Want to Stop Feeling Guilty?

Dan*, a college professor in his early thirties, told me that he was feeling guilty and bad. “I haven’t spent enough time with my wife and kids,” he said. “And I haven’t written everything I planned to write. I haven’t published enough. And I haven’t been available enough for the students who really need me.”

Guilt seems to be such a common emotion that I find myself wondering if it has a psychological purpose. We feel guilty about not calling our parents, our children, our siblings, or our friends often enough, or not walking the dog often enough, or about not pulling our weight on a group project. We haven't done enough for an elderly neighbor or we haven't been kind enough or patient enough with our loved ones.

We also feel guilty about betraying someone we care about, or hurting someone, or doing something we think is unethical or morally wrong. In fact, this group of causes is one of the reasons we feel guilt. It is a way of letting ourselves know that we have gone against our own moral code, and of punishing ourselves for it. It is also a way of trying to bring ourselves back into line, to get ourselves to behave better in the future and also to make up for what we have done in the past.

Not feeling guilty does not mean that a person has never done anything wrong. It may actually mean that they have not learned to take responsibility for their behavior. Many people who don't feel guilty simply blame others for their own misbehavior.

In the years that I have been working as a therapist, I have found that guilt, one of the primary emotions Freud wrote about, is almost never simple. The dictionary definition is three pronged, including 1)“the fact or state of having committed an offense, crime, violation, or wrong, especially against moral or penal law; culpability,” 2) “a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined,” and 3) “conduct involving the commission of such crimes, wrongs, etc.”

Understanding the differences between these three definitions is crucial to managing the guilt feelings that so many of us suffer from. And managing these feelings is one key to good emotional health!

Source: Copyright: <a href='http://www.123rf.com/profile_aquamila'>aquamila / 123RF Stock Photo</a>

For instance, when Dan says that he has not spent enough time with his family or his students, or working on his writing, what does he mean? Is he in fact failing to perform his duties in each of these areas, or does he have a feeling of responsibility – and is that feeling reflective of his actual conduct?

How do you sort these things out? And what do you do when you do believe that you have in fact been guilty of unacceptable behavior?

In an earlier post on the topic of guilt, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201308/what-makes-us-fee… I described some of the ways that psychoanalysts have looked at these complex feelings. Here is a brief review of some of those points along with some additional thoughts:

1 -- Guilt is not a nice feeling. We try to avoid it, and when we can’t get away from it we try to get rid of it, sometimes by trying to put blame on others – it’s her fault, not mine, we say. I’m really an innocent victim here. Or we look for absolution, forgiveness. We want to know that we’re not bad, or at least not completely.

2 -- Like so many painful emotions, guilt is actually important to our well-being, part of healthy psychological development. Freud saw it as a signal that an individual had begun to take responsibility for himself, for his feelings and conflicts and for difficult decisions he had to make. Carl Jung said that development and growth only occur when we are able to recognize and attempt to rectify our transgressions. And Melanie Klein saw guilt as a sign that a person could manage a realistic mix of emotional experiences, accepting that she is neither pure and always good nor evil and always bad.

3 -- Guilt is a way we have of recognizing that we have not lived up to our own values and standards. At its best, it is an opportunity to acknowledge and rectify mistakes.

4 -- But when guilt bleeds into shame, and it becomes another story. Brené Brown says that shame is “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging - something we've experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

Guilt Essential Reads

I'll Never Tell: Rethinking the Psychology of Secrecy

Parental Engagement When an Adult Child Has a Mental Illness

5 – Guilt can be a way of trying to hold onto or repair relationships. The thoughts might not always make logical sense, but sometimes they are ways of trying to stay connected. If shame is a feeling of not being worthy of connection, then guilt is a feeling that we can make ourselves worthy. Perhaps one more good thing about guilt, then, is that it brings along with it a sense that we can change something that is making us feel bad.

6 – Guilt can be a way of managing other unpleasant feelings. If somebody hurts our feelings, and we blame ourselves and take on guilt for what happened, then we don’t have to feel angry, sad or hopeless about our relationship with that other person. Guilt, in a paradoxical way, gives us hope, because we believe that we can make things better. It gives us a sense of power.

Letting go of guilt often requires accepting responsibility and atoning for what you might have done. But it also means accepting your own imperfection and other unpleasant realities. Dan in fact did not live up to his own expectations, so now he has to determine whether he can change some of the ways he has lived in order to meet his expectations, or whether he is actually placing unrealistic demands on himself.

A discussion with his wife helped him think through some of the answers to these questions. She thought that he was a great husband and a great dad, and she reminded him of some of the positive feedback he had been getting from both students and colleagues at the college where he taught. She did think that he had taken on some additional projects that he might want to reconsider for the moment, but she understood that there were pressures attached to his desire to achieve tenure as a professor. All in all, after the conversation, Dan felt better, but he thought that his guilt might also be a useful reminder to make some schedule changes and reduce some of his extra activities so that he could be home with his children and wife more, since they were his real priorities.

As always, I’d love to know your thoughts about this subject!

*Names and identifying information have been changed to protect privacy

Copyright fdbarth@2017