Are You Sacrificing Too Much of Yourself?

What are the many reasons for guilt? Are they real or imagined? To answer those questions, we have to do some exploration.

Source: GoodStudio/Shutterstock

When we are actually guilty of doing harm to another person or to a group of people, sometimes, some people feel remorse. Remorse is defined differently by different sources. Some say that it is the same as the feeling of guilt. Others say that it is different from guilt but can’t exactly—in a way that can be truly applicable—explain how it is different.

I say that remorse is based on an actual event in which we have harmed others in some way, whereas guilt is very often imagined. Remorse often pushes us to make amends, whereas guilt may push us into a deep hole in which we are paralyzed and can do nothing but ruminate about what we did, attaching all manner of “bad” or “selfish” motives, thoughts, and behaviors to it. In differentiating guilt from remorse, we can move on to the problem of guilt.

Guilt—which, as we have clarified for the purposes of this blog—is based on false beliefs about what we “should” be doing and thinking, what should and should not motivate us, and the minimization of the power of the human heart. These false beliefs include ideas of personal reference in which we “should” always be serving others with little to no thought of ourselves. These ideas often come from false identities that tell us that we are only good people to the degree that we sacrifice for others. Some even insist that the only reason we are alive is to serve others and that if we are not constantly doing that, we have failed on our mission to planet Earth and should not only feel guilt but also a great deal of shame. Some of these beliefs are based on religion, but many are not. Either way, these beliefs are impossible to fulfill. This impossibility is a setup for frustration and guilt.

The sacrifice of self for any reason is a sacrifice of Self. That means that we cannot, are not permitted to, notice or make reference to the needs and desires of Self. The problem is that it's only through addressing these needs and desires that makes it possible for us to live authentically. Left unfulfilled, these needs and desires will manifest in other ways, such as anger, frustration, resentment, and even the mistreatment of others. Of course, when these manifestations occur, they produce even more guilt, for the individual then begins to feel that these emotions should not exist, and the mistreatment of others is an utter failure.

Guilt only judges us and finds us guilty. It does not teach us to go within and find out why we have done something—that would be more like self-empathy. "Why am I angry, frustrated, or resentful?" "Why did I mistreat others that way?" If we answer these questions honestly, we may conclude that we did those things because we had sacrificed Self too much, for too long.

Certainly, there are those heroic examples that seem to prove that sacrifice of Self is necessary. For example, when the hero jumps into the water to save drowning people from a sinking car—risking his own life in the process. But is this done based on a "should be good so I don't feel guilty later" idea? Or is it done out of a natural compassion for others? When we assume that the hero is just responding to a "should," and we try to emulate that in our own lives, we may be setting ourselves up for yet another impossibility.

We cannot sacrifice ourselves without some backlash from Self. It is trying to get our attention. It is trying to say that such sacrifice is not only not necessary, but is actually harmful. Too much sacrifice pushes us further and further away from our own genuine Self.

We have come from a society, a world, in which the human heart is relegated to the back seat of our lives. It simply does not function as a real power. We don’t know, therefore, that the human heart has enough genuine compassion in it to push us to do for others in a natural way. What we have done instead is we have lived under a belief that says that we can only be good people to the degree that we sacrifice, and in some cases—dependent on how prone we are to guilt—sacrifice in the extreme.

If we trust the human heart, it can lead us to all manner of services to both self and other. This is a more genuine approach to living a life free of guilt. There are fewer shoulds and more genuine actions that reflect genuine feeling and genuine thought.

Many, if not all of us, have been taught certain tenets about the concept of selfishness. For a person prone to guilt, there is a false idea that any reference to self is selfish. Any action on behalf of the self is selfish. Any belief that takes care of self is selfish. Any thought that thinks of the self is selfish. That means there is nothing left but sacrifice of self—which means sacrifice of the authentic Self. These ideas will create deep feelings of guilt when one cannot accommodate them. They are false—absolutely false.

In order to live an authentic life, we may have to rid ourselves of such false ideas and beliefs. We may have to begin to trust the human heart to be enough to guide us to the right action.