Episode 15 Why We Blame Ourselves: Navigating the "What-Ifs" of Parental Child Loss

In this episode of Beyond the Loss, I step into one of the most isolating and heavy territories of The Hidden Aftermath: the silent erosion of guilt, shame, and self-blame. While the words are often used interchangeably, they carry vastly different weights. Guilt focuses on an action—“I did something wrong”—whereas shame turns inward, delivering a direct attack on our character: “There is something wrong with me.”

Through clinical research and deeply compassionate framing, this episode breaks down why guilt is not proof that you failed, but rather the agonizing ache of a parent loving a child they could not fully protect. I discuss various therapeutic approaches to help unravel these tangled knots and offer a gentle permission slip to bring more truth, and fewer verdicts, into your healing journey.

In this episode, we discuss:

 • Guilt vs. Shame: Understanding the vital clinical distinction between criticizing a past action and judging your worth as a parent.

 • Hindsight Bias in Grief: Dismantling the cognitive trap of holding your past self accountable to information, perspectives, and medical trends you did not have access to at the time.

 • Somatic Anchors of Self-Blame: How guilt and shame physically manifest as chest tightness, postural collapse, facial heat, or hyper-vigilance over surviving family members.

 • Systemic Family Grief: How blame and silence circulate within family systems, often leaving one individual carrying more than their share of collective trauma.

 • The Spectrum of Support: A comprehensive overview of cognitive, emotion-focused, somatic, and peer-led modalities that help soften looping thoughts.

Connect with me:

 Website

 Podcast

 YouTube

 Substack 

Transcript here

Interested in Being a Guest on Beyond the Loss?
Apply here to share your story: https://sharonspano.com/podcast-guest-beyond-the-loss/

About the Show 
Beyond the Loss: Life and Identity After a Child Dies is a podcast dedicated to helping grieving parents, bereaved families, and professionals navigate the emotional, relational, and identity shifts that follow the death of a child. Through compassionate conversations and clinical insight, we create space for healing, understanding, and honest reflection after profound grief. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Beyond the Lost. This is a space for parents who have lost a child in any way at any age, where no grief is ranked, explained, or excluded. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, developmental coach, systems thinker, and a parent whose life was forever changed by the death of my own son Michael. What if the guilt you're carrying about your child's death is not only about what happened? What if it's slowly becoming a question about who you are? Before we begin, I want to offer a gentle note. In this episode, we'll be speaking about the life and death of a child, including some of the thoughts, emotions, and body responses that may arise around grief, guilt, trauma, and loss. Please listen in a way that feels right for you. If something feels too tender, you're welcome to pause, step away, or return when you feel ready. This podcast is offered for reflection and support, but it's not a substitute for therapy, counseling, or medical care. If you're feeling overwhelmed or unsafe, please reach out to a trusted professional, a crises resource, or someone who can support you more directly. Please take care of yourself as you listen. So, welcome to another episode of Beyond the Loss. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, and today I want to talk to you about some of the many questions that come my way from parents I speak with who, along their own grief journey, find themselves struggling with all the what-ifs, the many nuances of guilt, shame, and self-blame that surface as we move through our own grief journeys. If we have awareness of these nuances, what I want to suggest to you is we often don't say them out loud because while the very nature of guilt and shame is that it erodes our sense of self at a subtle, often silent level. Some of those narratives sound like familiar voices, and you might recognize them. Why didn't I know? Why didn't I do more? Why did I miss this or that sign? Why did I make the wrong decision or do this when I should have done that? These are questions that every one of us who have lost a son or daughter struggle with at some time or another. And because our very nature as a parent is to protect the hardest question of all, why couldn't I prevent this from happening? Those questions can live quietly inside us for years and years. And the longer they do, the harder it is for us to shift to that place of integration that I've talked about so much. And that I want you to really think about as we move through this next episode. Sometimes these questions show up in repetitious memories that we replay over and over in our minds. And sometimes they come as a feeling in the body. We've been talking about the body in this series, and they come up in the body before there are any words at all. And sometimes beneath the guilt, there is something even more painful. Not only as the haunting question, what did I do wrong? but was I somehow not enough as a parent? This is when guilt can begin to move into shame. And we want to be very careful about that. Because when guilt turns into shame, it turns against the inner self. And in this way, it becomes even harder to carry the grief. So in this season, we've been exploring what I'm calling the hidden aftermath of child loss. And we've talked about how the body remembers and how when caregiving ends, the daily structure of love can suddenly feel like it's disappeared. Today I want to stay with that hidden aftermath and speak about guilt, shame, and self-blame because these words are often used together, but they do not mean exactly the same thing. In a literature review of the latest research on parental child loss, I discovered the incredible work of Catherine Duncan and Joanne Cachitore, wherein they set forth some of the distinctions that I think are important for family members to understand on their grief journey. So let's look at them. Guilt tends to focus on something we believe we did or didn't do. But shame, as I mentioned a moment ago, goes deeper and turns toward the self. And it's important to understand this because when we slip into shame, we risk falling into depression. So to reiterate, then the internal voice of guilt may say, I did something wrong, but more importantly, the internal voice of shame says there is something wrong with me. And that is a very dangerous place to fall into. It's an important distinction because guilt, painful as it is, may stay connected to a specific moment, decision, or action, and it may attach itself to a question about a medical choice, a phone call, a symptom, a conversation you had or didn't have, a boundary, or something you wish you had understood differently at that point in time. And it may surface in different ways over the years. For example, one of the things that I constantly struggle with is all the recent information on the benefits of being gluten-free. Because what I now know is that my son's early demise began with the gut-related issue that went undiagnosed. And I knew a lot about gluten-free options because Michael was diagnosed with celiac disease very early in his life. He spent most of his life on a gluten-free diet before it was a thing, before you could even find gluten-free options. But one doctor had removed him from these restrictions years earlier. So when he became ill, we looked at issues related more to his overall metabolic disorder, and we completely missed the more obvious issues until it was too late. Now, all of this occurred well before the latest trend on gluten-free options, as I said a moment ago. But what this means is that every time, even today, when I enter a supermarket and I see all the gluten-free food choices, my gut aches. And I question myself for a moment. Why didn't I see these things? Why didn't I know that it was his gut? Why didn't I look for better options? Why didn't I request an upper GI earlier? I allow those questions to surface, but one thing I won't permit is the voices of shame to rise up. Because at the end of the day, I know I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. I have to remind myself of this because I know the dangers of shame. Shame does something very different than grief. Shame doesn't simply question what happened, it questions you as a human being. And for a grieving parent, that can be devastating. If your child died of illness, you may replay decisions you've made just as I alluded to above. You may wonder whether you should have pushed harder, asked different questions, noticed sooner, or chosen another path. If your son or daughter struggled with addiction or mental health challenges, you may wonder whether you should have intervened earlier, set a different boundary, answered the phone on a specific day, made that one important call, stayed longer, said less, or perhaps even said more. And if your child died suddenly, you may search the days, hours, or minutes before the death, looking for some sign you think you should have seen. And if your baby died unfortunately before birth or shortly thereafter, you may find yourself questioning your body, your instinct, your choices, your pregnancy, or things that no parents should have to carry alone. The circumstances are always different for each of us, but I want to suggest to you that those inner narratives are often quite similar. The state of grief automatically searches for the moment when something could have turned out differently. The mind tries to locate the place where the story could have turned in another direction. And underneath that search is often a much deeper longing. If I can find the moment where this could have been for prevented, maybe this reality will feel less unbearable. But in reality, that searching makes it even more unbearable. Guilt is not always proof that you failed. And I want you to really let that sink in. Because I think guilt often comes from this place inside us that says, I was supposed to protect my child. And when our child dies, it can feel as though we failed at the most important responsibility we had. But what if the guilt is not proof that we failed? What if it is the ache of loving someone we could not fully protect? I want you to hold that thought very carefully because it doesn't mean there are no real regrets, and it doesn't mean that every decision was simple. It does not mean that there are no painful complexities that we have to face, but it does mean that guilt does not always tell the whole truth. That is the most important factor. Sometimes guilt points to something that needs compassion, attention, or support within us. And sometimes it's just the evidence of how much you loved your child and how impossible it is to accept that love did not give you the power to control the outcome. So what I'm suggesting is that you give any guilt that rises up its place in your own system, because there's no value in shifting into shame. Because remember, shame takes the question of what happened and turns it into judgment against yourself. And it can sound like I was not a good enough mother, I failed as a father, I should have protected my child, I should have saved my son, I should have known what my daughter needed. And even when no one else says these words, you may carry some version of them inside yourself. More importantly, shame makes us withdraw. It makes us keep the most painful thoughts unspoken. And it makes us fear that if others really knew what we believe to be true about ourselves, well, they wouldn't want anything to do with us, would they? So shame then isolates us even further inside our own grief. Now, if you're carrying guilt, there may be a question that needs to be held with care. But if you're carrying shame, there may be a wound in your relationship with yourself. And that wound deserves tenderness, perhaps even some level of therapeutic intervention. The research also suggests that self-blame, which is also very closely linked to shame, can be tied to post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, as I mentioned earlier, and even more intense grief. So then we find ourselves in these prolonged stages of grief. This factor is also important to recognize because self-blame can keep the mind and body locked in a painful search for that different ending that I mentioned a moment ago. And self-blame keeps returning to the scene. It keeps asking the same question in different forms. It keeps trying to locate that one decision, the one moment, the one thing that could have changed everything. So you can see how they kind of work together: shame, guilt, self-blame. And when no answer satisfies, the body may continue to carry that strain. And this is where the somatic, the body work that I've been talking about, that piece really comes into play. Because guilt and shame do not only live in thought, they live in the body. You may feel guilt as tightness in the chest, heaviness in the stomach, a frozen feeling, heat in the face, a collapse in posture, or a need to withdraw. I've had several parents talk to me about the panic they feel in their body, the worry and concern that arises when their living son or daughter or even grandchild is about to do something or go somewhere. There's an impending fear that something will happen to them that I can't prevent, particularly if they're caring for the grandchild on behalf of their own children. Thoughts of if I failed one child, might I somehow fail to protect another that I love so deeply? So you can easily see how debilitating thoughts of guilt and shame can be, and how they can be an interruption to the love you have for the one still in your mist, how you may be robbing yourself of those precious moments. In similar moments, you may notice your body brace when you speak about a particular decision, and you may feel yourself shrink when a memory arises, or you may become restless as though some part of you is still trying to go back and fix what cannot be fixed. So I'll keep reiterating these bodily sensations because, in my experience, most parents, most people in general, do not have awareness of how thoughts impact the body experiences. And I want you to first know that this doesn't mean that your body is wrong. It may mean that your body is still carrying a question that has not yet found a safe place to land. So I want you to begin to listen to your body and give these moments their place, because in doing so, you allow something new and different to emerge. You've heard me say that over and over again. When we acknowledge what is, we then have the space to do something about what isn't. And this is part of why support is so important, because we often don't know how to make sense of these internal experiences of guilt and shame. We often need an expert to help us unravel the many complexities of our own experience. I know that in the early years after my son's death, I had one particular night that haunted me over and over and over again where Michael was very, very ill. We had just returned from the hospital, and they had told me after repeated visits that he would probably have a rough night. So it wasn't even in my thinking that I should call the medical team. And we really struggled through that night. It was a horrific night. And I replayed it over and over again. And it's a night where I believe that something happened within him where he lost his vision completely for the rest of his life. And all I could think about was in these moments of terror. I mean, there I was holding him. He's thrashing about. I mean, it went on into the wee hours of the morning. All I could think about in retrospect was he must have been thinking, why isn't my mom taking me to the hospital? Why isn't she helping me? And I was haunted by that memory. I didn't even speak about it to my husband. I couldn't even talk about it out loud. And I finally went to a therapist and she did something called EMDR with me, which at the time, and some of you may have awareness of what that is. I won't get into the details of it, but it is a process that is often used for trauma and particularly for those coming back from war with PTSD, things of that nature. And it seemed very weird to me. She put these little paddles, one in each hand, and we talked about that scene. And she asked me many questions about it. And I didn't really understand what was happening with these little paddles in my hand, but it all seemed very, very weird. And I just answered her questions and I didn't know what was going to be the outcome of this. But one of the things that I remember she asked me was, what if Michael wasn't thinking, why is my mom not helping me in calling the emergency team? What if Michael was thinking, thank God my mom is here holding me? And it was like a whole reframing. I just remember thinking, oh, well, I had never thought of it that way. And I went home. I came back the next week and she asked me how I was feeling about that particular memory. And I said to her that for reasons I couldn't explain, it was still there, but it didn't feel as painful to me that it had somehow been reframed. And then she went on to explain to me how that process of EMDR can actually rewire the memory through the neurotransmitters of the brain. It was doing something in the left, right that again is beyond my pay grade to explain. But I encourage any of you, if you have a really troubling memory, to perhaps seek that level of support because I know it changed the entire game for me. Again, the memory is there, but it's not haunting me and it's not causing me to slip into self-blame or shame. So different kinds of support can help us with guilt, shame, and self-blame. Not because anyone can ever remove the loss for you. As I said a moment ago, the memory is still there, the loss is still there. I'm still on the grieving journey, of course, but because these feelings often need somewhere safe to be spoken, examined, softened, and held. And sometimes we need the help of a third party, someone who isn't uh, you know, necessarily involved in our story, but has the expertise and training to help us, as I said a moment ago, unravel it. So there are many different approaches. And some people benefit from cognitive approaches, cognitive behavioral therapy, you may be familiar with. In plain language, that kind of work can help you notice the thoughts that keep looping around, as mine was, and ask you whether this thought is telling you the whole truth. And in my case, I'll never really know, but it certainly gave me some relief to understand there was another possibility. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you separate what you know from what you could have known then, and it can help you look at a bigger context around a decision instead of letting one painful thought become the entire story. Another methodology is meaning-centered or existential approaches. They can also be very helpful. Now, these are not about finding a reason your child died. I want to be very clear about that. Meaning making is how we grow and develop to bigger and better ways of thinking. And after child loss, it's not about justifying the death or turning it into some kind of lesson. It is more about asking how you can continue to live, as I've been talking about integration, continuing to live in relationship to what matters, what your child's life meant, what your love still asks of you, and how you can carry your son or daughter forward without forcing an answer to why this happened. I was at dinner the other night for my husband's birthday, and some of you heard me talk about that we have a foundation where we have a golf tournament every year on behalf of persons with disabilities. We raise money. And there is an art program that we fund that was a vision I had early on after Michael passed of just an art program for eight people once a week. Well, the people that started it on my behalf and we helped support have now taken it to an entirely different level. And my husband, I overheard telling one of our friends how much peace it gives him to know that there are now 122 people in this art program that encompasses many, many things. I'll tell you more about it on another episode. But he was saying how much peace and joy it gives him to know that because of our son, 122 plus people are in this art program now five days a week, and they have somewhere to go and they have a community where otherwise they may have been sitting home, isolated and alone. Gave me such joy to hear him have come to that place of meaning making and understanding about what the impact is that our son has had on the lives of others. So it's different for each of us. You may find your own way of meaning making in terms of your child. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Another methodology is emotion-focused therapy, and that helps when feelings like guilt, anger, sorrow, and shame have become tangled together. Sometimes the work is not to talk yourself out of what you feel, but to let the feeling be approached safely enough that it can begin to move, soften, or reveal what's underneath. Support groups and peer spaces can also be useful, especially when shame has made you feel alone. There's something very powerful about hearing another parent say, I've asked myself that question too, or I know that kind of story. And so the goal is not comparison of grief. We've talked about that on another show, it's recognition. Because shame often grows in isolation again, and sometimes it loosens when the experience can be spoken in the presence of people who understand and will not turn away. Another methodology is mindfulness. Based approaches that can help create a little space between the thought and the self. Instead of I'm a terrible parent, there may be a moment of noticing a painful thought is here. And that's a very different experience. The thought, this may sound like a very small nuance, but it's not small when guilt has been living in the body for a very long time. Expressive writing can also be useful for some parents. And in the early moments and months after Michael's passing, I personally found it very, very helpful to write him letters. Writing gives the mind and body somewhere to place what has been circling. And if a letter directly to your child is too painful, maybe try just a private journal, a written account of what you're going through, what's happening, what has happened, or simply a place to say the things you have not been able to say out loud to anyone else. From a family systems perspective, it can also be helpful to understand that guilt and blame do not live only inside one person. Sometimes in a marital relationship, we don't share what we're feeling with one another because we're trying to be strong for each other. So we don't have anywhere to place all of that. So we have to recognize that we're both dealing with this loss, but perhaps in very different ways. Families sometimes organize around what is spoken, what is avoided, who carries responsibility, who stays silent, and who's allowed to grieve in what way. We'll look at this more deeply in future episodes. But for now, I want you to think and realize that looking at the larger family system can sometimes help you see that they also are carrying more than their own private grief. Now, I want to be clear that none of these approaches are a magic bullet. And not every approach will be right for every one of you. I wanted to just give you some ideas of things to research further. Good news now is on the internet, research is very easy. And so that you're educated if you decide that you need some external support, you can ask the right questions and make sure that you find an expert in that area. Like I had to look for someone that did EMDR. I had heard about it, but I didn't know anything about it in detail. And I made sure that that was one of the questions that I asked when I was looking for a therapist. I think it's important to add that guilt, shame, and self-blame deserve support. That's the bottom line. And they are not signs. I really want you to get this, that you're failing at grief. Again, they may be signs that something painful has been left alone for way too long. And as I shared earlier, there are many things in my life with Michael that I could look back on and question. And I share this with you so that you see you're not alone. When you care for a medically fragile child for many years, there are always many, many decisions. There are moments when you wonder whether you understood enough, asked the right question, saw enough, or even did enough. And I think many of you as parents know that kind of mental questioning. But I've come to recognize that I was making decisions inside the reality I had at the time, with the information available to me, with the limits of medicine, the limits of energy, and the limits of what any parent could know. And you are no different, I would suggest, that you did the best you could given what you knew at the time. And this doesn't mean that I don't wish I could have done it differently. And it doesn't mean that I still don't experience sorrow and regret from time to time. But again, the grief journey changes. What it does mean is that I'm careful about judging my past self against information, perspective, and hindsight that I didn't have at the time. There is freedom in understanding this because guilt can confuse the truth from reality. Whatever the circumstances of your child's passing, there's a high probability that you did not know then what you know now. And if you're carrying guilt or shame, I wonder what it would be like to ask slightly different questions. Not questions like, why did I fail? But what was I carrying at the time? What did I know then? What did I not know? What pressures were present? What support did I have? What support was unavailable to me? What was I trying to protect? What decision was I being asked to make without the certainty I needed? Again, these questions aren't going to erase your pain, but they may offer you a broader perspective and a deeper understanding of who you were in the moment. Remember that shame narrows the story until all that remains is a verdict against the self. Compassion, on the other hand, widens the story enough to include the conditions under which you were trying to love, protect, decide, and support. And haven't you been through enough? Maybe it's time to really exercise some self-compassion. That may be one of the most important movements in the journey grief. And I'm not suggesting that you force yourself to say, I have nothing to feel guilty about, because that may not feel true for you. So it's not about trying to talk yourself out of what you feel. It's about slowly, gently bringing more truth into the room, integrating the truth of your love, the limits of your love, the truth of what you knew then with what you didn't know, overall the truth of your circumstances, and more importantly, the truth that you were not all powerful, and that most likely the truth that being a parent never meant you had complete control over life and death. The last truth is the hardest one to bear. A therapist trained in traumatic grief, grief counseling, somatic work, cognitive therapy, emotion focused therapy, or trauma-informed care may be able to help you hold these questions without letting them become a sentence against your own life. And if your self-blame ever turns toward not wanting to live, please reach out immediately to someone who can help you stay safe. There is no shame in needing help with thoughts that feel unbearable. And there's no shame in being supported through the places where grief has become too heavy. As always, each week on these solo casts, I want to offer you a pattern to practice, something that you can do in real time to help you perhaps assimilate what I'm talking about in a more real way. So here it is. If guilt, shame, or self-blame rises within you, see if you can pause before following the thought all the way into the old narrative. You might begin by asking yourself, is this guilt or is this shame? Is this something I wish I'd done differently? Or has this become a judgment against who I am as a parent, as a person? Then, if it feels possible, take some deep breaths and bring your attention to your body. Notice where this thought is landing. What does it feel like? What happens within you when this thought appears? And as always, I want to recommend that you don't worry about trying to fix the feeling. You don't need to argue with it. Just say something simple. This is guilt rising, or this is shame rising. And then for the meaning-making piece, you might ask yourself one gentle question, perhaps several. What meaning am I making from this guilt? Am I making it mean that I failed my child? Am I making it mean that I didn't love well enough? Am I making it mean that I should have had the power I did not have? And more importantly, am I making it mean that I am not worthy of peace or joy ever again? Just notice the meaning. You do not have to change it immediately and just simply ask, is this the whole truth? And if it's not the whole truth, or if you don't know, that's again where the expertise may walk alongside you and help you discover what you do need to know. But perhaps you can make room on your own, even for one more truth, besides the one that's running itself through your life. And here are some examples of some things you might say. I was trying to love my child inside impossible circumstances. I did not know then what I know now. I have limits because I'm human. My guilt deserves care, but it does not get to tell the whole story. These are just some suggestions, some alternative narratives that you might play in your own head. Because not every thought that arrives in grief is telling the whole truth. And not every feeling needs to become a verdict against yourself. So, in closing, just a reminder that guilt, shame, and self-blame are painful parts of grief for parents who've lost a son or daughter, but they are not all the same. Guilt may ask what happened or what you wish had been different. Shame turns the pain against yourself. And self-blame keeps you searching for a place to assign responsibility when the deeper truth is that love did not give you control over every outcome. If this is part of what you carry, I hope you'll be gentle with yourself. I hope you'll get the help that you need. Not by dismissing the questions, not by pretending that regrets are not there, but by refusing to let guilt or shame become the whole story of who you were, how well you loved, or what your child meant to you. You are more than the worst question you carry, you are more than the moment you keep replaying. And your love for your son or daughter is not erased by the fact that you could not prevent the loss. They would want you to know this, I'm sure. Until next time, please take gentle care. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this conversation stirred something for you, you don't need to make sense of it right away. There's no timeline for understanding and no right way to carry what remains. Beyond the Lost exists to honor parents who've lost a son or daughter and all the complexity that this implies, and to support the professionals who walk alongside them without comparison, judgment, or explanation. Wherever you are in the long after, you are not required to arrive anywhere else. Until next time, take gentle care.