Conscious Choice: Survivor Guilt: The Burden of Being Healthy

August 2003 | Body & Mind Health

Survivor Guilt: The Burden of Being Healthy

by Julia Mossbridge

I am a survivor, but not in the usual 12-step sense. I am not a survivor of abuse, but instead a survivor of a family full of loving, compassionate, informed, and understanding people. That may sound a bit odd, but I call myself a survivor because for much of my life, I was the only one in my family without a psychological diagnosis. My father has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), my mother has had bouts of severe depression, and my sister has had bipolar disorder (manic-depression) for about 13 years. And me? I’ve got mild PMS.

As a result, I developed a severe case of what is called "survivor guilt" — the guilt you feel when people close to you have unusual and troubling circumstances that you don’t have. When I suggested to my editor that I write about my survivor guilt, I felt a tinge of shame. After all, isn’t it self-indulgent to write about the struggle of not having a struggle? But when I found out that one in every five American adults, according to a recent National Mental Health Association statistic, has some type of psychological disturbance, I realized that there must be millions of family members out there dealing with feelings similar to mine.

Like many who have learned to manage chronic survivor guilt, I’ve been continually reminded that I’m blessed to be psychologically healthy. And, of course, every day I give thanks for my health. But along with these benign reminders, I have also learned some not-so-benign lessons. These lessons were never stated out loud — after all, we had weekly family meetings to discuss our feelings, and my parents were always sensitive to what I had to say. No, these were lessons that I kept to myself, because I knew it would be too painful to my parents if they knew what I had learned in living in a family where other members were afflicted with mental health challenges and I wasn’t.

The lessons were simple. First, everyone is too overwhelmed dealing with their own issues to meet your needs, so a good idea is to not have very many needs in the first place. Two, in being free of some mental health burden, you got lucky for a reason — to save the world, for example — so you’d better get busy, making sure to excel at everything in order to justify your good fortune.

After years practicing a low-need, high-productivity lifestyle, I started to notice signs of success. My science was going somewhere, I sold a book, I became a columnist — all three are longings I’d had for decades. And like most people who experience a little bit of their dreams being fulfilled, I enjoyed it. But unlike most people, I felt guilty about my success, and I wasn’t sure why. After a bit of reflection, I discovered lesson three: even though working hard almost inevitably leads to success, you’d better not enjoy the fruits of your labor. That would be like gathering nuts and berries for your family and popping them into your own mouth. I could do the work, I had to do the work, but I didn’t allow myself to enjoy the results.

When I shared this insight with my sister, who’s an artist, and told her I was writing about my survivor guilt, she said, "Don’t forget to mention that manic-depression is much more common among creative geniuses and artists." At first I didn’t understand her point. After all, this column is about my struggle, not the behavioral genetics of bipolar disorder. Then I realized that she was drawing attention to something more subtle.

I think my sister was speaking to what the mystical Rabbi Baal Shem Tov said: "Everyone is unique. Compare not yourself with anyone else lest you spoil God’s curriculum." My sister was reminding me that despite her manic-depression, and perhaps because of it, she is able to contribute something special to the world through her art. She can paint a person’s soul in five minutes. She can see beauty where most people cannot. When I felt survivor guilt, it was because I concentrated only on her lack, not her promise. I didn’t trust that her uniqueness was its own course in God’s curriculum.

I started to notice that we are who we are both despite and because of our circumstances. My father’s gift for physics can be used despite his obsessive and compulsive behavior, but because he has OCD, he seeks the beauty, elegance, and cleanliness that theoretical physics can offer. And despite being a survivor, I am able to celebrate my success, but because of my survivor guilt, I work hard toward that success.

Finally I have learned a healing lesson: everyone is whole when you trust in God’s curriculum.

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library www.unfolding.org).

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