I’m a natural at guilt, especially during Lent. Come on! This is my time of year! An invitation to wallow on absolutely everything I’m failing at. Thus, anytime (and especially during Lent!) I can get some help on tackling this bad boy, I take it. John Grohol of Psych Central has five really good and practical tips. And since he seems to be a sane guy, I am going to try to follow them. I’ll give you the first two and then you can go over to Psych Central to get that last three.
Guilt is an emotional warning sign that most people learn through their normal childhood social development. Its purpose is to let us know when we’ve done something wrong, to help us develop a better sense of our behavior and how it affects ourselves and others. It prompts us to re-examine our behavior so that we don’t end up making the same mistake twice.
How can we help combat our guilty feelings, and accept them when they’re important, but let them go more easily when they’re not?
1. Recognize the kind of guilt you have and its purpose.
Guilt works best to help us grow and mature when our behavior has been offensive or hurtful to others or ourselves. If we feel guilty for saying something offensive to another person, or for focusing on our careers with an 80-hour work-week over our family, that’s a warning sign with a purpose: change your behavior or else lose your friends or family. We can still choose to ignore our guilt then, but then we do so at our own risk. This is known as “healthy” or “appropriate” guilt because it serves a purpose in trying to help redirect our moral or behavioral compass.
The problem arises when our behavior isn’t something that needs reexamining, nor is it something that needs to be changed. For example, a lot of first-time moms feel badly about going back to work part-time, fearful it may cause unknown damage to their child’s normal development. That’s simply not the case in most situations, however, and most children have a normal, healthy development even when both parents work. There’s nothing to feel guilty about, and yet we still do. This is known as “unhealthy” or “inappropriate” guilty because it serves no rational purpose.
If you’re feeling guilty for eating five chocolate bars in a row, that’s your brain’s way of trying to get the message to you about a behavior you probably already recognize is a little extreme. Such behavior may be self-destructive and ultimately harmful to your health and well-being. So the rational purpose of this guilt is simply to try and convince you to change this behavior.
2. Make amends or changes sooner rather than later.
If your guilt is for a specific and rational purpose – e.g., it’s healthy guilt – take action to fix the problem behavior. While many of us are gluttons for self-punishment, ongoing guilt weighs us down as we try and move forward in life. It’s easy enough to apologize to someone whom we’ve offended by a careless remark. It’s a little more challenging to not only recognize how your 80-hour-a-week career may be harming your family, but to also change your work schedule (assuming that there were legitimate reasons for working 80-hours a week in the first place).
Healthy guilt is telling us we need to do something different in order to repair relationships important to us (or our own self-esteem). (Unhealthy guilt’s purpose, on the other hand, is only to make us feel badly for little legitimate reason.) While sometimes we already know the lesson guilt is trying to teach us, it will return time and time again until we’ve actually learned the lesson fully. It can be frustrating, but it seems to be the way guilt works for most people. The sooner we “learn the lesson” – e.g., make amends, work to not engage in the same hurtful behavior in the future, etc. – the sooner the guilt will disappear. If successful, it will never return for that issue again.
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