Maks Chmerkovskiy’s ‘survivor’s guilt’ may be felt by others fleeing Ukraine

After living through war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters or other life-threatening events, some survivors develop a distorted sense of guilt and ask: 'Why did I get to live?'

When Maks Chmerkovskiy finally made it out of Ukraine, as Russian missiles continued to rain down on the capital city of Kyiv, he posted a video from his Warsaw hotel room, admitting he was consumed by guilt.

“I felt wrong leaving, I felt wrong being on that train,” said the Ukrainian-born former “Dancing With the Stars” pro. Chmerkovskiy, 42, also admitted he felt shame for “taking up space” on a train out of Kyiv and bad about leaving behind friends who stayed to defend their country from the Russian invasion, either voluntarily or because they had no choice.

“I’m having a very (expletive) hard time leaving,” Chmerkovskiy also said. He arrived back in Los Angeles Wednesday, explaining that he also felt shame and other trauma, which he expects will require “a lot of therapy” to deal with.

In his video, and in an interview Friday with Good Morning America, Chmerkovskiy described what’s commonly known as “survivor’s guilt.” It’s an anguishing mental health condition in which a person lives through a life-threatening event and then asks, “Why did I get to live?”

"I’m emotional, I can't control it. I cried all the way from the airport."

'DWTS' alum and Ukrainian dancer @MaksimC describes to @tjholmes his emotional journey home from Kyiv and what he says it was like on the ground as Russia invaded Ukraine. https://t.co/kWY5S6eOU4 pic.twitter.com/NJog5v9Iin

— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 4, 2022

Survivor’s guilt has been documented in those of who lived through the Holocaust, the 9/11 terrorist terrorist attack, or, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also seen in combat soldiers, first responders and humanitarian aid workers, and it can affect regular people who have survived mass shootings, traffic accidents, natural disasters and other traumatic situations.

In the current version of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V,” survivor’s guilt is described as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, (PTSD). It’s characterized by a person having a distorted sense of guilt and negative feelings about oneself.

As Chmerkovskiy said, he basically feels terrible about still being alive, when others around him have died or are likely to die in the coming days or weeks.

Maria Korniiets, a 27-year-old Ukrainian woman, similarly told The Insider that she felt guilty about flying to Poland in January, before the invasion. She said she could see “the storm clouds gathering,” but her mother in Kyiv refused to leave.

“People are dying there. Why them? Why not me?” Korniiets said. “You feel like you should be there fighting, but you’re here. You see that people are suffering and they might not be able to get out.”

It may not help Chmerkovskiy to read some of his replies on Instagram posts, where some have written him off as a rich celebrity with a U.S. passport, who may have had ways to secure safe passage that weren’t available to ordinary Ukrainians.

Chmerkovskiy hasn’t offered details about how he was able to get out of Ukraine. The government has barred male citizens, 18 to 60, from leaving so they can stay and help defend the country against the onslaught of Russian forces.

Chmerkovskiy said his guilt about being on the train prompted him to stand for the entire train ride, which took some 20 hours. He admitted he was one of the few men on the cold and claustrophobic car, mostly packed with women and children. “I wanted to make sure I don’t take up space, that I’m not there instead of another mother with two kids,” he said.

Others have more cruelly criticized Chmerkovskiy for not staying to fight. The dancer seemed to address this criticism by talking about how he regards the United States as his home, explaining that he came live in the U.S. in the 1990s when he was 14; he now resides in Los Angeles with his wife Peta Murgatroyd and their 5-year-old son.

Chmerkovskiy said he traveled to Ukraine to judge a TV dance competition. Before Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24, he said he had come to love his birth country, almost as if he was getting to know his birth mother.

“Now I have friends here,” Chmerkovskiy said. “I have friends on the frontline, and I can’t reach them, and I don’t know if they’re dead. (There’s) the brother of my boxing coach: He posts that his brother’s dead. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that. How am I getting a plane (in Warsaw) now and getting out?”

Given both Chmerkovskiy and Korniiets’ testimonials, survivor’s guilt is likely to afflict other refugees arriving from Ukraine. Joshua Morganstein, M.D., chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on the Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster said survivor’s guilt, as well as grief and trauma, are common in people “who’ve been exposed to extremes.”

The association issued a statement earlier this week, saying that the war “will have adverse mental health effects on individuals and communities around the world,” particularly those directly exposed to armed conflict and those displaced from their homes and country.

The mental health impacts of war or disaster always exceed the physical impacts of people being injured or killed, Morganstein also said. Mental health impacts can also have a wide geographical distribution, which means that Ukrainians in the Unites States could also be adversely affected as they worry about the safety of loved ones back home. Russians who oppose Vladimir Putin’s war may be stigmatized in their communities.

When people survive extremes, Morganstein said they “might question the choices they made, either what they did or didn’t do during the event, thinking I should have done this, or I shouldn’t have done that. He added: “It can be associated with guilt and feelings of shame, where guilt is, ‘I did something bad,’ and shame is more like, ‘I am bad.’”

In the immediate term, surviving a traumatic event can lead to physical symptoms: headaches, nausea, sadness, irritability, trouble sleeping and a need to repeatedly play over the event in their mind,” he said.

Often, those symptoms are transient and improve and go away over time,”  Morganstein said. But sometimes, they can hang on, “take root” and lead to PTSD, grief, depression and other debilitating disorders.

Complicating people’s recovery is that they probably feel multiple things at once: relief and happiness to be alive, but also guilt, Morganstein said,

Chmerkovskiy has conveyed this complexity in his Instagram posts, talking in one sentence about feeling scared or angry, but in the next sentence proclaiming happiness and gratitude to be alive. He also displayed a mix of emotions when he arrived back at the Los Angeles International Airport and enjoyed a long embrace with his wife.

He also briefly showed a smile, but he mostly looked tired and a bit in shock. He told an Entertainment Tonight reporter, “I don’t know really what to say right this second. I’m trying to process all of this.”

His voice became urgent when he told reporters that he used to avoid talking about politics but no more. In Kyiv, he said he wanted to do as much as he could to document the dire conditions people were living in. He held up his phone and said, “This is my gun, and I’ve decided I’ll do my best with this.”

When people experience a traumatic event, their recovery needs to begin with them feeling safe and assured that they have basic necessities like food and shelter, Morganstein said. After that, they can develop strategies for calming themselves, staying socially connected and developing a sense that, over time, they can help themselves, even if they had to leave behind their homes, jobs, family and country.

Whenever talking to someone with survivor’s guilt, Morganstein said it’s important to never offer platitudes such as “Everything happens for a reason.” It’s also important to just listen and not insist that there’s no logical reason for them to feel bad about being alive.

In the long run, it also helps for survivors to find ways to help others, Morganstein said. Chmerkovskiy has said he’ll continue to share videos that  document what’s happening in the war. He also share information about how Americans can urge their leaders to keep up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin or money support relief efforts.

“I will never be the same,” Chmerkovskiy said in one video, while he told “Good Morning America”: “I’m still very much in that fight-or-flight (mode), I’m a big boy, but I know for a fact that I’m going through something mentally … because I get into these cry moments, I’m emotional, I can’t control it.”