If you are caught up in a disaster and blamed for the consequences, even if you aren’t responsible, how can you cope with the feelings of guilt that are likely to arise?
Weekend Word BBC Radio Wales 08.06.18
I have a recurring dream in which I drive a car that veers out of control. I walk away, but others are hurt or even killed – sometimes my son. I tell everyone: ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ But they look at me horror-struck. I feel sick, and wonder whether I’m avoiding the truth.
I always wake up, but for some people the nightmare comes true. The Grenfell Tower Enquiry heard this week about Behailu Kebede, in whose flat the fire started. His lawyer said that Mr Kebede had been attacked in the media even though he’d done nothing wrong, and was still trying to “comprehend the enormity of the fire, cope with distress, trauma, insomnia, and allay feelings of guilt.”
Whatever the facts, it’s easy to empathise with a person who’s caught up in the causes of a tragedy, even though they aren’t responsible for it. I know people who’ve made a mistake, done something that would usually be fine, or survived unscathed when others have suffered. For years afterwards they’ve been haunted by the events, feeling their weight, wanting to take responsibility and wondering if they could have acted differently. They feel confused and above all guilty.
These are exceptional experiences, but we all hurt each other in small ways, and in making sense of the issue the confusion I think the distinction in Buddhism between guilt and remorse.
Feeling remorse when you’ve harmed others is painful, but in Buddhism it’s a positive and important experience — a key to changing and resolving to never act that way again. Guilt, on the other hand, involves believing that I’m a bad, worthless person; that means hating myself, and for Buddhism, nothing good comes from hatred. If I’m a bad person then when something bad happens it makes sense to think I’m at fault. But if I’m bad, how can I learn and change? The knee-jerk impulse to look for a scapegoat is another part of the problem, and like feeling guilty, it gets us nowhere.
An alternative response is looking for the real, underlying causes and recognising the times when the person who gets blamed is also a victim. It could be me in that position; it could be any of us, and the true alternative to guilt is compassion.
