Survivor's Guilt

Survivor's Guilt

This article relates to How to Be Safe

In How To Be Safe, Tom McAllister charts a year in the life of his main character Anna and the rest of the community of Seldom Falls, in the aftermath of a mass school shooting carried out by a student. Anna, a teacher who was fired from the school, struggles to cope with many aspects of the tragedy, not least her feelings of guilt that she was not there when it happened.

The concept of survivor guilt was first identified among holocaust survivors, individuals who had lost family and friends in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. It is recognized as afflicting people who survive traumatic events – wars and conflicts, natural disasters, terrorist attacks and school shootings, but can also be experienced by others such as first responders, transplant recipients, and people who have lost a loved one.

Regardless of the source of the feelings, Psychology Today identifies three themes or types of guilt that sufferers may experience:

1. Guilt about surviving: the feeling that you do not deserve to have survived when others have not. Survivors often feel that happiness is inappropriate and wrong. They feel that the world is unfair.
2. Guilt about not doing enough: survivors may feel guilty that they did not do more to help others, or that when the opportunity to be brave and save another person arose, they did not take it.
3. Guilt about actions: in moments of extreme stress, people do not always live up to their own ideas of themselves, perhaps pushing others out of the way so that they can survive. This theme also affects people who have left poverty – refugees for example – who feel guilty about others left behind.

The Sun Sentinel reported that students of Stoneman Douglas High School who were not, for one reason or other, at school on February 14, 2018, are experiencing survivor's guilt. The article estimates that on any given day, only 94% of the school's population is in attendance due to illness or other absences. Like Anna in How To Be Safe, there were people who were not at Stoneman Douglas, but could and normally would have been. These students have to balance the disconnect of being both part and not part of the event. They may also find they have less access to support than those who were present and yet may still be suffering significant trauma.

Filed under Medicine, Science and Tech

This article relates to How to Be Safe. It first ran in the May 2, 2018 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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