In a Zoom coaching session a few weeks ago, a forty-something years old client referred several times to feelings of guilt. Not only had it been a familiar feeling since about the age of five, it had been a driving force throughout his personal life and career.
While guilt often gets a bad rap, in certain situations it can be helpful. For example, if you pay for coffee with a ten-dollar bill and the cashier gives you change for a twenty and you don’t say anything, you might feel pangs of guilt. Why? Because a part of you holds a belief that stealing is wrong, so you return the extra cash. In this case, the guilt motivated you to change your behavior in accordance with your belief that stealing is wrong.
Or you might choose to remain silent and keep the money. To relieve yourself of the “pain” of the guilt, you might tell yourself, “This is a big corporation; a little less profit won’t matter”, thereby changing the belief that stealing is wrong, allowing you to keep the money, lessen the guilt, and still feel like you’re a good person.
Guilt is a barometer that alerts us to behaviors that violate the “truths” of our conscious and unconscious belief systems. And while some of those beliefs are reflective of our authentic values, others are self-limiting ones that we learned and adopted from others.
Going back to my client’s situation, he talked about the guilt he feels about not protecting his younger brother from their father’s verbal and physical abuse growing up. I asked him how old he was in his earliest memory of wanting to protect his brother. When he said about five years old, I asked him to identify the belief he violated by not protecting his little brother. After a long pause he said, “I was responsible for my brother’s well-being.” I then asked him if that was true. He replied, “Well, no. I guess it wasn’t. It was my parents’ responsibility.” He had been a young and defenseless child himself, yet the unconscious belief that he had internalized at five years of age—that he was responsible for his brother’s safety—had caused him to feel guilty for nearly forty years. The internalized belief, “I’m responsible for others’ well-being” permeated his life, showing up as a habitual pattern of making others’ needs more important than his own, and making choices out of obligation versus from that which was in his best interests.
Conventional wisdom is that being selfless is noble and good. And yes, sacrificing our needs over another’s is sometimes the necessary or right thing to do. But when done habitually, it is a form of self-abandonment that creates an unhealthy lack of inner balance. Symptoms of this imbalance may be chronic depression, resentment, stress, anxiety, and even physical maladies.
While chronic guilt may provide some semblance of our still being a good person despite our wrong doings (because at least we feel bad about them), it has a heavy cost. Habitual guilt hijacks our minds, our creativity, our power, our joy, our self-esteem, and our emotional and even physical well-being. It consumes our precious life energy, diminishes our relationship with ourselves, and contaminates our connections to others. And in its extremes, it can make our life on earth a living hell.
If you are a habitual guilt tripper—or struggle with guilt over a specific event—below are some practical steps to help free yourself from the grips of guilt and move into a state of greater inner balance.
1) Clarify the situation: What did you do specifically about which you feel guilty?
2) Identify the violated belief: What “truth” did you betray that’s producing your guilt? For example, Others’ needs are more important than my own or It’s my job to make others happy or Letting others know how I really feel is selfish or It’s destructive to be verbally abusive to others.
3) Conduct a reality check: Is this belief a true reflection of my values, or is it an untruth that I adopted from someone else?
4) Course-correct: If the belief is a true reflection of your authentic self and values, change your behavior now (or in future situations) to align with the belief. For example, if your behavior violated It’s destructive to be verbally abusive to others, and you determine that this is one of your true values, then your changed behavior might be to apologize, ask the other person for forgiveness, and develop better and more respectful communication skills. If it’s a limiting belief adopted from someone else, update the belief to what is really true for you. For example, change Letting others know how I really feel is selfish to Letting others know how I really feel is critical to taking care of myself and of my relationships with others.
5) Practice self-compassion: Remember that at any given moment, each one of us is truly doing the very best we can—even if that best, in hindsight, leaves a lot to be desired.