Managing Stress for Success

Motivational Speaker Carole Spiers
explains Survivor Guilt - the misunderstood stress symptom

In the aftermath of a traumatic event, the mysterious onset of Survivor Guilt can seem like an aberration. Instead of celebrating their lucky escape, the survivors start to identify with the dead rather than the living, feeling guilty about their own good fortune, and often blaming themselves, quite irrationally, over nothing.

But therapists have concluded that Survivor Guilt is not an aberration but a complex moral response, now officially re-classified as one of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As such, it is easily recognised among survivors of military combat, terrorist outrages or industrial accidents.

It can affect also people who have been spared a 'slow motion' trauma like redundancy. But the effects are similar. Always the over-heated conscience at work. "Why wasn’t it me?" or "Could I have done more?" The guilt is nearly always completely unfounded.

Revisiting the trauma

But if Survivor Guilt is easy to recognise, it is not easy to treat. Specialists have described it as a defence barrier that needs to be lowered, and the emotional damage slowly repaired. The counsellor aims to move the sufferer towards self-help through listening, prompting and guiding in confidence, steering the dialogue through minimal speech or gestures. This is aimed at escorting the sufferer back down the strange route by which they arrived - revisiting the trauma, focusing on it as part of the emotional landscape and acknowledging the guilt feeling. It may help them to come to terms with their true role in the incident, make more sense of it, and start to assume a more normal role in the here-and-now. In other words, it ushers them gently towards the rational.

HR departments everywhere are recognizing the need to become better trained in this sensitive branch of disaster intervention and grief therapy that helps managers to know what to say when they are in situations where they may be lost for words.

Survivor guilt - summary

• Survivors of traumatic incidents often blame themselves over nothing
• This irrational behaviour is officially classified as a symptom of PTSD
• Specialist grief therapy by counsellors can largely defuse the problem

Another key insight from Carole Spiers, International Authority on Corporate Stress,
Motivational Speaker and Gulf News Columnist.