Helene Aftermath: Guilt, gilt, and gold

Have you been feeling guilty?

Guilty when you enjoy the sense of community and camaraderie in your neighborhood? Guilty when you find a way to get to a neighboring town and take a warm shower? Guilty when you cook a hot meal in your own kitchen?

I haven’t spoken with a single person since Helene that hasn’t mentioned some kind of guilt. The scope of your loss doesn’t seem to matter—in the aftermath of a disaster, you will likely feel guilty.

Which indicates to me that this feeling isn’t personal. And yet—guilt is such a terrible feeling that it’s almost impossible NOT to take it personally. The intensity of the awful feeling seems to suggest that in order for it to feel this bad, it must mean there is something equally awful about you. Doesn’t the feeling of guilt mean that there is something you need to change about yourself? Isn’t the whole function of guilt to get you to change behaviors that aren’t in alignment with your integrity?

I would propose that survivor’s guilt has a different function altogether. We live in a devastated community. The web of our social ecology has been destroyed. It would be easy—understandable, even—for us to turn away from that devastation and tend just to ourselves and to our families.

But survivor’s guilt ensures that we do not. It’s about restoring the web of the community, not about something you’ve done or not done.

It’s not yours. It’s bigger than you. It’s not about you. It belongs to the collective.

Here’s the rub:

If you take the guilty feelings personally, you might find yourself comparing yourself to others, undermining your own wellbeing with critical thoughts, or beating up on yourself for your luck or privilege. You might find yourself trying to change behaviors —like resting or taking time for self care—that are actually helpful to you. Unfortunately, these responses will harm your health, and they won’t repair the community.

If you take the feeling of guilt personally and try to escape the suffering by numbing it out, pushing it away, or distracting yourself, that’s not going to help either (as a mentor once told me: uncomfortable feelings don’t go away when you sidestep them. They do pushups.)

I think of those two responses as gilt guilt. It might look right on the surface, but doesn’t go all the way down. It doesn’t address what needs to be addressed.

Gilt responses to guilt are completely understandable because guilt feels so bad. In hedonic terms (pleasure, comfort) guilt is an awful sensation.

But in eudaimonic terms (from the greek eu, pleasure, and daimon, spirit—the pleasure of the spirit) guilt itself can be both helpful and good. Aside from the discomfort of the feeling, what it is trying to do is call your attention to something that matters.

Because guilt has gold in it, too. It can be what they call an “FGO”—an F’ing Growth Opportunity. Feels bad, is good. If you can attend to the feeling of guilt without using it to shame or judge yourself, guilt will tell you how to act on what matters.

Guilt + your values = gold.

For example: If I am feeling survivor’s guilt because I just sat with a client who lost her home and I have a completely intact home to return to tonight, I could try to push that feeling away. I could use it to belittle myself and feel shame about my own experience. Or, I can ask myself: what does this feeling of guilt want me to know about what matters to me? What could it tell me about my place in rebuilding the community web?

When I consult my own values, I know that whatever we rebuild, I want it to be more equitable, more resilient, more creative, more inclusive than it was before. Then, the feeling of guilt turns me toward the problem instead of against myself. It causes me to get curious about actions I can take in my community that are equitable, resilient, creative, compassionate, and inclusive.

When I sit with these values instead of taking the guilty feeling personally, I can recognize that my intact home is a resource for the community. I can shelter friends, family, and responders there—which will help me lean into inclusivity. I can cook nourishing meals there— leaning into resilience and compassion. I can host gatherings to build a sense of community, creativity, and equitability.

This doesn’t mean that I should be spending every moment in a frenzy of positive engagement. There will be mornings of crying, days of staring into space, times of connecting with family and friends and taking care of myself.

But it does mean that if I am suffering with painful feelings of survivor’s guilt, I don’t have to take it personally. Instead, I can use it to clarify my values and direct my feet toward what I would like to happen next.

In a former lifetime I heard Michael Meade say that when the kingdom falls ill, the answers come from the edge. Every person finds their thread, and they carry that thread back from the edge to the center, and the center is rewoven.

It takes all of us to stitch the web back together. Your guilt does not belong to you—don’t take it personally. No single one of us could ever do everything that needs to be done.

But there is gold in the guilt. It might just be the gentle nudge that helps you find your own thread, the thread that will weave you back home.

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Our next depth storytelling event, a benefit for BeLoved Asheville, will be taking place October 29th. Come and be held by story—sometimes the back of an old story is broad enough to carry what is too heavy for us alone. Join us from anywhere in the world—a recording will be provided for registrants who can’t attend live.

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