Not long ago, I was struggling to find peace. I was dealing with angry thoughts and feelings directed at an episode of domestic violence that I thought I had moved past. It happened in 2019. I don’t want to go into detail except to say it was severe enough that the police were called and my husband, Josh, was taken to jail. Several months later he was released from jail and put on probation. A restraining order was issued, and Josh moved to another city. Later on, I would learn that my husband had violated his probation and was sent to prison.
At a loss for what to do, I decided to look more closely into the feelings I was having.
Several years ago, I took a class called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or DBT. Among other things, DBT teaches about emotions and how to identify and deal with them. From what I had learned in DBT, I knew that anger was a secondary emotion. That it could be caused by fear, frustration, loss, and/or guilt among other things. I had definitely experienced all of these things while dealing with my husband's assault, but I thought I had moved past them when I had forgiven him. Then one morning I was thinking about this problem, and I was prompted by the Spirit to look up “survivors guilt.” I typed the words into my phone. The first result turned up with the following:
“Survivor's guilt is a response to an event in which someone else experienced loss, but you did not. While the name implies this to be a response to the loss of life, it could also be the loss of property, health, identity or a number of other things that are important to people.” (1)
At first it didn’t make any sense. I was the one who had experienced a loss. But as I pondered on it a bit more, the Spirit helped me to realize that my husband had also experienced a loss. He had lost his freedom and I had not. Was I feeling guilty because my husband was in prison while I was free? Was that guilt turning into anger?
Sitting down to think about that night and what had happened, my mind began to wander down a path of questions. If I hadn't pressed charges, would he be where he was at? If I had done something different on that night, would he have gone to jail? After all, he was struggling, and we had had a pretty big fight. Immediately I had to stop myself; these questions were not helping me. However, they led me to the truth. I did feel guilty because my husband was in prison. Not only that, but I felt partially responsible.
But how was I going to deal with these kinds of thoughts and feelings? I knew the first thing I had to do was look at the truth behind what had happened. Even though Josh had been struggling at the time, he still had his own choices to make. He was the one to make the decision to do what he had done. He also made a choice when he violated his probation. I was not responsible for his actions or the consequences of them. What I had done, I had done to protect myself.
And yet I still felt guilty. I knew in my mind that I deserved safety as much as anyone else, but that’s not how I felt. When I went to speak to my therapist about this, he reminded me of something else I had been taught in DBT. Feelings aren’t facts. This teaching had become long buried in everything else going on. Just because you feel a certain way about something, doesn’t automatically mean that’s what is actually happening. Just because I felt partially responsible for Josh being in prison, didn’t mean that I was.
At this point, I realized that I needed to accept the truth of what I was experiencing. That I had done nothing wrong, and that Josh was now experiencing the consequences of his actions. Although I am still learning to accept this, I have escaped the majority of the feelings of anger and guilt that used to hang over me. I now live my life with a healthier mindset.
(1) Unknown. “Understanding Survivor’s Guilt; Learning How to Deal with Survivor’s Guilt.” Centerstone, 9 May 2023, centerstone.org/our-resources/health-wellness/understanding-survivors-guilt/. Emphasis added.
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