Areas of Focus
Guilt
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“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Guilt is an emotional state involving:
conflict at having done something that you believe you should not have done.
having not done something that you believe you should have done.
True guilt is a positive force as it encourages accountability and reparation. False guilt, on the other hand, involves guilt which has no merit. It works on the following premise: “If you think or feel that you are guilty, then you must be guilty.”
Although you may experience guilt, not all thoughts or feelings are accurate. For example, paranoid thoughts hold no basis in reality. Yet, we often believe that we are guilty because we think or feel that we are guilty.
The following two strategies may assist to alter false guilt:
Delaying responses to guilt will buy you time to work out the appropriate action, if any.
Compartmentalization allows guilt to be held in check, although this requires tolerating the discomfort of the negative feeling.
References
Buber, M. (1957). Guilt and guilt feelings. Psychiatry, 20(2): 114–29.
Cryder C., Springer S., Morewedge, C. (2012). Guilty feelings, targeted actions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(5), 607–618