Los Angeles is a place that feels physically and emotionally broken these days. For the tens of thousands of people displaced, the process is almost impossible. Others continue with small, visible changes in their daily lives.
However, that does not mean that there is no heavy inner struggle.
How do you understand the fact that a large part of our city has been destroyed, destroyed and left with broken hearts while a significant majority remains untouched?
It’s a confusing and crippling time, and most of all, it’s unfair. There is smoke and ash in the air, as well as survivor’s guilt, leaving many unsure of what to do or how to grieve.
“Everything you say sounds like the wrong thing to say,” said Shannon Hunt, 54. Her home in Central Altadena is standing still while those around her are. An art teacher, his school, the Aveson School of Leaders, is gone.
“Every time I cry, every time I feel sad, I think I don’t deserve that, because someone else is getting worse,” Hunt said. “That’s stupid, intellectually. I understand that’s wrong, but that’s how you feel, because these other people don’t have baby pictures and they don’t have Christmas decorations and they’re people I love. How can I complain?”
The survivor’s case, experts warn, will be a new experience for many. I’ve heard it, as one thought has crossed my mind two weeks ago when I left my place: I don’t deserve this. I tried to go to the places I usually find solace but I went, like comfort and fun, frankly, I felt out of place at this time.
It actually shows that you have a lot of compassion. Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered a lot because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us when we feel survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot.
– Chris Tickner, co-owner of Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy
“You hit the nail on the head there,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author of “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss.” “Survivor’s guilt is, in many ways, ‘I don’t deserve this.’ I don’t deserve to survive.’”
O’Connor introduces the concept of “fractured thoughts.” The word, O’Connor says, “is something we use a lot in the study of loss and trauma,” and it’s about our everyday beliefs — how life, the world, and people in general work.
“Events, like loss and trauma, shatter those ideas,” says O’Connor. “It’s not that we never have new ways of thinking about the world, but that it takes time to answer questions like, ‘What do I deserve?’ The process of us pausing and considering those questions we didn’t have to do before, because not every part of Los Angeles was burning.”
Admit how you feel
Chris Tickner and Andrea-Marie Stark are loving and professional partners, working in Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy. And they are residents of Altadena, whose home survived despite, Tickner said, everything around it falling apart. As therapists, they now find themselves in an unusual position, trying to process their grief and survivor’s guilt while doing the same for their clients.
The first step, Tickner says, is to normalize it.
“It really shows that you have a lot of compassion,” Tickner said. “Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others are suffering because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us when we feel survivor’s guilt. It says that we care so much about people, that we are willing to be stoic and not reveal ourselves.”
To begin to consider the case of the survivor, it helps, experts say, not only to be vulnerable, but to acknowledge and eliminate our instinct to integrate the class system of suffering. The first step you should take is to better understand what is going on.
The LA wildfires are a tragedy that is impossible to fathom, and whether you were severely affected or not, the feeling of survivor’s guilt is to be expected. We all, after all, feel lost when we look at our communities and our city will be irrevocably changed. And yet our tendency is to go on and be quiet. A friend even warned me about writing this story, wondering if it was a “problem” to admit that I was struggling when I wasn’t removed.
“The reality is that there’s a lot of tragedy going on all the time,” says Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist at LA’s Root to Rise Therapy. “Putting our heads in the sand and saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think that’s the right way.”
The truth is that there are many disasters at all times. Burying our heads in the sand and saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right way.
– Jessica Leader, licensed marriage and family therapist at LA’s Root to Rise Therapy
For one thing, it’s divisive. “Everyone, no matter what they’ve been through, starts their time saying, ‘I’m very lucky.’ I have no right to complain,’” said the Leader. “That really boggles my mind. A collective experience right now – survivor’s guilt permeates every conversation we have. It’s normal. But it’s also paralyzing.”
Turn your attention
Survivor’s guilt, says Diana Winston, director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, is “a constellation of emotions” — “hopelessness, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” If we stay with them for a long time, especially the shy ones, we can be very quiet to talk about them. Winston recommends a simple thinking technique called the RAIN method, an acronym that stands for “see, allow, investigate and expand.”
Consider it, in a way, a beginner’s guide to meditation. “I think people, without a background in logic, can work a little harder with RAIN,” Winston said. “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 self-awareness can do that.”
Just take a moment to focus on the last aspect, “nurturing.” “A lot of people feel guilty, scared and scared, and what we can do is pay attention to other people,” Winston said. “It tends to help people not get lost in their accountability.”
Exercises like RAIN can also help us talk and share our feelings, which is important. Do not put them in bottles. First, it can lead us to the uncomfortable place of feeling like nothing matters, or accelerate our grief until it becomes part of our identity. Focusing on things, Leader says, can encourage the resistance to let go, to feel guilty if we don’t live in our memories every day.
O’Connor says to think about what grief researchers refer to as the “dual process model.”
“When we’re in grief, there’s loss and recovery that we have to deal with,” O’Connor said. “Giving back can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to drink and cry and talk to someone we love. The key to mental health is being able to do both, to go back and forth between structure and memory. People who are flexible and resilient are the ones who can do both.”
Take the smallest step for comfort
It is important, too, to acknowledge what we are capable of in this moment.
“There has to be a caveat,” Tickner said. “Practicing mindfulness right now is really hard.”
Hunt says friends encouraged him to take a break. It’s just not possible. “A friend was like, ‘I’ve got a spa day pass. Maybe you can take it easy.’ I said, ‘That sounds amazing, but I don’t think I can do it.’ I just started pounding on the table. I can’t imagine sitting in a hot tub. My mind wanders. That kind of self-care wouldn’t work for me right now.”
Giving back can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to drink and cry and talk to someone who loves us.
– Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and writer
In such cases, says California Integrative Therapy’s Stark, make it easy. “Talking to friends, talking about how you feel, writing, making art, listening to music,” Stark said. Then, of course, get out and be part of the community. Volunteering can be especially comforting.
And when friends offer help, accept it.
“We’re staying at a friend’s house right now,” says Stark, “and their neighbors came over and said, ‘We made too much pasta.’ Do you want to?’ And I started saying, ‘No, no, no, I can’t take it.’ Then I felt myself saying, ‘You have to accept it. It’s just pasta.’ I said yes, they came with nice steamers and it was warm and lovely. And it made me feel so much better, even though I was nervous.
“So please,” said Stark, “accept whatever people offer you.”
Say yes, write, put on music and volunteer when you can — simple tips, says Stark, but with long-term health benefits.
“Every time you do a practice like that, you literally activate a new neuronal pattern in your brain that increases your personality, your ability and that wonderful word we use called ‘resilience.’
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