Grief is a complicated process. It’s something that each individual experiences differently.
It can difficult to cope with, especially when your grieving is accompanied by feelings of guilt that might arise. And yet feeling guilty is normal when experiencing grief. This might seem odd, but it’s actually very common.
This article takes a look at the connection between grief and guilt. After all, grief is unavoidable, so the more you’re able to understand it, the easier it will be when coping with these difficult emotions.
Keep reading for insight into coping with guilt when healing from a sudden loss.
The Reasons For Guilt
Everyone person on earth has experienced guilt at one time or another. After all, guilt is a natural emotion.
When it comes to loss, you can experience feelings of guilt for a number of different reasons. Perhaps someone has died and you had wronged them in some way. Without proper closure, feelings of guilt can remain with you for years. Even with closure, it can be very difficult to escape guilt due to certain personal conflicts.
Or perhaps you only perceive that you wronged the individual. Perception is a powerful force. It bends reality to fit your point of view. Because of this, it’s difficult to fully separate fact from fiction. This misperception is often amplified by the grief caused by loss.
When you feel you’ve done something wrong, it’s hard to find peace until you’ve made things right again. But death has taken away your ability to make things right, thus you experience a powerlessness than can be frustrating.
Never underestimate the power of the mind. It’s constantly attempting to discover new problems and then try to solve them. It’s an endless cycle.
Memory/Confirmation Bias and Negativity Bias
Memory is another aspect of the human experience where the mind is involved in the grieving process. When you’ve lost someone, your mind will remember many things about them. Many of these memories will be accurate, while many others may not be accurate at all.
Guilt can deeply impact the accuracy of these memories. This results in both confirmation and negativity biases.
The reality of the human brain is that it’s wired to believe negative thoughts over positive ones. Thus the brain clings to pain rather than choosing feelings of joy.
Memory plays into this by creating patterns of thinking. This results in mental confirmation of guilt and remorse. It can be challenging to interrupt this cycle of negative thinking, and yet finding a way to do so is crucial to the healing process.
If you’ve recently lost a loved one, cremation urns are a way to keep their memory alive.
Survivor’s Guilt
Another interesting aspect of the grieving process is what’s known as “survivor’s guilt”. This refers to the experience of feeling guilty over surviving when someone else has died.
Survivor’s guilt might seem like a ridiculous emotion to some individuals, yet it’s very real for many people. Regardless of the cause of death, or the state of your relationship at the time of their death, you can easily become overwhelmed with survivor’s guilt, knowing that you were spared while they were not.
Again, this is a complex dynamic of grief. The mind is trying to sort everything out and make sense of what’s happened. It’s a way of processing the pain. And though it’s difficult for people not emotionally connected to the situation to understand, survivor’s guilt is a very real phenomenon that can often require years to overcome.
Trying to Create Order Out of Chaos
How could feelings of guilt possibly be beneficial to the human experience? There is no simple answer. And yet one explanation for guilt in grief is that the mind is sorting through the mental chaos caused by grief in an attempt to find order.
Even though guilt can cause uncomfortable feelings, it also provides certainty. Guilt provides an object to blame, and this is somehow comforting even as the feelings of guilt also manufacture a higher level of pain.
Death and loss are uncomfortable. The loss causes pain, and the mind ultimately doesn’t deal well with the emotions that get stirred up at the time of a significant loss. That’s why the mind begins searching for answers, because it hates the chaos that results from something it can’t explain.
The Mind Wants Answers
In recent years, science has begun to discover many fascinating things about the human mind. Ultimately, the mind wants answers to problems.
Have you ever noticed that your mind never stops? Can you sit for even a few seconds without having random thoughts? It’s been said that you don’t think, but rather, thinking happens to you. After all, where do thoughts come from?
Loss generates the ultimate question for the mind to grapple with: “Why did this happen, and why do I feel so much pain?” And it will seek a solution to the question, even when the solution makes no logical sense.
Mindfulness and meditation can have a huge impact on the grieving process, especially when it comes to guilt associated with loss. Meditation helps the mind relax, and then release the negativity that it so desperately wants to cling to.
Experiencing Guilt is Normal
Lastly, it’s important to state that guilt is a very normal and healthy part of the grieving process. Keep in mind that there are stages of grief, and guilt is one of them. Your feelings of grief need to be faced and dealt with in order to heal. Just don’t expect the guilt to leave overnight or for healing to occur quickly.
Try to Remember That Feeling Guilty is Normal When Experiencing Grief
Healing from loss isn’t easy. Especially when the loss causes feelings of guilt. And yet it’s crucial to remember that feeling guilty is normal when experiencing grief. Fortunately, the information contained in this article can help speed up the process.
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