Navigating the Complex Emotions: The Choice of Guilt.

It’s hard to think that sometimes guilt is a choice. Like a lot of us believe that our guilt is rooted in something substantial, but often, it’s not. We tend to live out moments in our minds that no longer hold power over us for the same reason we do with un-forgiveness, the power of focus.

This is an interesting thing to master because it can literally alter your life. Whatever has your focus has your heart. The thing that takes up the most of your attention, is where your life will always orient towards, so why make this pain?

Why make it guilt? 

To be clear there are situations in which we feel we need to mend or ask for forgiveness and thats natural, in fact, good. This is a reality of our humanity, but there comes a point where we choose to remain in a state of guilt.

We create walls around the places where we have failed or came up short and never look back. The problem there is that those walls make freedom inaccessible. What we thought would be a safe haven from the heaviness of our past and our mistakes, now becomes a jail in which were forced to live in with the biggest monsters in our lives, we didn’t trap them in a place faraway, we trapped ourselves as close to them as we possible can be. 

What if I told you that there is actually some science on “how to no longer feel guilty” 5 things you can do that will help you overcome this jail of guilt that we’ve made a home out of?

The truth is that this something we all struggle with at some point in life.

I want to be clear, this doesn’t mean that we just continue to treat people poorly, there is healthy guilt that leads up to repentance and to rebuilding relationships, this is more towards that false guilt that doesn’t allow us to forgive ourselves. That keeps us in the feed back loop of choosing to do wrong and failing to do good. The choice to remain in guilt ultimately stems from that very same inability to forgive ourselves, we feel like we must continue to bare the pain of things that should no longer remain. 

Dr. David Burns, who is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford medical school wrote a book titled         “Feeling good: the new mood of therapy” 

In which he outlines the following: 

“The results of this study indicated that Feeling Good appeared to have substantial antidepressant effects. At the end of the first four-week Bibliotherapy period, 70 percent of the patients in the Immediate Bibliotherapy Group no longer met the criteria for a major depressive episode, according to the diagnostic criteria for a major depressive episode that are outlined in the American Psychiatric Association’s official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). In fact, the improvement was so great most of these patients did not need any further treatment at the medical center.”

So before we dive deeper into this we need to first understand the power we hold as humans. Your brain is the most powerful computer in the world. The ability to create anything on any software, on any canvas, on any sheet of music, literally anything that can be made was first God given to you. Your brain can produce such beauty, but by that very reality such pain. What you allow yourself to dwell in, will become your reality. Theres a saying that says something along the line of “you create the life you want” and to an extent that is very true. You also create the space for the things you allow to remain and the things you demand to go. So knowing this, how do we now choose to be forgiven, to be happy, to no longer be guilty? 

Stop Magnifying 

Sometimes when we’ve done something that makes us feel guilty tend to want to make that the drive of our emotions. We dwell longer than we should and the interesting thing about guilt is that the longer we focus on it the bigger it becomes. Like any emotion, we tend to add layers to it, creating ties that shouldn’t remain and overextending the welcome of guilt. To be clear here we are not talking about healthy remorse or momentary natural responses to guilt, but rather unhealthy carrying of guilt. 

Dr. Burns says this about magnifying: 

“What sentence will you choose to impose on yourself? Are you willing to stop suffering and making yourself miserable when your sentence has expired? This would at least be a responsible way to punish yourself because it would be time-limited.”

We tend to give ourselves life sentences when it comes to guilt, especially within the context of the guilt of letting ourselves down. We might have made some bad decisions in stages of our lives that were not our current reality or our current state of mind, but still remain with the guilt of person we no longer are. We replay moments that are now even more amplified by the reality that we do not remember actual memories, but rather memories of memories. For this reason your brain allows you to wonder a little more. It allows you to create and run with whatever first comes in. 

We need to learn to forgive ourselves for the decisions and defense mechanisms we learned in our responses to trauma or our moments that lacked growth.

You are under no obligation to continue to feel or be the person you once were. To understand that  is a point of healing and growth. The reality that the guilt you’ve allowed yourself to feel, the guilt that for many of us has become a life sentence a jail, housing us in with it, is only as powerful as you allow it to be. 

The biggest war we will ever battle is ironically not one for violence but rather one for peace. You will have to live with you for the remainder of your life, what good is it to continue to live in the past? Whats interesting is that if we are looking outwards, it would be easy to give someone else this advice. It is only when we come to the introspective that we don’t extend that same grace. We are often so much harder on ourselves than we deserve to be. 

You are not as bad as you lead yourself to believe, but you can be. This becomes a slipper slope and this continued belief becomes our reality. 

Dr. Burns says this about remaining in that thought: 

"More often than not, the belief that you are bad contributes to the “bad” behavior. Change and learning occur most readily when you (a) recognize that an error has occurred and (b) develop a strategy for correcting the problem. An attitude of self-love and relaxation facilitates this, whereas guilt often interferes.”

In other words, we become what we think.

Reńe Descarte’s famous line really resonates here: 

“Cogito, ergo sum”

(I think, therefore I am… for those of us that don’t speak latin) 

Your whole life is just a stringed line of all of your thoughts. Everything we do first starts as a thought or a lack of thought.

Our guilt is no different. This is such a valuable thing to live by that it will resurface later in this book but for the sake of the reality of our guilt, we apply it here too. 

You are not the things that you have done you are the things you choose to do in response to them. In other words, you are not a composition of your mistakes but rather a fullness of the things you choose to either remain or not remain under. Guilt can only live by using you as its life source, so starve it. Choose to no longer bare weight that isn’t yours to bare. 

As you read this you maybe thinking “that’s so much easier said (in this case written) then actually done and honestly that was my first thought when I read studies on this. How can we honestly tell people not to be engulfed by guilt? Well the reality is that this is one of the most studies fields. Ironically our brains want to tell us more about itself and the power of every emotional response you have first starts as a thought that you allow to either grow or put out.

Think about it like a fire. 

If you allow a fire around a lot of very flammable things to continue to freely burn, it will engulf everything around it until everything is on fire, but if you begin to water the fire and the areas around it, the fire stops spreading and slowly dies, in some cases quicker than others. We water our emotions and thoughts with other emotions and thoughts. We remind ourselves of the truth of who we are. As the Buddha once said: 

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind.” – Buddha.

If today we believe that we are at fault for things we can no longer change, then tomorrow our minds will remind us of it. So how do we stop beating ourselves up over things that are no longer in our lives? How do we stop magnifying and stop over thinking? 

First lets figure out what and why: 

What happened to cause this guilty feeling?

- To identify the cause of guilt, it's crucial to reflect on recent events or actions that might have triggered the emotion. Focus on specific situations or behaviors that you believe could be the source of your guilt. Sometimes we can’t even identify the source of the guilt, we just feel guilty for something as if it’s just a part of who we are. Realizing this gives us more authority and reach over our emotions especially when we realize that we are in control again. 

What specific aspect of this do I feel guilty about?

- Pinpointing the specific aspect of the situation that is causing guilt is essential for understanding the root of the emotion. Analyze your feelings and thoughts to identify the exact action, behavior, or consequence that is leading to your guilt.

Did I really do something wrong, or am I just perceiving I did something wrong?

- This question delves into the perception of guilt. Sometimes, guilt can arise from a genuine wrongdoing or mistake, while at other times, it might be a result of distorted thinking patterns or excessive self-blame. Challenge your thoughts and assess whether your guilt is justified based on objective standards or if it is influenced by negative self-judgment.

Is someone else making me feel guilty?

- In some cases, external factors, such as manipulation or emotional pressure from others, can contribute to feelings of guilt. Assess if someone else is intentionally or unintentionally imposing guilt on you. Recognize that your emotions should not be solely controlled by others' actions or opinions. Guilt is the favorite tool of the narcissist or those looking to “gas light” us. Control doesn’t always look physical. 

Is it in my control to fix the situation?

- Determine whether the situation that caused guilt is within your control to address or rectify. Guilt can sometimes motivate positive changes and prompt individuals to take responsibility for their actions. Guilt, like any other emotion, has its extremes and its uses. Sometimes the guilt of a past mistake can be a motivating factor if we understand how emotions can be owned (we’ll talk a little more about this later!). 

Could fixing the situation help?

- Consider whether taking action to resolve the situation could alleviate your guilt. In some cases, addressing the issue, apologizing, or making amends can lead to a sense of relief and personal growth. Sometimes we are holding ourselves captives to an emotion that could have been relieved with a simple conversation. 

Emotions are significantly intertwined. Sometimes our guilt can be expressed as anxiousness, fear, and even depression. This is also the reason why some respond in anger (here we go into another feedback loop) this is how intertwined our emotions are and how thin those lines can be. If we don’t address these things when we’re going through them and instead try to live with them, they will fester and just become worse. This is where Choosing to do wrong kicks in, we are picking the things that seem easy now but will be the cause of so many relationship issues in the future. 

Choosing what’s easy now to avoid a moment of discomfort will only give you a life of hiding from the demons you’re living with… it’s time for an eviction notice.