Survivors guilt', Grief Waves & Intergenerational Trauma
Emotional tsunamis
I know what it is like to go through the grief cycles, the shock, anger, bargaining, acceptance, that come in tidal waves.
These are made even more complex when the death is from suicide.
The guilt is so much more complicated when it is survivor’s guilt. Because the person did not die naturally and often premature, unnatural, and horrifying that someone could die at their own hand.
Of course, we have thoughts, “what if?”
While simultaneously grieving. All of that brings in very intense feelings.
And these emotions spin and spin, twist and cycle through like a washing machine’s spin cycle, again and again…twisting and churning like a queasy stomach.
The anger. The heartache. The despair. The devastating sadness. The relief. Then the guilt at the relief that the dysfunctional person is gone and can longer devastate those around them. Then it starts all over. It can spin and spin and spin.
I think the tricky thing about suicide survivors’ guilt is that it is tied to grief.
They say we’re supposed to feel the feelings, all of them, even when they are tidal waves. Don’t repress, don’t block them or make them get stuck. Let them flow.
And yet, we’re not supposed to go down the rabbit hole and take on/accept the survivors’ guilt.
Guilt too is a feeling.
So, it is not so simple.
It sounds good, sure. It makes sense in theory.
But emotions don’t always come that way—in neat little packages.
Ie—the guilt that is tied to the fact that my brother is dead and I am not.
But how he died. At his own hand.
But they often feel like the same emotion, grief and guilt.
How do I know where one starts and the other begins, bleeding into the other? They blend and interweave into one another, and whirl and swirl sometimes into a kaleidoscope of colors.
Feelings are complex.
now, I am thankful that I don’t have many regrets where my father and brother’s deaths are concerned. I don’t feel I could have saved them. I know of others who carry a lot more of a load and burden of survivors’ guilt. Perhaps I would if my child had completed suicide.
Though I do often sit with the heavy reality that I am here and Jeremie is not, when he had a child, another generation, was a parent to someone who needed him.
But I also know that I have done the work. To get better. To heal. To get therapy.
From all I’ve read with intergenerational trauma and wounds, I also wholeheartedly believe that—in doing this—I put my ancestors and relatives, those who have walked on, to peace. I believe that my healing helps them.
This is religious, spiritual. I know not others will believe this.
Yet, it doesn’t really matter. Even if you are to believe that this is all there is and that this belief of mine is complete and utter horseshit, well, so be it.
I’m of the opinion that if it helps me to do better, be better, treat others better and serve others in a healed way, then that works.
I would rather tell myself lies that are in congruence with my constructive healing then cast skeptical lies in the absence of empirical data. I would rather tell these supposed lies if they contribute to less mental self-harm and self-destruction.
Whatever makes you sleep at night.
My complex grief and trauma, shame and despair and abandonment, from PTSD and CPTSD, have done their part to tell and urge me to believe a lot of very deep-ceded lies about myself.
But—part of the healing now is to recognize that it wasn’t all on me.
If we look at intergenerational trauma and wounds, this notion that this all didn’t start with me, I no longer bear the burden of making sure my father and my brother didn’t die.
We all are accountable to do our own work of healing.
I feel for my brother, raised differently than I was, a different gender, wounds and insecurities and ADHD and other lived, embodied experiences I did not have.
But like many people, whose families tell generations upon generations of stories of trauma and mental illness, we both had our individual and shared semi truck fulls of emotional baggage that we needed to work through.
This is our intergenerational burden. He had it. So do I.
But, it becomes what we do with it.
I sit a lot with the experiences of grief and suicide and the stigma of how society acts around those who have a relative who has taken their own life. I get it, it’s heavy. It’s a lot to hear about it.
It’s worse to carry it.
Because I can read all the things, do my own healing work and advocate against stigmatization. But it is still [always] there. I can’t entirely transcend it—
I believe that in my lifetime it will always be a thing—in this society
That whoever close friend or date that I have, when I disclose to them how my father and my brother died, I will see the look in the face of them—
The shock, the horror, the discomfort, the awkwardness, the pity.
Sometimes, even the fear.
Their eyes seem to scream:
“Oh my GOD!"
“That’s horrible!”
“Are you…okay?”
…then you can see the wheels turning, and I wonder if they think I am mentally unwell as well.
Inner monologue: “Are you going to off yourself as well?”
I can never quite transcend that.
And yet, still, it is the risk I take. To choose to talk about this. To share it all so publicly.
If I don’t, if no one did/does—then what?
We don’t advocate, we don’t de-stigmatize, we don’t support family suicide survivors. By extension, people suffer in silence, with their losses.
Perhaps others who are in major depression/suicide ideating, or attempting/considering suicide may think—
It’s better this way, for me to die. Mental illness lies to us. Sometimes it is very convincing.
And yet, yet—
The pain and anguish for those who are left behind to make sense of it…to grieve it, carry it throughout their lifetimes—
I’m here to tell you that it is fucking excruciating.
If people really want to end their lives, they will.
But I also think that many don’t want to die. They just want to not be in pain. They want that to stop; they just need help. Many don’t know that there is help out there.
Some think they are doing their family a favor by dying prematurely. I truly believe that my father believed that.
And yet, they have no idea—
What they will leave behind, the havoc they will wreak.
If you are carrying the heavy load of grief, especially the survivors’ guilt that plagues us suicide survivors, please go gentle on yourselves
And—
I understand that you wish your loved one isn’t dead, and didn’t die that way.
I understand that your emotions are complex. They are allowed to be. Heavy and contradictory.
I know it’s a lot to feel. Try not to repress.
But also, though we feel the guilt and can’t help it, please reaffirm yourself with affirmations and assurances that it is not your fault. You are not a murderer. You are not responsible that __________ is dead.
My survivors’ guilt used to be a deep putrid green color. The color of sickness.
Now, I identify it more as a deep, morose blue. It is morbid. It is heavy. But it no longer plagues me. There is a beauty to it. Almost a serenity, like a very deep blue of the sky.
Part of the grief we will always carry means that the colors of the kaleidoscope will always shift. Emotions are always like that. So are emotions from grief. Emotions from suicide grief and survivors’ guilt are magnified, amplified, raised to the hundredth power.
Since we carry it, always. It is heavy.
But also now, I believe it to [be able to] become a superpower.
I continue to stand in awe of the lived, embodied experiences of humanity that we are able to live through, but that don’t break us. They knock us down. We feel ourselves crumbling. And yet, we carry on. We transform and find a way to heal through it.
If we’re committed, I believe we can become even better versions of ourselves, addressing our own trauma as well as our intergenerational guilt.
And when we get there, even the closer we get, I see that and all these colors of emotions transforming into a rainbow.
