When Your Friend Is Gone but You Survived
Survivor’s guilt can go unrecognized yet demands attention to heal.
Posted February 27, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Sifu Dan Jones is a master of Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong. Among his many activities, he teaches Active Calm . On my show Unlocked [1] , he said, “Allowing, instead of trying, allowing the mind to quiet, allowing the body to relax, breathing normal through the nose, maintaining your Tai Chi stance.” In response to my question, he agreed that letting go of control, letting the body do its thing allowed the body to do what was necessary to prepare and maintain active calm.
I’m going to try to connect what Dan Jones said about allowing and what we need to do by letting go and allowing survivor guilt .
Two examples of survivor guilt
A colleague of mine described a severe illness she experienced at the age of 56 that had a 99.99% chance of death, yet she survived. However, on her first day out of the ICU burn unit, with the TV on in her room, she saw on the news, before anyone had told her, that her dear friend’s 13-year-old son had drowned. She could not believe that she had lived and that young boy had died. Why did she survive? She felt an enormous sense of sorrow and remorse. That’s survivor’s guilt.
Another example was a reorganization I lived through. It was a moment in the organization’s history that everyone wanted to forget even before it was over. The purpose was to reduce staff by 10%, and it did it in the most egregious manner anyone could imagine – by firing everyone and hiring them back one by one.
There is much more to the story, but the key is that, in that organization, firing people was not a normal practice — at all. If a manager did fire someone, it was excruciating. They were treated as though firing someone had made the organization look bad, regardless of the reason for the dismissal.
You can imagine the distress people felt just from the staff being fired. What I want to tell today is the story of the survivors and the survivor guilt that pervaded the organization after the mass firings. Those who remained in the organization felt a deep sense of guilt that, for some reason, they had made it through when their colleagues did not.
All those rehired talked about was how bad the reorganization was, but no one talked about the guilt they were feeling — the feeling of being responsible somehow even though they had no control.
And if you’re wondering about the impact on the organization, productivity dropped 30% that first year after reorg. Other symptoms such as mood swings, anger , and suicidality tended to be hidden, yet I’m certain they existed. The survivors were feeling guilty just because they had survived.
Survivors of terrible accidents often feel they should have died instead and are undeserving of being still alive—or still in a job, as in this case. There is often a sense of shame and blaming themselves—again, for something over which they had no control.
Psychological symptoms of survivor’s guilt include irritability, lack of motivation , mood swings, finger-pointing, blaming others, rage, and obsessive thoughts about the event. Are you beginning to recognize this experience?
This is one of the most challenging lessons in forgiveness because forgiveness is about forgiving yourself. When one of the symptoms of survival guilt is feelings of helplessness, it is no wonder that it feels impossible to do. Yet if we think of it as letting go, then the feelings of helplessness work in our favor. There is no action in letting go. It is a matter of deciding to do so.
Once the decision is made, the door to healing is open, even when the pain remains. The action needed at that point is to do what Victor Frankl said: “ In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” The sacrifice begins by seeking ways to make the world a better place.
Two avenues for making the world a better place when we suffer or may suffer survivor guilt
Let’s first look at it from the manager’s perspective.
The decision to forgive yourself and move on must be informed. Recognizing that you are not the cause of the decision is important. Managers can play a major role in this by informing staff. I took three days (24 hours in total) to talk with every staff member of my division individually to tell them why decisions were made and why they were not to blame. I made sure those next in line were all informed of the potential manifestations of survivor guilt so they could observe their immediate staff more specifically and step in or call for help quickly.
Overall, helping people understand their real role in the decisions was essential. Offering to discuss any concerns that came up in the future was also important to reduce feelings of guilt by giving them avenues to make the world a better place even if it must begin with themselves.
If you find yourself with a less willing manager, then you must take the job on yourself to identify what has made you angry or sad or uninspired, then put it into its proper place, and forgive yourself. Open the door to healing the pain.
In the end, forgiveness is like resilience : It is a decision even if it means making the decision again and again until you feel the release within yourself and the door shifts.
Then, find ways to make the world a better place in a way that feels right for you. A colleague who survived a severe illness, for example, contributes in many ways—one of which is making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for the homeless every Friday morning. She calls it her sacred space. What makes sense for you?
Allow life to live through you
Eckhart Tolle said it so well in The Power of Now: “Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief . It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you.” What an exciting way to talk about meaning in your life.
We don’t always recognize survivor guilt, nor do we necessarily realize that healing begins with self-forgiveness —paired with contributions to the welfare of others that reaffirm our life’s meaning and worth.
Survivor guilt is something you may not have ever experienced, but now you will be able to recognize it if and when it appears in your life—and know how to proceed. And if survivor guilt ever feels overwhelming, don’t hesitate to seek professional support to help you navigate it with greater ease and understanding.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory .
[1] How to Bring Active Calm to Every Day S4 E7 youtu.be/AQOe66MH0uI
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Madelyn Blair, Ph.D., on the faculty of Columbia University, offers strategies for you to unlock resilience. Known for storytelling and knowledge management, she is a popular speaker, author, and instructor.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.