WHAT EXISTS IN THE GAP BETWEEN 'FEELING' GUILTY AND 'BEING' GUILTY?

In the latest post on her Speaking of Suicide blog, Stacey Freedenthal calls the self-blame experienced by survivors of suicide loss "raw, painful, even toxic" and says "it does not have to be so" -- suggesting that the suicide bereaved "can replace condemnation with compassion."

First of all, I pretty much agree with what she says about compassion. And I recommend Stacey's post to any survivor who has struggled with self-blame, for it offers a number of ideas (I had never heard of "hindsight bias") and practical suggestions (including a list of questions to consider asking yourself) that might be helpful.

But reading it also made me wonder: Is intense guilt (or self-blame) "bad" for a person? Does it need to be "fixed"?

I'm not talking about the toxic version of feeling guilty: If a person experiences such a feeling so intensely or so unendingly that he or she is debilitated by it, then of course, it must be ameliorated even if it requires professional help.

But there is something normal and perhaps even necessary about feeling guilty (I'm not saying normal and necessary for everyone, for some survivors do not struggle with guilt). In many instances, however, I believe feeling guilty provides a starting place for figuring out one's true relationship to what happened. Again, please don't misunderstand: "feeling" guilty and "being" guilty are two different things, and that's really my point.

Perhaps people's struggle to reconcile the difference between what they feel and what they are actually responsible for is an important struggle for them to experience. They certainly need the support of others to help them bear their pain, but I don't think they benefit from people trying to talk them out of feeling guilty or explaining it away (people who are trying to help the bereaved sometimes do the latter because they, the helpers, can't bear to witness such pain, but that's another topic).

Perhaps the question isn't even, "Am I guilty or not?" or "Am I to blame or not?" The question might be more like, "What forces and facts exist in the gap between how I feel and what actually happened?" There are probably a hundred versions of that question -- and as many answers as there are survivors of suicide loss, for each person's experience is unique -- but people must ask their own version of the question and answer it in their own way, so they can discover and give voice to their own reality.