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Key points
- Guilt and shame are common reactions to trauma and difficult circumstances.
- Guilt can be healthy or unhealthy, but shame is always unhealthy.
- Cognitive errors that lead to excessive guilt include the hindsight bias, black and white thinking, and overestimating personal responsibility.
Do you spend too much of your life feeling unnecessary guilt? You may think you are not a good enough parent because you don't enthusiastically participate in every aspect of homeschooling. Perhaps you feel guilty about your weight or feel inadequate because you don't work out on Zoom every day. Perhaps you lost your job and feel guilty about not providing enough income for your family.
During the pandemic, we have had to make life, relationship, and health decisions under conditions of uncontrollable stress, uncertainty, lies, and constantly changing information. Yet we often still blame ourselves for not providing a perfect environment for our kids, not being completely healthy and disciplined, not visiting our parents often enough, or not being a constantly happy and supportive partner or housemate. If you infected a loved one or lost a loved one to COVID-19 or if your job involved exposing your family to the virus you may be left with long-lasting trauma related guilt.
The Difference Between Helpful and Unhelpful Guilt
Guilt and shame have been labeled as self-conscious emotions because they stem from evaluations or negative judgments of ourselves and our behavior. The purpose of these emotions is to help regulate our behavior in line with social norms and expectations or our own personal values.
The difference between guilt and shame is that guilt involves feeling bad about your choices and/or behaviors while shame is a more global sense that you are an inherently bad, unworthy, incompetent, or unlovable person. As such, shame is the more destructive emotion because you cannot undo it by changing your behavior. Guilt can be helpful if it helps you correct behavior patterns that are unhealthy, self-destructive, or hurt others. However, too much of the time you feel more guilt than is objectively warranted by the situation. Many times you may conclude you have done something wrong just because you feel bad, without looking at the evidence.
Excessive Guilt Results from Faulty Thinking
You may think you are viewing the situation objectively when you feel guilty, but research shows humans often have blind spots or evaluate situations based on faulty premises. I will discuss five cognitive errors that lead to excessive guilt. For each one, I will suggest some questions to ask yourself to create a more objective viewpoint.
1. Hindsight is 20/20
One of the most frequent errors you may make is to judge past situations based on current knowledge without realizing that a lot of the information was not available at the time you made your decision. You can't be expected to know in advance exactly how things will turn out. In the case of COVID, there was a delay before the public was advised to use masks and it took longer to understand how much it spread through the air. Actions that seemed reasonable at the time may have increased your exposure and vulnerability.
Questions to ask yourself: Did I know then what I know now? How much has the situation changed and what new knowledge have I become aware of since the time I made my decision? Could a reasonable person have made a similar choice based on available knowledge, even if it didn't turn out well? Did I consider alternative actions and why did I rule these out? Do I know exactly how a different course of action may have turned out or am I just assuming it would have turned out better?
2. Overestimating the amount of responsibility you have
When a loved one is hurting, we often feel guilty automatically. This is because humans are wired to attach, and preserving relationships with caretakers is the key to survival when you are young. Thus, our brains become hyper-vigilant for other people's hurt or angry responses. Also, when you are in the situation you will automatically overestimate your own contribution (good or bad). How many times have you thought you did almost all the housework or childcare while your partner thinks you hardly did any?
Questions to ask: What were the different factors that contributed to this situation besides my own actions? Think about whether bad luck, random events, or the actions of others played a role. If I did contribute to this event happening, did I do so intentionally or unintentionally? Did I have good intent?
3. Not taking context into account
When you feel guilty you tend to view your own actions in isolation or as if you were operating in a perfect universe. You may compare your behavior negatively to that of a hypothetical perfect person/parent/partner/daughter/student/employee. But that person does not exist. In real life we have lots of demands on our time, face many stressors, and have to weigh the costs as well as the benefits of looking after others or trying to be perfectly disciplined in our work, eating or exercise habits.
Questions to ask: Am I looking at this event or my behavior in isolation without seeing the whole picture? To what extent was my behavior affected by genetics, ongoing stress, other demands and responsibilities, situational factors, depression or other mental health limitations?
4. Black and white thinking
Guilt is often the result of seeing a situation in all or nothing terms. You may focus only on what you didn't do while ignoring what you actually contributed. When a loved one dies, you may regret all the time you didn't spend with them or feel guilty for not being there with them the whole time. You may not consider how much joy you gave your loved one just by being present in their lives.
Questions to ask: Am I seeing the situation in all or nothing terms? Did I contribute in some ways even if not in every way? What level of contribution is reasonable to expect given the circumstances?
5. Mentally undoing helplessness
There are few things more painful than witnessing a loved one suffer because of their own decisions, difficult circumstances, serious illness, or addiction. Your brain may automatically be triggered to focus on how you could have helped them more or taken away their pain if you had acted differently. Mentally undoing negative outcomes and imagining how things could have been different is a defense your brain uses so as not to feel how truly helpless you are. But it can lead to needlessly beating yourself up or feeling overly responsible for painful experiences that were never your fault. The truth is that we can't always save those we care about.
Questions to ask: Did I actually cause this pain or am I just helpless to take it away? Is the alternative scenario I'm picturing actually realistic?
Understanding the cognitive errors underlying guilt and shame and asking questions to help you look at the facts of the situation can help relieve you a giant mental burden. If you are scared to let go of guilt because you think it will mean you don't care, understand that there are better, more proactive ways of showing caring than suffering from unnecessary guilt.
References
Kubany, E. S., & Ralston, T. C. (2006). Cognitive Therapy for Trauma-Related Guilt and Shame. In V. M. Follette & J. I. Ruzek (Eds.), Cognitive-behavioral therapies for trauma (pp. 258–289). The Guilford Press.
Haller, M., Norman, S. B., Davis, B. C., Capone, C., Browne, K., & Allard, C. B. (2020). A model for treating COVID-19–related guilt, shame, and moral injury. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 12(S1), S174–S176. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000742
