Research Survivor Guilt Stories

[RoselynJ]

Good evening all.

Let me start by saying thank you for allowing me into your community. I am an almost-40 year old author and mother. One of the things that is very important to me in my fiction is accuracy - Which is why I am here. I am writing a novel which includes a person who has some pretty significant survivor guilt. While I have grappled with this in my own life - I worked for a time in a trauma centre, and my father committed suicide - I don't fully understand what it is like in the head of someone suffering in this way.
My fictional character is a refugee, and blames herself for the death of her children during wartime.

I am here to ask for your feelings - rather than the stories themselves (unless you wish to share). What does your body feel like? Do you sweat? Chills? Seek some kind of experience to forget/feel better? Anything else you think I should know - or that my readers should know?

 

[Bloomy]

What most people dont understand its the feeling of freedom when you know you can choose to live or not to live. No swaet. No chills. Just utter peace is the feeling. With that said it also feels encouraging knowing I have two more years to make the best out of life. And who knows - If all goes well after two more years I might find out that life is actually worth living.

 

[Ronin]

You DO understand survivor's guilt is something intensely damned personal about either people so dear it'd be disrespecting everything of them by talking of them lightly, or over situations that are so painful as to be shared with a random stranger?

Perhaps you better do your story research elsewhere than on a board of survivors of atrocities.

 

[Suzetig]

What @Ronin said. That and how someone experiences guilt after trauma is equally intensely personal - with people experiencing a range of thoughts, feelings and reactions over a period of time.

I also wonder whether, given your reference to your work in a trauma centre and your experience of suicide, whether you are correlating survivors guilt with vicarious trauma- which are vastly different things. But mostly what @Ronin said.

 

[Ronin]

Added to:

If you don't understand the basics, please don't try to write complex situations and complex trauma.

For these things get tangled and I doubt you would be able to write it accurately. Hell, I couldn't write my own life accurately, and I tried in prior therapy assignments. It's just not something that works in a story format well.

 

[RoselynJ]

You DO understand survivor's guilt is something intensely damned personal about either people so dear it'd...

Ronin, I would never take something personal lightly. I want to learn and understand. Where else could I learn to be respectful of the people who feel this way if I don't ask the people themselves?

@Suzetig - my aim at putting my own experiences into this, was to say that I have been on the other side of the correlation - I have seen people going through the initial stages, but I have never experienced it myself, I don't understand and I want to try to understand. I do understand the basics from a clinical/medical perspective, but not from the sufferers perspective which I am hoping to flesh out by this post.

@EveHarrington, Yes my character had PTSD. It is thirteen years since the incident, so she has grappled with PTSD and is not in the initial stages. But recent events bring it all up for her, and she opens up to a friend about her experience - which is where the survivors guilt comes in, because she'd carried the entire time and THAT she hasn't dealt with.

@Bloomy - thank you. There is a moment where she considers not living, and your account of the peace will be helpful.

If I have offended with this post I apologise, But I really am trying to really an honest account, in the hope that readers will learn something about what it is like - and maybe be more empathetic to others as a result.

 

[scout86]

I'm not sure 'survivor's guilt' is much different than any other form of guilt.

"I'm alive and he/she/they aren't."
"If I'd done something different, if I'd said something, if a thousand different things that I coulda/shoulda done...."
"What right did i have live when others didn't?"

There's probably an infinite number variations on that theme. But it's just guilt and I'm not sure it's any different from guilt the way 'normal people' experience it. I don't know that it's unique to PTSD. It's unique, maybe, to recognizing that you're alive and others aren't, and maybe you played a role in that somehow.

 

[RoselynJ]

I'm not sure 'survivor's guilt' is much different than any other form of guilt.

Thank you Scout. I don't know if it is different either, but I thought it might be which is why I have asked. I did not want to make assumptions on other peoples feelings.

 

[joeylittle]

I did not want to make assumptions on other peoples feelings.

That's fair. But, as an author of fiction, you are also allowed to do your own articulation of your empathy for the character.

It is a helpful thing - to write what you know. Being the person left alive, believing you could have done something to make it turn out differently...I would guess that you do understand quite a lot about those feelings, having lost someone to suicide. Profound grief, profound stress - just leaving PTSD out of the equation - causes physical reactions in people of all sorts. If you can imagine it, the odds are very good that a person is capable of it. Your task as the writer of fiction is to communicate the human experience as you understand it. And if it's true to what you know and imagine, and the story is good, and the language is expressive...it will be as true as anything else.

Ask yourself always, "what do I know about this"? - and then, let people read it. They will believe it or they won't, and they will tell you why. Once you are in the editing stages, it might be good to ask a trusted reader who has a different experience than yours with survivor's guilt to read it, and to comment. But before you've written it, I'd suggest that there's little to be learned from others, and more to be gained by looking inside your own self.

 

[RoselynJ]

joeylittle,

Thank you for your words.
I do believe however we can always learn from others who have lived an experience different to our own. Both in fiction and in real life. I appreciate those who have been (and are) willing to educate me.

 

[Ronin]

@RoselynJ, the issue with this is, no amount of people telling you what something feels like will be 'educative'.

You didn't come through those experiences yourself. You can't comprehend what it was 'like' from people trying to articulate something deep like that, and your education can be detrimential to other people's health. As such you're not entitled to it; it's not a 'respectful' thing to go asking something like this for the sake of a story.

You don't ask victims of something real life for the sake of a story. It's just a very poor taste.

People will understand artistic license about stories. Those are stories, after all. While they affect how people feel about issues, and groups of people, you getting parts of the story wrong will likely result in 'Shrug. It's just a story'.

In a better case people discussing the inaccuracy for months because that happens with otherwise well written fiction. It will not result in people recalling painful details to try help you out and comitting suicide because of it. Things like that.

It is all well you're trying to be respectful of people with the product of your writing, but you better consider aspects while /still yet writing/, they may outweight quality concerns about your finished creation.

 

[Suzetig]

I do believe however we can always learn from others who have lived an experience different to our own.

I don't disagree with you and @joeylittle has given you a way to do that.

Researchers who ask people to share their stories for use in research or for case studies in books etc have very tight ethical hoops to jump through for very good reasons, because of what it can raise for people both to share their experience and to know that some part of their story may be shared or published anonymously or otherwise. Many people would never agree or give informed consent for this and ethical research gives them the opportunity to give or withhold informed consent, and access to support services afterwards.

You're asking for people to share very personal experience with a complete stranger who will possibly use what they share in a fictional book to effectively "colour in" a character.

If you're determined to draw on others lived experience, I suggest you contact a local mental health service, ask them to allow you to meet service users and explore their issues with them, gain approval to use your research in fictional publications and go through appropriate ethical approval. If you don't think you'd get permission to do it there, face to face, then you've no right to do it here.

If we sound protective of our members, it's with good reason.