Healing can lead to guilt when it distances a person from loved ones who remain in dysfunction.

Survivor’s guilt often appears when personal growth changes long-standing relationships.

Healing oneself can serve as a model that shows others that change is possible.

What is survivor’s guilt? Google dictionary describes it this way:

A condition of persistent mental and emotional stress experienced by someone who has survived an incident in which others died. For example, “He escaped with his life but suffered from survivor’s guilt.”

This is the definition most people think of as “survivor’s guilt.” But mental health professionals and therapists know that this concept applies far more widely than this description would suggest. We see survivor’s guilt in our offices every single day, but it’s a slightly different type.

How Therapists Define Survivor’s Guilt

Survivor's guilt can be described as the guilt people often experience when they make healthy choices and take steps to heal themselves emotionally, as each step takes them farther away from the dysfunctional people in their lives.

For many hard-working, well-meaning folks, there is no way around it: To heal yourself, you must leave someone behind.

Healing from abuse, trauma, or childhood emotional neglect is accomplished by taking a series of small steps. As you make healthy changes in yourself and your life, each of these small steps takes you somewhere. You are literally moving forward.

As you take steps, bit by bit, you change—by making subtle shifts in your perspective on what has happened to you in the past, sharing your experience with another person, or validating your feelings. These are all changes that take you somewhere.

As you change yourself, you are, in an important way, saving yourself. You may be pulling yourself out of a deep hole that you have shared with some important family or long-time friends. You may be taking steps out of an addiction, a depression, or a dysfunctional social system.

Whichever it is, you will not be able to save everyone around you. At some point, you may face a fateful choice. Do I save myself? Is it wrong to do so? What about the people I have shared dysfunction with all these years?

This is the petri dish in which your survivor’s guilt is........

© Psychology Today