The quoted Wiki article notes that it’s feeling wrong for having survived when others didn’t, and “The experience and manifestation of survivor’s guilt will depend on an individual’s psychological profile.” So perhaps those with more depressive or pessimistic or self-destructive tendencies will wish they were the ones dead instead, while others may feel a crushing burden of responsibility to try to measure up to the potential lives of those lost, others may despair at the seemingly random and uncaring universe/deity, and so on.

That’s well said. And some may feel guilt for the feelings of relief- that they’re glad it was someone else and not them.

I have seen on TV interviews with people clearly suffering survivor’s guilt, so I think I can help.
Imagine you are watching TV with 2 of your friends, you fall asleep in front of the TV, and you wake up to find the house is on fire. You grab the friend next to you and shake him awake, and he smashes a window to get out (as the fire is blocking the door). You take a quick look for your other friend, then decide to go out through the window yourself.
Your friend’s body is found in a chair a few feet from where you were sitting.

You are quite likely to feel guilt from one or both of these lines of thinking:

  1. I could have saved him, if only I’d tried. I could have stayed in the room for another minute, and that is all it would have taken to find him. I could have carried him out, or at least woken him, if only I had tried a little harder, but I was so concerned with saving my own life that I let a friend die.
  2. I could have saved him, even if it cost my own life. And I should have. While the desire to save one’s own life is understandable, we are taught that a good person will give their own life to save another. By choosing to save your own life instead of that of another, you have shown yourself to be “not good” at best. It is one thing to be a selfish jerk and eat the last of the bread, another to be a selfish jerk and let somebody die.

I have seen an airline stewardess being interviewed about a disaster, and it was obvious that a decade later she had not come to terms with what she had done. She followed her training to the letter, but she just wasn’t okay with the fact that there were people alive on the plane when she left it. She seemed to accept that if she had remained one more minute she would have been killed in the fire or subsequent explosion, but equally knew that she could have gotten one or two more people to safety if she’d stayed.
The one person I have seen who expressed the best handle on this guilt I have seen put it this way: “Nobody who was sitting further from an exit than me made it off that plane alive. Whatever I did was what I needed to do to survive.” For the record, that included crawling over a conscious man lying in the emergency exit door and asking for help. An awful thing to live with having done, but she had good evidence she needed to have done that to live. Not everyone gets such evidence.

Related: a reporter for Time who lost a hand to a grenade in Iraq related that it made him angry when people called him a hero, for how he had saved the lives of everyone else in the Hummvee. It took him months to realize that someone who had told him why was right: he felt he had actually screwed up, and that there must have been a way to save everyone and NOT lose his hand.

Even heroes feel guilt that they couldn’t do more.

Only because I survived because of my specific sexual activity, so there’s no “why?” about it. But my partner’s the one who, based on his sexual history, should have been stricken decades ago. And there’s no “why?” to explain it.