Traumatic events can shape and scar people and people who process the often-conflicted emotions they feel through therapy will often describe how it can manifest in very different ways.
One of the most significant symptoms is survivor’s guilt, a feeling not only of distress that a traumatic event happened but a feeling of remorse and shame that they survived when others in the same situation did not.
Any situation that can cause post-traumatic stress disorder has the potential to cause survivor’s guilt if other people died or suffered worse than a given person in the same situation. Sometimes they might blame themselves for other people’s deaths.
According to Stephen Joseph in his study of the Zeebrugge Herald of Free Enterprise Disaster, there are three general groups of survivor’s guilt that emerge from survivors of a disaster.
- The first is the guilt of being alive after being in a situation where other people died.
- The second is the remorse for actions they did not take out of fear, particularly ones that they felt could have saved other people’s lives or removed suffering.
- The third is remorse for the actions they did take in a flight-or-fight situation.
Whilst Mr Joseph’s study and other similar examinations tend to focus on relatively acute events, either in the form of disasters, wars or natural disasters, it can also occur in survivors of long-term illnesses such as cancer and HIV/AIDS.
The latter disease, in particular, would lead to survivor’s guilt, as the HIV epidemic/pandemic until the development of effective antiretroviral medication meant that the disease was in almost all cases a terminal illness.
People who were HIV-positive and survived, as well as people who were deeply affected by the epidemic but did not contract the virus themselves, reported strong feelings of guilt and depression, often described albeit not officially as AIDS survivor syndrome.
