Is it normal to feel guilty after my partner’s death?

grief therapy guilt in grief widowhood young widows Mar 17, 2024

Things no one tells you about guilt. How to tell a healthy guilt from an excessive form of guilt?

Guilt is a profoundly complex emotion which plays an essential role in regulating and protecting relationships. To answer this question, we need to first understand the origins of guilt and its function in our lives.We are not born with the built-in ability to feel guilty. Babies slowly develop a capacity to experience more complex emotional states and recent studies indicated that children display signs of guilt from around the age of 2–2.5 as they gradually become more self-aware. While their development progresses, they begin to perceive themselves as separate beings who can influence others and recognise that their actions have consequences. The main function of guilt is to help us recognise how our behaviours have affected others and motivate us to repair ruptures in relationships. This in turns serves to protect bonds with people, which are essential to our survival and motives us to adhere to social rules.
The better we feel supported by our caregivers to deal with our guilt as children, the better we cope with guilt-inducing situations as adults. However, if children grow up in environments where reparation and forgiveness were not a part of their family story, they often do not learn how to appropriately address their guilt.
Experiencing a profound loss such as the death of a life partner pushes the surviving parter to enter a state of grief. Grieving widows and widowers are frequently tormented by intense feelings of sadness, numbness, anger and guilt, to name a few. This is particularly complex if the context of their partner’s death was traumatic in nature, such as: premature loss due to prolonged illness or a sudden death caused by accidents or unexpected medical conditions. In those situations, people typically have to deal with baggage of unexpressed feelings surrounding the loss, as well as trauma of the circumstances of the loss. Those experiences can be difficult to put into words, especially at the beginning while inhabiting in a state of shock.

So how come guilt plays such a crucial role among grieving widows?

Guilt is a normal response to loss, since losing someone prematurely confronts us with a profound sense of life being unfair, and that in turn makes us feel utterly helpless. If you survived the death of a loved one, you might end up feeling that your efforts were somehow insufficient to prevent their death. You may be thinking about ways you could have stopped it from happening, or simply feel bad for being the one who stayed alive. Others might ruminate on their faulty behaviours in the relationship with their late partner, or focus on regretting things they did or failed to do. Underneath all of those complex reactions is a realisation it is now too late to do anything, which is a terrifying fact to come to terms with. It is our helplessness and the lack of control that I often find sits behind the feelings of guilt. In day to day circumstances, we frequently feel that our guilt can be somehow resolved by a reparative act, an effort made to acknowledge our faults and to remedy our mistakes by apologising and taking responsibility for our actions. It is an essential element of resolving guilt, even though the person might not forgive us. We know, however, that our attempt at making things better is registered, leaving us with ordinary consequences of our actions. Something potentially much easier to come to terms with. Unfortunately, this cannot take place after someone passed away, meaning that death disrupts the usual process of working through our guilt. This means we tend to struggle with our guilt for much longer due to an unfinished business with the person who left the world.
Excessive feelings of guilt can show up in various forms and might sufficiently disrupt the ability to engage in life. Although it is normal that in the state of grief you might disengage from various social activities or feel unable to go back to work. Some extreme form of withdrawal from day to day activities or erratic behaviour, such as excessive drinking or taking drugs, can be a way of avoiding facing your feelings. For most people, these would naturally subside as they begin to process what happened and gradually being to re-engage with their usual routines within a reasonable amount of time. If you find yourself being tormented by intense feelings of guilt that do not shift over a long period of time and significantly disrupt your day-to-day life, something else might be contributing to your grief.

Here are some most common reasons that can complicate your grief experiences:

Traumatic Loss

One of the most common reasons why feelings of guilt do not shift after a significant amount of time has passed is an underlying psychological trauma. It might be associated with a sudden death or prolonged illness that sufficiently traumatised you as a surviving partner. Traumatic loss is hardly spoken about, leaving the people who are affected by it with insufficient support to deal with the aftermath of the traumatic experiences. It is particularly important to acknowledge that the premature loss of a life partner, especially at a young age, is a form of psychological trauma.

Previous Traumatic Events

There might be previous traumatic events in life contributing to the experiences of most recent trauma, an accumulation of different psychological factors which are shaping the way we view current events and can make us more vulnerable. For example, your previous losses in life, especially, in childhood, or strained relationships with parental figures. Physical, emotional and sexual abuse in childhood can impact the way we relate to people in our adult life and how well we adjust to losses in adulthood.

Traumasised Brain

Trauma impacts the way our brain processes information, by disturbing our natural capacity to make sense of the past events. This is a natural mechanism of the brain to protect you from a psychological assault of a traumatic event. Flooding your brain with unprocessed memories of the event in a form of flashbacks. This means that certain parts of our brain, such as the frontal lobes (logical thinking skills), hippocampus (memory storage box) and amygdala (fear response) are not communicating well between each other. As a result, your ability to reason with your psychological and physiological responses might be temporarily disabled. As time passes with adequate self-care and support from family and friends, your mind should gradually begin to recover its capacity to deal with destabilising events leading up to the loss. Unfortunately, sometimes this is not the case. If you have been stuck for over a year in a frozen-like state, you might need to see your GP and ask for mental health support available in your local area.

Complicated Relationship History

One of the most significant factors influencing your ability to cope with guilt associated with a loss of a life part is the quality of your relationship. There are no simple marriages, but some are more turbulent than others, and therefore, if the relationship was significantly strained, you are more likely to find it difficult to deal with complicated feelings of guilt. This is particularly true for relationships with domestic abuse, co-dependency issues, and infidelity, alcohol & drug dependency. Paradoxically, the healthier your relationship, the easier it is to come to terms with the loss, since a more balanced view of the late partner dominates your mind. As a result, you are likely to gradually reinvest your energy into rebuilding your life. You might feel that the person who left this world would like you to feel happy again, and that this does not take anything away from your relationship with them.
I would encourage you to answer the questions below to help you think about how much your guilt is featuring in your life and whether it is of any concern. If you find yourself answering yes to several of those questions, it might be worth talking to a registered professional about your difficulties, such as clinical psychologist, or psychotherapist. If you would like to find out more about who is best suited to help you, read my blog explaining differences between different mental health professionals.
Here are your questions:

Have you been feeling guilty, numb and depressed for more than a year after your loss without any changes in your mental state?
Have you been ruminating on feelings of guilt most days?
Have your feelings of guilt been stopping you from going out and spending time with your family and friends?
Have you been struggling to let yourself enjoy even small things in life?
Have you been blaming yourself for the death of your late partner?
Have you been feeling like your life is not worth living without them?
Have you been feeling like meeting someone would mean betraying your late husband?

Don’t forget to Episode 11 of ‘A Guide to After Life’ podcast, where in I have expanded on the topic of guilt after loss.

If you have any questions, please get in touch via email or schedule a free 15-minute call with me