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He Survived. His Friends Didn’t.
When it comes to my veteran husband’s PTSD, there’s one symptom that haunts him more than the others. It follows him into his dreams and pounces without warning. Some nights it’s all he can talk about. What hurts him the most is his survivors’ guilt.
“Two [of his friends] were lost in Iraq, and the other two were killed in Afghanistan. When that last one went down, it just undid him.”
Survivors’ guilt is like someone using their own empathy as a weapon against themselves. Timothy J. Legg, a geriatric and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, tells us that survivors’ guilt happens when someone feels guilty after surviving an atrocity that other people didn’t survive, or she might feel guilty because other people got left behind. She may ask herself, “What could I have done differently? Why didn’t I suffer as much as other people did? Why didn’t I die?”
People with survivors’ guilt may feel guilty about what they did or didn’t do during a traumatic experience, or they may feel ashamed for simply living through it, assigning selfish, impure motives to the very act of survival.
For instance, Fox News recounts how some Holocaust survivors thought they were somehow morally flawed after surviving atrocities that killed so many…
