In the same way that it is necessary to feel your emotions to be able to have a fully realized life, you will need to remember your trauma in order to heal from it. You may already remember more than you want to of the experience, or you may remember very little of the actual event.

In either case, one of the principal tools . . . is to reconstruct that happened. What you will find is that, as the healing process progresses, your perceptions of the event change as you discover and learn more about the factors that make up your PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

You need to record what you currently remember about the trauma. It's important to be as detailed as you can. Include as many graphic and sensual details as you can remember, including sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and how things felt when you touched them. The details are important not because they are or were traumatic in themselves, but because similar details in your present life may be triggers that produce intense emotional-and even physical-reactions. You may even be organizing your life to avoid confronting similar details in the present.

Self-Blame and Survivor Guilt

The devastating event that occurred to you is important in itself. Also important, however, are your attitudes toward that event. Whether you have survived one trauma or several, your beliefs about why the trauma occurred and the way you judge your behavior during and after the traumatic episode are going to heavily influence the degree to which you continue to suffer.

Do you blame yourself for the traumatic event? Or do you fault yourself for some of the ways you reacted, or did not react, while the trauma was occurring? If you do, once again, you are not alone. It is not uncommon for trauma survivors to blame themselves in some way, large or small, for the event itself, its negative outcome, or both.

Origins of Self-Blame and Survivor Guilt

Self-blame arises in part from the fact that powerlessness and helplessness are two of the worst feelings any human being can experience. Yet being and feeling powerless or helpless in the face of great danger is the very definition of trauma. However, people prefer to think that they are able to control their lives, so it is easier to blame themselves for negative events than to acknowledge that sometimes life is unfair or arbitrary and innocent people can be victimized for no reason.

Consequently, to maintain a sense of being in control you may view yourself, rather than chance, as responsible for one or more aspects of the trauma--perhaps for all of it. In this way, self-blame can be a means of regaining the power that was lost during the traumatic event.

Survivor guilt is something other than just compassion for those who have suffered more than you. It is also a way of saying. "If I had suffered more, you would have suffered less." Such thinking is not logical, but it makes sense emotionally. It can be a defense against the pain you feel at seeing others hurt. With survivor guilt, the idea is that by punishing yourself, you can undo the damage, or at least keep bad things from happening again.

It has one additional aspect-gratitude. It is difficult to accept being grateful that it was someone else who suffered. However hard this feeling is to face, it is nothing more than expression of the natural and vital instinct for self-preservation.

Accepting Guilt Feelings

If you suffer from self-blame, respect it. Even if you yourself or others can easily see that the self-blame is irrational, you need to respect your feelings. When you feel guilty, others may open their mouths wide with disbelief. But your task, at least for the moment, is to simply recognize your own emotion and not disparage it.

Eventually, you will need to examine any guilt you feel, both to see how closely it matches objective reality and to determine exactly where the responsibility for the event truly lies. Either in a journal or with sympathetic family members or friends, discuss the ways in which you feel responsible for the traumatic event and/or its outcome . . . try not to blame yourself for blaming yourself. Self-blame and guilt are entirely normal following any type of disaster or loss. You might state with some legitimacy that your actions contributed to the trauma's taking place or to its negative outcome. You may, in fact, have made a mistake, perhaps several mistakes. However, you need to view your behavior from a trauma perspective.

Looking at the Bigger Picture

In trying to understand your trauma, you cannot look solely at your own behavior; you need a wider, more complete perspective. For example, like many trauma survivors, you may have forgotten or dismissed the conditions that existed at the time. If you feel partly, or entirely, responsible for what happen to you, discuss it with understanding others. They should be able to help you get a better perspective on your role in what happened.

"I Just Couldn't Think"

Some trauma survivors report that during the time of the traumatic event, they made decisions that, in retrospect, were not the wisest. During a traumatic event, you were probably thinking to the best of your ability under the circumstances. However, the turbulent emotions and high anxiety levels that traumatic situations create sometimes interfere with calm, rational thinking. In contrast, during a traumatic event, most people's judgment is affected, to one degree or another, by the very real dangers involved in the situation and the strong fears such dangers can produce. Furthermore, there may be biological bases for this "inability to think" under stress.

Perceptual Distortions

Because trauma is, by its very nature, sudden and overwhelming, people are often unable to adequately assess the situation, no matter how intelligent, brave, or physically fit they are. In addition, it is often difficult for trauma victims to even realize that the trauma is occurring.

Some individuals report perceptual changes in which time is altered and events seem to be happening in slow motion. Visual perceptions may be modified so that people sometimes have an "out of body" experience, or at least feel that they are simply observing themselves from the outside rather than participating in the traumatic event. Another frequent perceptual alteration is a hysterical-like tunnel vision that focuses on the trauma scene itself to the exclusion of the rest of the environment.

In this initial state of denial and shock, it is easy to make "mistakes" or to act in a manner that later confuses you and causes you to doubt and criticize yourself.

False Guilt

Under traumatic conditions, errors in judgment are to be expected. Even people who make remarkably reasonable decisions under conditions of great stress later judge themselves at fault when an unexpected event occurred that causes a negative outcome. The original decision may have been the best decision that could have been made, given the information and resources available, yet because of an unpredictable turn of events-which frequently happens in trauma-people judge themselves as guilty.

This false guilt stems from the mistaken notion that people believe they could have known better and predicted the negative outcome(s). This "20-20 hindsight" is deceptive since no one can predict the future, and you have to make the best decision you can, giving the information at hand.

"Catch 22" Guilt

"Catch 22 guilt" occurs when none of the choices is acceptable because all available courses of action have repugnant consequences and involve repudiation of some important value.

A Closer Look at Self-Blame

Some of the explanations that people use that lead to self blame are

Sometimes self-blame and low self-esteem stem from "victim thinking" - seeing yourself as having been totally helpless or ineffectual during the traumatic event. You may have been victimized during the trauma, but that does not mean that you were totally passive or blameworthy. Nor does it mean that you are totally unable to meet some of your present-day goals. It is important to begin to "reframe" your perception of the traumatic event to see that you did the best you could under the circumstances and that any negative outcomes were beyond your control.

1. Matsakis, A. "Thoughts, Feelings, and Traumatic Events." I Can't Get Over It: A handbook for Trauma Survivors (2^nd Ed.). Oakland, CA: New Harginger Publications, Inc., 1996, p.65-84