I've always liked that statement: it's okay; I'm a recovering Catholic. If you haven't heard that statement, it refers to the guilt that is inherent in Catholicism. As you may or may not know, guilt is a powerful weapon of control found in not only Catholicism, but in many religions.
A friend of mine was recently dealing with guilt and it got me to thinking. Personally, I often feel guilty, but through the work of cognitive behavioral therapy, I have been able to get rid of most of my guilty feelings. But then, CBT takes a lot of work and I'm not a therapist. I just want to take a few moments in my little blog here to explore what exactly guilt IS.
When we feel guilty, we feel we have let someone else down. What I have learned, however, is that it is mostly important to determine if we have let ourselves down. Awhile back, I had written about integrity and I think that's related. If you set a high standard for yourself and then you fail to meet that standard, guilt may be one of the feelings you have. That is a very core part of guilt; guilt is found with perfectionist type people; when a person like this doesn't do something perfectly, then they feel a total sense of failure and failure leads to feeling guilty.
But when the guilt relates to letting someone else down, it becomes tricky. If you have truly done something wrong towards that other person, then a certain amount of guilty is healthy to associate. But when your life revolves around the guilt that you feel, falsely, then you have a problem. The feelings of guilt are a message from the ethical portion of our brain; guilt will tell us to not do something again because it was wrong in some way. However, when we hyperfocus on the feeling of guilt itself rather than the message it is sending, we can drive ourselves nuts!
Depending on the action which you took that invoked feelings of guilt, the first step is to determine if there is a true reason to feel guilty; that is, what is the message? If you have harmed someone in some way for your own means, then yeah, you probably have a reason to feel guilty, you jerk! If you stole something from someone, or gossiped needlessly, and you feel guilty, then you probably should feel guilty. If you did something to improve your own life that perhaps didn't jive with someone else's life and they are upset, THIS is where you have to examine the guilt. Guilt on this level is usually irrational.
First of all, one person cannot be responsible for another person's feelings. I have learned this one the hard way. I have spent a large amount of energy trying to make other people happy. Especially trying to make those people who really don't care one way or another happy. While parts of me continue to try to make others happy, I am personally trying to redirect this in making people happy while I make MYSELF happy. So now, when I do something that might make someone else uncomfortable, I step back from the situation and question the message of guilt before it actually becomes guilt.
For example, at work yesterday, one of my coworkers asked me if I would run some things to the post office for her. She asked me to do this just fifteen minutes before I was done working and I had scheduled myself to pick my daughter up a few minutes after I was done with work. I told her that I was unable to run that errand today but that tomorrow I would have some flexibility. I felt guilty. I felt that I had done something bad. But then I stepped back from the situation and reminded myself that earlier in the morning, she had asked me when I was working until; I told her three. I also reminded myself that my daughter is more important than pleasing everyone at work. THEN I looked outside and though "I bet she doesn't want to go outside and get in her car because it's pouring out!" I THEN reminded myself that I had told her earlier in the day that I was leaving at three.
I rationalized that her poor planning is not my responsibility - that is to say "I am not responsible for her discomfort or emotions. Therefore, I had done nothing wrong.
Like I mentioned earlier, I do believe that a certain amount of guilt is necessary, but that we should use it as a message device from our ethics. It should not be a controlling agent. So, regardless of whether or not the guilt is justified, it is important to examine the why of the feeling and to disregard the actual basic feeling of guilt. We need to examine whether or not the guilt is justified, why it is, what (if needed) we can do to correct or prevent the situation from happening again and so on. Wallowing in guilt is absolutely unnecessary and useless.
This is one of the trickier emotions, I think, to overcome. But when we can get a handle on it through self-talk and whatnot, we can really reign our lives in and take more control of them. Self-talk is an excellent tool, not just for guilt, but for all emotions. Even the good ones!
No comments:
Post a Comment