Grief and Guilt In her book, "Grief: The Mourning A

When the death of a loved one occurs, most people will, to varying degrees, experience some feelings of guilt. A widow for example, may spend long periods of time sitting beside the death-bed of her terminally ill husband. Yet, if the husband dies while she is out of the hospital, in addition to feeling grief, she may also feel guilty.

However, for some people, the experience of guilt can lead to long-lasting and serious consequences. This is especially true if while searching for reasons for the death, a person uncovers an element of personal responsibility for the occurrence of the death.

Sanders provides an example of this kind of guilt in the case of a widow whose husband had a history of asthma attacks. Because every time he had these attacks, he had been take

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that he or she must die. In other words, the guilt demands punishment. An example of this kind of guilt can be seen in a wife who, after long years of taking care of a chronically ill husband, wishes for his death. When the spouse dies, this thought and any thoughts related to it (e.g. fantasies of a new husband or of being free to travel) can begin to torment the mind to the point where the wife then begins to neglect her health. Or perhaps, she will engage in some other form of self-destructive behavior such as hanging out in seedy bars and having promiscuous sex. If left unchecked, self-destructive behaviors can become so bad that they ultimately lead to one's own death. In other words, the consequences of ambivalent introjection can be quite serious. Sanders reports that in Fenichel's theory of ambivalent projection, the greater the love-hate relationship, the stronger the feelings of grief and self-approach. Nonetheless, for most people, the guilty feelings will be resolved as a person refuses to fixate on the bad feelings and allows his or her thoughts of the deceased grow increasingly more positive. The reason that there are guilt feelings in all grief is explained by Sanders in terms of survivor's guilt. In o
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Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)