Guilt is the most destructive, paralyzing feeling of all. It’s a horrible burden that crushes people and demolishes their lives. I want to suggest a productive way of addressing guilt and getting from under its weight. Please understand that I’m not talking about a short-term, situational experience. I accidentally stepped on a person’s foot in line for coffee today and I felt bad. But I’m now very much over it. The guilt that I want to address here is the kind that people carry around for a long time. Weeks, months, years.
We all know that guilt is painful. However, if we cling to it for such a protracted period of time, this means it is serving some purpose for us. Nobody would engage in an activity over a significant period of time if that activity didn’t carry significant benefits. If we feel guilty, it means we need to feel this way. Unearthing the benefits guilt brings to our lives will be the first step on the way of healing.
Here are some possibilities:
1. Guilt can offer an illusion of control. If I caused these horrible events, then the world can ultimately be controlled by me in all of its unpredictability.
2. Guilt can offer an excuse for stasis. If things I do have such bad consequences, here is a great excuse to do nothing.
3. Guilt can allow one not to grow. If I’m stuck on this action I feel so guilty about, I will forever remain at the age when I committed it. People who feel guilty about things they did 30 years ago show this same kind of immaturity in every single other context, as well.
4. Guilt can reinforce the image of oneself as a hopelessly rotten, bad individual. There is nothing than the human psyche values more than stability and lack of change. Guilt might be a nifty little mechanism that perpetuates this sweet feeling of personal uselessness and rottenness.
Now, the purpose of the exercise is not to feel even more guilty for being a controlling, infantile individual with no desire to move ahead. Doing so would not change the situation. What would help is identify the roots of the problem. How did I come by the feeling of myself as bad? Why am I afraid of growth? Which responsibilities that the guilt is allowing me to avoid do I fear? Why do I fear them so much?
The important thing to remember is that guilt is destroying you and people around you. There are no healthy purposes it can serve, none whatsoever. Whenever you engage in feeling guilty, you are doing something deeply unhealthy. Now is the time to stop. Lay down this burden and start walking away from it. And this will be the best thing you can do for yourself and everybody else.
Clarissa's Blog 
Guilt can reinforce the image of oneself as a hopelessly rotten, bad individual. There is nothing than the human psyche values more than stability and lack of change. Guilt might be a nifty little mechanism that perpetuates this sweet feeling of personal uselessness and rottenness.
I am inclined to think the opposite of this is more likely. Something like: “I did something terrible, but I feel bad about it, so I am not a terrible person.”
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That’s another possibility. They are all equally destructive because they freeze a person in the problem and prevent growth.
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Beautifully said, Clarissa. But have you also thought that where the guilt is installed so early that it becomes a person’s principal sense of self, there is hardly any other self there to help overcome the stasis? (It would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.) For these unfortunates, to feel guilty may be the only way to feel alive. That’s where reasoning oneself out of it (no matter how brilliantly) is really of no use, and help from an outside source becomes necessary.
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I am one of those unfortunates, and you are absolutely right, I did get help from a professional to start working on this. It’s a process, and this post was addressed to myself more than to anybody else. But I’m also hoping that maybe it will point somebody else in the right direction.
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Two needless emotions: guilt and worry.
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Exactly.
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How did I come by the feeling of myself as bad? Why am I afraid of growth? Which responsibilities that the guilt is allowing me to avoid do I fear? Why do I fear them so much?
1. There are several layers but the first has to do with my relationship with my mother. She loved me, so I owed it to her to let her destroy me, and I did not want to do that, so I was not reciprocating her love, so: guilt. That is the ur-version of my guilt and all other guilt I feel is modeled upon it.
2. My growth hurts others. If I grow, they may kill me or at the very least increase my guilt burden to unbearable levels, while I also watch them suffer excruciating pain. Therefore sit still, do not grow.
3. It is not responsibilities I fear. What I fear is punishment. I forget that there will be none: it is holding onto the guilt that brings the negative consequences.
4. Because I fear death. In a choice between being someone with unrealized potential and someone dead, I choose to be someone with unrealized potential. I forget that this is not the actual choice I face — it is the opposite, really; I can remain in suspended animation or I can rejoin life.
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Oh, and also: it is not fear of growth but of the emotions, or places my mind can run, at the moment of taking the leap. It is to a self destructive place. I fear the anxiety attack, which is anxiety over how others in power over me will react (negatively), and anxiety about the rage I will feel at this; I also fear the sharp regret that comes with the memories of the last times I tried to jump and failed or pulled back in fear. I fear, essentially, the past, and forget that the past is not the future. I forget that I might have the power to control the anxiety attack. I forget that the fear of the anxiety attack, and of the things that provoke it, is no longer a rational fear.
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Was that really love, though? Can such a destructive impulse be part of love?
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My parents would say yes — otherwise you are just friends.
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Also: I am not sure it is guilt per se that I am trying to recover from but if it is: the purpose it really serves is as a screen. If I caused these events, then others did not. My remaining guilty protects them and protects me from seeing what they were really like and what they really did. This I think is the truest of my musings on this here today.
Whatever it is I am trying to get over reminds me of this mild eating disorder I had years ago, that I got over in stages. The day I realized I wanted to ditch the last stage was the day I became insatiably curious to see what life would be like outside that cage — even if if it were to discover worse things. I just wanted to know. I am feeling curious in the same kind of way now about what it will be like to drop [guilt].
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There is also this, from a self help guru I generally mistrust, but I wonder whether it is true: “”Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
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For me, it’s neither. My defining fear is closer to what you described before: that if I allow myself to be who I am and live a happy authentic life without faking or hiding, I will experience immediate destruction. So I choose to destroy myself because this way, at least, the terror is under my control.
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Yes, and I also think this sentence is overcomplicating and overburdening. Self destruction is also better than destruction by others because you can do it incompletely. Let someone else do it and you really might die, is my view, or sustain really disfiguring damage, lose an eye which would be inconvenient, things like that. Far prefereable to be in charge of it oneself.
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Meaning — the sentence above, that I wondered about. And I don’t mean to sound macabre in this comment. I just mean that my self destructiveness really was started as a shield against FAR more complete destruction.
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…bloody hell. You’ve just put into words the biggest fucking problem in my life. I’ll definitely need to think about this further.
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Oh, more: apparently Erik Erikson says that if children are not allowed to do things on their own, a sense of guilt may develop and they may come to believe that what they want to do is always wrong. q-d site: http://web.cortland.edu/andersmd/erik/stage3.html
Don’t assert yourself, and you won’t be rejected, an important consideration at the age he is talking about since the child is too young to live on its own.
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And apparently if you are raised by someone with borderline personality disorder this initiative vs guilt problem is really exacerbated.
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Yes, and there will be broken decision-making mechanisms as a result, too. Because any activity one initiated was punished, this has the paralyzingly effect of making one terrified of moving, doing anything.
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Yes, and I tend not to think I have difficulty deciding since I easily decide many things without dithering, but on the other hand, I can see it –.
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“My parents would say yes — otherwise you are just friends.”
– What would you say, though? And why are they colonizing your voice like this? Why do you – a person of a great linguistic talent – start speaking in somebody else’s voice? Also, are you sure that this tendency of your parents to rob you of your voice is not related to your incapacity to write everything you could and want to write as a scholar?
By the way, my parents are also convinced that the only mark of real familial closeness is that you can hurt, wound, criticize and control the “truly loved ones” in a way you can’t afford to do with strangers. It would really drive my mother crazy if I referred to myself as “person” or “human being.”
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It’s the biggest problem of most people’s life. The greatest obstacle, the heaviest burden.
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Oh, I am completely sure it is related.
Why I allow them to colonize voice on, particularly, love: because if that is love, I don’t relate, so I surely don’t know love at all. I am myself not raised to be able to feel the kind of freedom in relationship with another person that I associate with love and recognize as love when I see it. But love, I am told, is a painful, dark, tangling thing that ties and binds and wounds, and that I am too young and unsophisticated and unfeeling to understand.
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Hope talking about this isn’t unwelcome here, but… most of the physical abuse inflicted on me after I started going to school and learned about the concept of human rights and began using it in my defense also involved my father screaming “You’re not a person” or “You have no rights” at me. While my parents never put in words the “only mark of real familial closeness”, they certainly acted as if it were true.
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This is more than welcome. We can use this platform to help ourselves and others to overcome the legacy of abuse.
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My parents see us as their body parts, limbs or even internal organs. And when we don’t act exactly as they imagined we should, they go into a total tailspin. For instance, last month they created a horrible scandal because my sister – a 32-year-old woman with a business and family of her own – went to dinner with a friend. That’s all she did. Went to dinner with a friend. But it’s not what they imagined she had to be doing on that day and so her decision was intolerable to them to the point of mental collapse. The scandal is still continuing, over a month after the fateful dinner.
Of course, there is no way for one to guess what they might be imagining for one, so these situations are unavoidable.
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Wow, that’s awful. I can’t even begin to imagine how one can maintain a continuous scandal for 1 month out of going to dinner with a friend but clearly your parents are smarter than me. I’m sorry this is happening to your sister and you.
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Her decision, intolerable to the point of mental collapse, yes. We have had so many instances of that in our family.
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There is also shame which is somehow different and is more like what I experience (or I experience both). Shame = should not exist at all; guilt = should exist, but as a different person who does different things.
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This is a good piece of writing. I probably need to re-read it a couple of times to take it in. I deal with some guilt issues, I am not sure exactly how to connect that to parts of what you wrote. The article makes me think, so thank you.
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