The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

by Daniel James Brown

None of this, of course, even begins to touch the particular trauma that Sarah, Mary Ann, and Nancy Graves had suffered, along with a number of other Donner Party survivors—that of having eaten and seen eaten the flesh of their companions. Regardless of the necessity of having done so, they had violated a fundamental human taboo, and it was almost inevitable that they would experience significant amounts of guilt and its close cousin, shame. The two are not quite the same thing: Guilt revolves around feeling bad for what you have done; shame is feeling bad about yourself as a person because of what you have done. Guilt can actually be therapeutic, because inherent in the emotion is the idea that you can change your behavior and end the problem. Shame is a far more toxic emotion, because it implies that your character has been polluted by your actions. Deep-seated shame typically leads to a variety of anger-related emotional problems, particularly hostility and aggression.