Los Angeles is a place that feels physically and emotionally fractured these days. For tens of thousands of displaced people, routine is almost impossible. Others continue with few visible changes in their daily lives.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't a tough internal struggle.
How does one make sense of the fact that a considerable portion of our city has been decimated, devastated, and bereaved while a significant majority remains intact?
It is a confusing and paralyzing time and, above all, unfair. There is smoke and ash in the air, as well as survivor's guilt, leaving many not knowing how to act or grieve.
“Everything you say sounds like it's wrong,” says Shannon Hunt, 54. His house in downtown Altadena still stands, while those nearby do not. An arts teacher, her workplace, Aveson School of Leaders, disappeared.
“Every time I cry, every time I feel broken, I think I don't deserve it, because someone else has it worse,” Hunt says. “That's stupid, intellectually. I get that that's not right, but that's how you feel, because these other people don't have baby pictures or Christmas decorations and they're people I love. How can I complain?
Survivor guilt, experts warn, will be the new normal for many. I have felt it, as a single thought has racked my mind for the past two weeks when I left my house: I don't deserve this. I tried going to spaces I frequented for comfort, but I left because, frankly, comfort and enjoyment seemed inappropriate right now.
In fact, it shows that you have a lot of empathy. Most of us don't want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don't want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we feel survivor's guilt. He says we care a lot about people.
—Chris Tickner, co-owner of California Integrative Therapy in Pasadena
“You hit the nail on the head,” says Mary-Frances O'Connor, grief researcher and author of the book “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss.” “Survivor guilt is, in many ways, 'I don't deserve this.' I don't deserve to have been saved.'”
O'Connor raises the concept of “shattered assumptions.” The term, he says, “is something we use a lot in loss and trauma research” and deals with our everyday beliefs: how life, the world, and people in general work.
“Events like loss and trauma shatter those assumptions,” O'Connor says. “It's not that we never develop new ways of thinking about the world, it's that it takes time to address questions like, 'What do I deserve?' “The process of having to pause and consider those questions, we didn't have to do before, because there wasn't an entire Los Angeles neighborhood burning.”
Recognize what you are feeling
Chris Tickner and Andrea-Marie Stark are romantic and professional partners and operate California Integrative Therapy in Pasadena. They are also Altadena residents whose home survived even though, Tickner says, everything around it was devastated. As therapists, you now find yourself in a strange position, trying to process your grief and survivor's guilt while doing the same with your clients.
The first step, Tickner says, is to normalize it.
“It actually shows that you have a lot of empathy,” Tickner says. “Most of us don't want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don't want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we feel survivor's guilt. “It says we care a lot about people, so much so that we are willing to be stoic and not express ourselves.”
To begin processing survivor guilt, experts say, it is helpful not only to be vulnerable but also to recognize and eliminate our instinct to invent a class system of suffering. The initial step to take is simply to better understand what is happening.
The Los Angeles wildfires are a catastrophe beyond comprehension, and whether you were badly hit or relatively unscathed, a feeling of survivor's guilt is to be expected. After all, all of us feel lost as our communities and our city will change irrevocably. And yet our inclination is to move forward and remain silent. A friend even warned me not to write this story, asking if it was “problematic” to admit that I was struggling when I wasn't displaced.
“The reality is that there are so many tragedies all the time,” says Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Root to Rise Therapy in Los Angeles. “Burying your head in the sand saying, 'Just focus on me,' I don't think is the right approach.”
The reality is that there are so many tragedies all the time. Burying your head in the sand 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
On the one hand, it is isolating. “Each person, no matter what they experienced, began their session by saying, 'I'm so lucky.' I have no right to complain,'” Leader says. “That's really going around in my brain. The collective experience right now: survivor guilt is seeping into every conversation we have. It's normal. But it is also paralyzing.”
Direct your attention outward
Survivor guilt, says Diana Winston, director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, is a “constellation of feelings”: “despair, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” The longer we sit with them, especially shame, the more reluctant we may become to discuss them. Winston recommends a simple mindfulness trick called the RAIN method, an acronym that stands for “Recognize, Allow, Inquire, and Nurture.”
Consider it, in a way, a beginner's guide to meditation. “I think people, without experience in mindfulness, can work with RAIN a little bit,” Winston says. “'This is what I feel and it's okay to have this feeling. It makes my stomach tighten and I can breathe and feel a little better.' “Anyone with a little bit of self-awareness can do it.”
Take a moment to focus intensely on the last aspect: “nurture.” “A lot of people feel guilt, fear and panic, and what we can do is focus our attention on other people,” Winston says. “It tends to help people not get lost in their own reactivity.”
An exercise like RAIN can also help us articulate and share our emotions, which is integral. Don't repress them. That can lead us to a nihilistic place where we feel like nothing matters, or accelerate our pain to the point that it becomes part of our identity. Thinking about things, Leader says, can inspire a resistance to letting go, to feeling guilty if we don't live in our memories daily.
O'Connor recommends thinking about what grief researchers call the “dual process model.”
“When we grieve, we have to face loss and restoration,” O'Connor says. “Restoration can be about reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk to a person who will hug us. The key to mental health is being able to do both, going back and forth between constructing and remembering. The most resilient people are the ones who can do both.”
Take the smallest possible step towards comfort
It is also important to recognize what we are capable of at this moment.
“A caveat is in order,” says Tickner. “Practicing mindfulness right now is really difficult.”
Hunt says her friends recommended she take a moment for herself. It is simply not possible. “A friend told me, '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 would start crying on the table. I can't imagine sitting in a hot tub. My brain is spinning. “That kind of self-care wouldn’t work for me right now.”
Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk to a person who will hug us.
—Mary-Frances O'Connor, author and grief researcher
In such cases, says Stark of California Integrative Therapy, keep it simple. “Talking to friends, talking about how you feel, writing it down, making art, listening to music,” Stark says. So, by all means, get out there and be part of the community. Volunteering can be especially rewarding.
And when friends offer help, accept it.
“We're staying at a friend's house right now,” Stark says, “and his neighbors came over and said, 'We made too much pasta. Do you want some? And I started saying, 'No, no, no, I can't stand it.' Then I heard myself say: 'You have to accept.' It's just pasta. So I said yes and they came with the beautiful ziti and it was warm and lovely. And it made me feel so much better, even though I was terrified.
“So please,” Stark says, “say yes to whatever people offer you.”
Say yes, write, play music, and volunteer if you can—easy tips, Stark says, but ones that have long-term health benefits.
“Every time you do a practice like that, you are literally opening up a new neural pattern in your brain that expands your individuality, your capacity, and that wonderful word we use called 'resilience.'”
