Bereavement guilt and regret (Li and Stroebe)
A remorseful feeling, after a death, of having fallen short of one’s own standards toward the person who died or in how they died: the visit put off, the treatment agreed to, the last words said in anger. Regret (wishing it had gone otherwise) and self-blame (holding oneself responsible) are related and may behave differently.
What drives it
Guilt keeps the person tied to the dead through the one thread still in reach: what they could have done. It also restores a sense of control, because a death that could have been prevented is less frightening than one that could not. Useful for identification because the ‘if only’ loop can keep grief raw, and self-blame in particular has been linked with heavier grief.
How it shows
Work
A nurse goes over a patient’s last shift again and again, rereading notes she has already read. A manager who missed a colleague’s distress before a death starts checking on everyone, every day.
Relationships
Siblings argue over who should have noticed Mom getting worse. One partner keeps asking the other ‘do you think we did the right thing?’ about the decision to stop treatment.
Self
Notice the sentences that start with ‘if only’ or ‘I should have’, and whether they name something you could have known at the time.
What tells it apart
Hindsight bias: Hindsight bias makes the warning signs look obvious now. If the guilt rests on something that was unclear at the time, it may be hindsight speaking more than a real failing.
Survivor guilt: Survivor guilt is more likely about being alive or well when someone else is not. Bereavement guilt is more likely tied to a particular act or omission.
Shame: Guilt says ‘I did a bad thing’ and may ease with understanding or making amends. Shame says ‘I am bad’ (a bad son, a bad mother) and is more likely to make the person hide.
A test
Write down the ‘if only’ and, next to it, what the person knew on the day. If what they knew then could not have told them what they know now, the guilt may be resting more on hindsight than on a choice they really had.
Questions to carry
- What do I wish I had done differently, and what did I know on that day?
- What would it mean about me if there was nothing I could have done?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
moderate. Li, Stroebe, Chan and Chow (2017) built a Bereavement Guilt Scale with five strands (responsibility for the death, having hurt the person, survivor guilt, indebtedness, and how heavy the guilt feels) in Chinese samples of 600 and 479. Higher scores went with more depression and anxiety and less self-forgiveness, and were higher after accidents and suicide than after long illness. It has not yet been tested in other cultures. A study of 60 widowed people over two years (Stroebe and colleagues, 2014) found early self-blame went with more grief while early regret did not predict grief or depression, so the two may need to be kept apart.
Where it comes from
Jie Li, Margaret Stroebe, Cecilia Chan and Amy Chow, Guilt in bereavement: a review and conceptual framework, Death Studies, 2014. The Bereavement Guilt Scale, Omega, 2017