Guilt...It's Complicated

Photo from The Parenting Guilt Trap; Parenting Hub

I should have been able to stop this.

In my previous post, I suggested that pretty much all grieving parents will feel this way at some point, however their son or daughter died.

I think that’s because we never stop believing that our job, as parents, is to take care of our child, whatever their age. That being a responsible parent means we will always find ways to keep them safe. And as a measure of our success, the bare minimum requirement is that we manage to keep them alive.

When a child takes their own life, parents can feel an even greater sense of failure.

After all, Suicide Prevention messaging suggests that all these deaths were preventable. This adds a whole extra level of painful soul-searching: for comparison, imagine a Cancer Charity peddling the line that parents could (and, by implication, should) have stopped their child dying from cancer.

Taken to an extreme (because our brains will do this) a parent whose son or daughter has taken their life can end up feeling as if their negligence was the cause of their child’s death. I know that losing a child to addiction can have this effect too. It’s extremely common that, when our child’s mental health was compromised before they died, we end up dealing with guilt on steroids.

Of course, as all parents know, feeling responsible for our child comes with the territory. From the very first moments of our baby’s life, we are made aware that our main job now is to attend to them. This must surely be the reason for the excessive crying of a new-born. An ear-splitting wail, it’s so over-the-top that even the worst and most neglectful mother in the world could not fail to respond.

This feels entirely intentional on Mother Nature’s part, because the baby is so wholly reliant upon us, meaning we are mere conduits for the survival of this next generation. A new-born baby has much in common with a tyrant; the stress caused to the parent by such an intense declaration of its needs seems totally irrelevant, because the baby’s needs are paramount.

If all goes well, and as we get to know our baby, we learn to tune in to them better. But we still feel guilty on the occasions when we get it wrong because that’s how nature ensures we don’t take our eyes off the ball. And thus, it begins (and will continue as our child grows up), the expectation we place on ourselves that we can, and should, always take proper care of them.

If you are a bereaved parent and have not experienced guilt, feel free to ignore what I’m about to say. Just know that you are in the minority. Because I’ve learnt that parental guilt is present in pretty much ALL forms of child loss.

It’s four years since my son Dom took his life and I’ve had time to begin to properly (by which I mean more healthily) process my trauma, as well as to gain a better understanding of the workings of my mind, especially in relation to this guilt. And I’d like to share my observations, in the hope that I can help any other parents reading this to put down the stick with which they may be currently beating themselves up.

First and foremost, FEELING guilty does not mean that you ARE guilty. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you are the reason your child died. All it means is that you are the kind of person who is scrupulous in holding yourself to account, but this admirable quality is working against you right now.

I feel this requires some explanation.

If things go okay for us as children (meaning our parents are ‘good enough’ and do a half-decent job) we develop a ‘healthy’ conscience and through this we register that when we are behaving well, we feel good about ourselves, whereas if we’re behaving badly, we get an internal and somewhat uneasy sense that we’re doing wrong. Otherwise known as guilt.

It gets significantly more nuanced when we become adults, because what constitutes good/ethical choices can be up for debate. Nevertheless, in-built consciences remain nature’s way of ensuring people can get along together, since most of us don’t want to deliberately hurt anyone else. Because if we do harm to another, seeing the damage we may have done ‘pricks our conscience’ and leaves us with the unpleasant feeling of guilt.

But guilt can have a darker side.

Guilt is our first experience of a consequence for doing wrong. Our parents know its power; it can be a punishment, used to control us, to bring us to heel. It can be misused, sending us the message that not only what we did was wrong but that we ourselves are bad for doing it. That’s why it’s so important to distinguish between the offence/crime and the basic goodness of a person, whatever age they are.

Because guilt can manifest as self-condemnation and can disable us (especially prolonged guilt and all the rumination contained within it.) Essentially, it’s a static thing, with nowhere to go. It can feel as if it has taken a hold of us and can cause us no end of suffering.

Remorse is often seen as a word which is interchangeable with guilt but in truth it’s distinctly different. Because remorse is a deeper more empathetic feeling than guilt. And although it is characterised by a sense of deep regret for the harm caused (which is still painful to experience) it includes the desire to make amends and, as such, it suggests that this will then redeem us.

So, whereas guilt carries potentially harmful judgement of the self, remorse encourages us to learn from our mistakes, and to notice that the wrong thing that we did does not make us a ‘bad’ person. And so, it motivates us to act.

As adults we have greater access to this more adapted version of guilt. We welcome the fact that, instead of having to sit with the bad feelings that our guilt produces, remorse offers us the chance to do something positive, prompting us to recognise that we will have an opportunity to do better next time. This promise of redemption is a balm when we most need it.

I believe that, as adults, our guilt serves no helpful function unless it is followed by remorse. Guilt makes us feel stuck, whereas remorse brings us back into alignment with who we truly are. Because, we are not our mistakes, we are what we do with them.

Where am I going with this? Well, I’ve come to believe that, when your child dies, the healthy workings of our conscience can go seriously wrong.

It’s hardly surprising, really. Your child’s death feels utterly abnormal. Your world is upended. You may as well have been transported to the moon, because the landscape of this new world into which you have been thrown is totally unrecognisable.

And that’s because all your points of reference have been scattered to the wind. None of this makes any sense…and I think that’s when, as we desperately try to get a hold on some reason amidst the madness, our thinking goes haywire too.

In our intolerable pain we may turn on ourselves, going over and over the details of our child’s last year/month/day/minutes. Questioning why we didn’t stop this happening. Blaming ourselves.

I believe that’s because, in trying to attribute the usual ‘cause and effect’ model to this completely new and frightening event, our conscience has started misfiring. That in our mind’s highly compromised state, effectively trying to make sense of the senseless, it’s attempted to reboot. Returning to the ‘Factory’ settings (AKA the conscience’s basic default of feeling child-like guilt) we regress to a simplistic version of how right and wrong plays out.

This operating system is completely inadequate for the job in hand, namely getting our heads around the complexities surrounding our child’s death. As a result, our internal messaging gets hi-jacked. We know that something terrible has happened and tell ourselves we must have failed in our job of protecting our child, and that it is our fault that they are now dead.

Now, flooded with guilt, under ‘normal’ circumstances remorse would come to our aid because, as I’ve explained, it’s not actually the enemy. On a different occasion, the belief that we got it wrong can be the making of us, the uncomfortable feeling strengthening our resolve to think more carefully about our actions in the future and thus offering us both the opportunity and desire to learn from our mistakes.

But we’re not able to call upon remorse after our child dies. There’s literally nothing we can do with our soul-sapping guilt because there are no lessons to learn and apply next time.

I think this is a major contributor to the complicated grief which assails so many parents after their child has died. The conscience (designed to experience guilt followed by remorse) has gone rogue. It’s likely desperately trying to do its job, offering us a chance to redeem ourselves. Ensuring we don’t suffer again by pointing us in the direction of getting it right in the future.

But we know that there will be no opportunities to use our experience and do it better, next time. Because, when your child is dead, there isn’t a next time.

So, we don’t get to become this BETTER person, an improved version of ourselves. It feels as if we have no choice but to accept that we did an undoable wrong. Sadly, we may even conclude that, we are in fact a BAD person, period.

And how are we to be punished for our crime? By being stuck in this permanent state of guilt, with no chance of moving beyond it, ever.

This sounds appalling, and that’s because it is. We are in so much pain already, following the death of our precious child, and this self-imposed verdict of ‘guilty’, with no access to any kind of redemption, serves only to hurt us more. Signing up to feel this way forever is like putting ourselves in prison and throwing away the key.

Of course, breaking free from this incredibly damaging thinking requires hard work. And time. But I believe that stopping blaming ourselves for our child’s death is a necessary act of self-compassion and something that, ultimately, we must do, if we are to survive this loss.

Because this guilt serves no purpose.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Unable to access the healing power of remorse, and in the absence of being able to say sorry for our perceived failings to our child directly, wearing a metaphorical hairshirt as a form of penance may feel like an act of love, perhaps the only one we can show our child now.

But it isn’t. And it would NOT be what our child would want for us.

I feel, with total conviction, that my son would be appalled if I had decided that being plagued by guilt was how I could prove that I still loved him. And that he would be incredibly sad if, for the rest of my days, I only chose to connect with him through pain and anguish.

Because I can do SO much better for him, and for myself.

I know putting our guilt down is not easy. I have so many regrets, but they will have to serve as the closest version of remorse available to me. Honestly acknowledging them does provide a form of comfort though, because saying them aloud helps me to see that so many aspects of my guilt are unfounded. Writing about my regrets in my earlier Substack posts (February-May) has helped immeasurably in leading me towards self-compassion rather than self-blame.

I recognise that as bereaved parents we most likely have our own very different versions of the same tragedy, and that the details of how this played out can haunt us all. But they will continue to do this if we allow them to take centre stage forever, instead of letting our love for our child be the main player in the story we tell ourselves.

I want to end by saying that, if you are reading this having lost your child, I hope that you find, or have found, a way to stop blaming yourself for aspects of their death. It’s so important to see the bigger picture, recognising the limitations that existed in respect of the control we had over the events surrounding this devastating loss.

I hope, too, that you are not holding yourself to unrealistic standards of perfection, because we are all human at the end of the day and, in common with other parents (whose children, please note, do not die from these) we have all made mistakes. We must remember that the death of our child is not a punishment for something we did wrong, it is a tragedy.

And finally, I hope that you give yourself permission to show the enduring love for your child in a way which best honours you, and them. Because that is what we, and they, deserve.

How I have chosen to do this for my own child, my cherished son Dom, will be the focus of my next post.