After a traumatic experience, many people feel a strong drive to help those who have suffered as they have. Psychologists and psychiatrists sometimes call this drive “survivor mission.” A survivor, in the words of the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, “is one who has been exposed to the possibility of dying or has witnessed the death of others yet remained alive.”8 Survivors, Lifton continues, feel “a sense of debt to the dead, a need to placate them or carry out their wishes in order to justify their own survival.”
