Today, Los Angeles is a place that feels broken, both physically and emotionally. For tens of thousands of displaced people, daily life is nearly impossible. Others saw few noticeable changes in their daily lives.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t intense inner struggles.
How do you make sense of the fact that a sizeable portion of our city has been destroyed, ravaged, and heartbreaking, while the vast majority has remained untouched?
This is a confusing and paralyzing time, and most importantly, unfair. Smoke and ash filled the air, and with it, survivor’s guilt, leaving many unsure of how to act or grieve.
“Everything you’re saying feels wrong,” said Shannon Hunt, 54, whose home in downtown Altadena still stands, while nearby houses have not. Exist again. An art teacher, her place of employment, Iveson Leadership Academy, has disappeared.
“Every time I cry, every time I feel heartbroken, I feel like I shouldn’t be like this because there are other people who have it worse,” Hunter said. “Intellectually, it’s stupid. I know it’s wrong, but that’s how you feel because these people don’t have baby pictures or Christmas decorations, but they’re people I love. How can I complain? Woolen cloth?
Survivor guilt will become the new normal for many people, experts warn. I’ve felt this because for the past two weeks, as I’ve left my residence, a thought has struck my mind: I don’t deserve to be treated like this. I have tried to seek comfort in my usual haunts, but I left because, frankly, the comfort and enjoyment just didn’t feel right at the moment.
This actually shows that you have strong empathy. Most of us don’t want to express our pain when others are suffering more because we don’t want to make them feel bad. So if we feel survivor’s guilt, it says something about us. It shows that we care deeply about people.
—Chris Tickner, Partner, California Center for Integrative Therapy, Pasadena
“You hit the nail on the head,” says grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of “The Grief Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss.” “In many ways, survivor guilt is ‘I didn’t deserve this. I didn’t deserve to be spared.
O’Connor introduced the concept of “broken assumptions.” The term, she says, “is something we use a lot in loss and trauma studies” and relates to our everyday beliefs about how life, the world, and people generally function.
“Events like loss and trauma disrupt these assumptions,” O’Connor said. “It’s not that we never develop new ways of thinking about the world, but it takes time to grapple with questions like, ‘What do I deserve?'” The process of having to pause and consider those questions we didn’t have to do before, Because no entire Los Angeles neighborhood burned down.
admit your feelings
Chris Tickner and Andrea-Marie Stark are romantic and professional partners running California Integrative Therapies in Pasadena. Tickner said they, also residents of Altadena, said their home survived even though everything around them was destroyed. As therapists, they now find themselves in the strange position of trying to deal with their grief and survivor’s guilt while doing the same to their clients.
Tickner said the first step is to normalize it.
“It actually shows you have a lot of empathy,” Tickner said. “Most of us don’t want to express our pain when others are suffering more because we don’t want to make them feel bad. So if we feel survivor’s guilt, it says something about us. It Shows that we care about others so much that we are willing to remain stoic and not express ourselves.
Experts say starting to deal with survivor’s guilt requires not only becoming vulnerable, but also acknowledging and eliminating our instinct to fabricate a painful class system. The first step is simply to better understand what is going on.
The Los Angeles wildfires are an incomprehensible disaster, and whether you were severely affected or relatively unscathed, survivor’s guilt is to be expected. After all, we all feel a sense of loss given that our communities and cities will be irreversibly changed. Yet our tendency is to carry on and remain quiet. One friend even warned me not to write this story, wondering if it was “wrong” to admit that I was struggling when I wasn’t displaced.
“The reality is, so much tragedy persists,” said Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Root to Rise Therapy in Los Angeles. “To put your head in the sand and say ‘just focus on me,’ I don’t think that’s the right thing to do.”
The reality is that so much tragedy persists. Burying our heads in the sand and saying, “Just focus on me,” I don’t think is the right approach.
— Jessica Leader, licensed marriage and family therapist at Root to Rise Therapy in Los Angeles
For one, it’s isolating. “Everyone, no matter what they’ve been through, starts treatment and says, ‘I’m lucky. I have no right to complain,'” Leader said. “It’s definitely been playing around in my head. The collective experience right now – survivor’s guilt is seeping into every conversation we’re having. That’s normal. But it’s also paralyzing.
turn attention outward
Diana Winston, director of mindfulness education at the UCLA Center for Mindful Awareness Research, said survivor guilt is a “constellation of feelings” — “hopelessness, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” The longer we sit with them, especially shame, the less willing we are to discuss them. Winston recommends a simple mindfulness technique called the RAIN method, which stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture.
In a way, think of it as a beginner’s guide to meditation. “I think people who don’t have a background in mindfulness can work with RAIN,” Winston said. “‘This is how I feel, and it feels good to have this feeling. It makes my stomach tighten, I can breathe, and I feel a little better. Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness can do this.
Take some time to focus on the last aspect, Nurture. “A lot of people are feeling guilt, fear and panic, and all we can do is turn our attention to other people,” Winston said. “It often helps people not get lost in their own reactions.”
Practice like RAIN also helps us express and share our emotions, which is indispensable. Don’t seal them. This can lead us into a nihilistic place where nothing matters, or accelerate our grief until it becomes part of our identity. Ryder says obsessing over things can trigger our resistance to letting them go, making us feel guilty if we don’t live in our memories every day.
Think of what grief researchers call the “dual-process model,” O’Connor says.
“When we grieve, we need to confront loss and recovery,” O’Connor said. “Recovery can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We take a moment to have a drink, cry, and talk to someone who embraces us. The key to mental health is being able to do both, to move back and forth between architecture and memory. The most adaptable people are those who can do both.
The smallest step towards comfort
It’s also important to acknowledge what we are capable of in this moment.
“It’s important to note,” Tickner said. “It’s really hard to practice mindfulness right now.”
Hunter said a friend suggested she spend some time alone. it’s out of the question. “A friend said, ‘I have a pass for a spa day. Maybe you can take it and relax.’ I said, ‘That sounds great, but I don’t think I can do it.’ “I’ll start bawling at my desk. I can’t imagine sitting in a hot tub. My brain is spinning. This kind of self-care doesn’t work for me right now.”
Recovery can be about reaching out and helping our neighbors. We take a moment to have a drink, cry, and talk to someone who embraces us.
—Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author
In this case, simplify it, says Stark of the California Center for Integrative Therapy. “Talk to friends, talk about how you’re feeling, write it down, make art, listen to music,” Stark said. And then, of course, get out there and be part of the community. Volunteering is especially gratifying.
When friends offer help, accept it.
“We’re staying at a friend’s house right now,” Stark said, “and their neighbor comes over and says, ‘We made too much pasta. Do you want some?’ I started saying, ‘No, no, no, I Not acceptable. “And then I heard myself saying, ‘You have to accept it. It’s just pasta.’ So I said yes, and they came over with beautiful pasta, warm and lovely. It made me feel better, even though I was scared.”
“So, accept whatever people offer you,” Stark said.
Say “yes,” write it down, play music, volunteer if you can — these tips are simple but can have long-term health benefits, Stark said.
“Every time you do an exercise like this, you actually open up a new pattern of neurons in your brain, which expands who you are, your abilities, and that wonderful word we use, ‘resilience.'”
