The Psychology of Guilt—Part III

This is the third in a three-part series of articles on the psychology of guilt. Please read the previous two articles first.

In guilt dynamics, there are only two patterns of thinking or behaving—rectifying something you did not do or rectifying something you erroneously did do. Either way you are stuck. In general, this is a no-win experience for the recipient. This is the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. In general, if we conform to the speaker’s manipulations, we have stuffed our anger and failed to be assertive. We feel crummy (anxiety on the surface, resentment underneath) and reinforce the guilt-inducing behaviors by not dealing with it directly. If we counter-manipulate at the level of the manipulation, we will have an argument and be further criticized by the speaker, again at the same level using the same standards, which in this case we are bucking. If we fail to respond; that is, do nothing, we are burdened with unresolved negative feelings. Strike three—you’re out!
I think of guilt as being on a continuum from the more local to the more global. Guilt can be induced by small events, like not coming home at curfew, especially if you happen to be a teenager. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, one can have “life guilt,” like Catholics and other Christians who were born in original sin.

“If you’re born on this world, you’re guilty, period. Screw you, end of report, next case. Your birth certificate is proof of guilt.”--George Carlin

From that point of view, humans are in a sorry state right out of the starting gate, and they didn’t even do anything, personally. The causes of guilt are failures in behavior, if viewed from legal, sociological or psychological perspectives, or sins, if viewed from a religious point of view. Both in the legal and religious arenas, there are lesser and greater transgressions. Thus, in law we have misdemeanors (petty theft, jaywalking) vs. felonies (burglary, assault). In Catholicism, there are intermediary “sins.” These are the venial sins. Then, there are the big ones, called mortal sins. (Catholics are my best customers because of all that guilt).
Guilt is intensified if the perception is that by our behavior, we have caused harm to another. Thus, getting drunk and running a stoplight causes us to crash into another’s car, which causes considerable harm to the other driver and car. However, guilt is diminished if there is no harm caused or if I don’t get caught. Consider this scenario. It is three in the morning, and I’m driving home on an old country road. I come to an intersection with a four-way stop, and there is no one around for miles. I slow down but don’t stop; instead, coast through the intersection after looking in all directions. Did I do something wrong? I didn’t hurt anyone and no one was there to remind me of the law, which I clearly knew; therefore, my driving must be OK.

To find the cause of guilt, I have to recognize that I have violated some standard of thinking, feeling or behaving. If I don’t appreciate or even know of the standard(s), then I don’t feel guilt. If I do, then I have a problem, mostly how to deal with my ambivalence. Ambivalence? Yes. Guilt, like procrastination and the inability to forgive are the three major forms of ambivalence. (An example of a minor form of ambivalence would be simple indecision, say at a restaurant, having trouble deciding which entrée is more appealing. Distrust can be a form of ambivalence, but some forms of distrust can just be distrust without ambivalence.)
This is really an article on ambivalence because guilt is one of three major forms of ambivalence. Why discuss ambivalence? Guilt rests on the foundation of ambivalence. Without a solid understanding of ambivalence, the three major manifestations of ambivalence make no sense. So, forgive the apparent diversion to follow, but from my point of view, a discussion of ambivalence is necessary to properly understand guilt.
-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

The Psychology of Guilt—Part II

This is the second of a three part series of articles on the psychology of guilt. Please read the first article before reading this one…

Here’s another perspective, from psychology:

“In this definition, guilt is a negative, paralyzing emotion, based on non-acceptance of oneself or the situation, and it leads to depression and frustration rather than change or improvement. Guilt is usually a negative focus upon oneself: ‘I am an evil person. I can't bear myself. I am unworthy.’ While this response may appear in a religious guise, it often turns out to be a form of self-deprecating laziness. This can even lead to self-hatred, and certainly contributes to lack of self-confidence. Instead of recognizing that one’s actions are incorrect, one gets the feeling as if one is unworthy, as if ‘I’ am intrinsically bad.
In Buddhism such type of guilt is categorized as a... "disturbing attitude: one doesn't see the situation clearly and may well be a tricky form of self-centeredness associated with anxiety, and sometimes depression.”

In other words, guilt has a notorious down side; a rotten underbelly that manifests as conflict, while at the same time obfuscates awareness of underlying feelings. Because it is painful, guilt can be a powerful motivator of behavior.
For example, guilt can make you overly socially sensitive. This is true if you are too willing to do anything in your attempt to make everyone happy. In this case it makes you overly conscientious. You fret over every action you take, overly consider the possible negative consequence to others, even if this means that you must ignore your needs and wants. Because it is less guilt-inducing to take care of others first, instead of yourself, you hide behind the mask of self-denial. You honestly believe it is better to serve others first, unaware that "guilt" is the motivator for such "generous" behavior. You see decisions about right and wrong in every aspect of your life and become obsessed with the tenuous nature of all of your personal actions, words and decisions. You are most sensitive to the cues of others when any implication of your wrongdoing is intimated. In extreme cases, guilt can immobilize you. You can become so overcome by the fear of doing, acting, saying or being "wrong" that you eventually collapse, give in, and choose inactivity, silence and the status quo. In this case, guilt neutralizes both initiative and assertiveness.
Here’s another dark side of guilt; it can interfere in your decision-making. It is so important to always be "right" in your decisions that you become unable to make a decision lest it be a wrong one. This is when guilt clobbers insight and reinforces suppression. Guilt makes you downplay the full array of your feelings. When guilt rules there is less of a subjective pay off to look deeper. There’s just conflict and pain “down there.” Overcome by guilt or the fear of it, you can become emotionally blocked or closed off. You are able neither to enjoy the positive fruits of life nor experience the negative aspects.
-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

The Psychology of Guilt--Part I

This is the first in a three-part series on the psychology of guilt. It is written by a clinical psychologist who has been in private practice 27 years.

The Psychology of GUILT
(Ambivalence Turned Inwards)

From etymology (the study of historical linguistic change, especially as manifested in individual words)…

“Guilt stems from gylt ‘crime, sin, fault, fine,’ of unknown origin, though some suspect a connection to O.E. gieldan ‘to pay for, debt,’ but O.E.D. editors find this ‘inadmissible phonologically.’ The mistaken use for ‘sense of guilt’ is first recorded 1690. ‘Guilt by association’ is first recorded in 1941. ‘Guilty’ is from O.E. gyltig, from gylt.”

From wikipedia…

“Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that violation. It is closely related to the concept of remorse (which adds the dimension of sadness, shame or responsibility).”

In psychology, as well as in ordinary language, guilt is an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something that one believes one should not have done, or conversely, having not done something one believes one should have done. It gives rise to a feeling which does not go away easily, usually driven by conscience. Freud described guilt as a state, resulting from the struggle between the ego and the superego. Specifically, guilt was thought to occur because of overbearing “parental imprinting.” Freud rejected the role of God as punisher in times of illness or rewarder in time of wellness. Thus, while removing one source of guilt from patients, he described another. This was the unconscious force within the individual, and Freud thought this contributed to illness. In a more general but still Freudian sense, the victim of someone else's accident or bad luck may be offered criticism; the theory being that the victim may be at fault for having attracted the other person's hostility. Guilt was the factor that created the calamity, albeit the process was out of awareness. The punishment of suffering confirmed the fault of the sufferer. Guilt and its causes, merits, and demerits are common themes in psychology. The use of guilt here is not referring to the mere fact of being guilty of something, but refers to seeing or projecting one's mistakes, while not knowing what to do about them or refusing to correct them.
-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

Guilt Quotes--Part II

I found some more good quotes on guilt…

“Guilt is the reason they put the articles in Playboy.”--Dennis Miller

“Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups.”-- Cathy Guisewite

“No work for love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”—Alan Watts

“The only things that I can tell you is that every case I have reviewed I have been comfortable with the innocence or guilt of the person that I've looked at. I do not believe we've put a guilty... I mean innocent person to death in the state of Texas.”--George W. Bush

“Never regret anything because at one time it was what you wanted.”--Unknown

“It's regret, I think that really is the worst kind of pain. Yeah guilt is bad, and sadness is bad, but regret is the sickly combination of both.” --Unknown

“Is it possible that all the horrible things you've done have been forgotten by everyone-except yourself?”--Unknown
“Alas! How difficult it is not to betray one's guilt by one's looks.”--Ovid
“Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.”--Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but guilt is simply God's way of letting you know that you're having too good a time.”--Dennis Miller

“Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.”--Sarah Zettel

“Repentant tears wash out the stain of guilt.”--Saint Aurelius Augustine

“Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed.”--Cicero

“Guilt is a spiritual Rubicon.”--Jane Porter floating around in our culture and our consciousness.
“Why don't Jews drink? It interferes with their suffering.”--Henny Youngman

“How tedious is a guilty conscience!”--John Webster hat we can do. It is greatly misunderstood and because of this it is rarely given in the truest sense of the w
“We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility”--Thomas Szasz.

-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

Guilt Quotes--Part I

In my wanderings about the literature on guilt, I ran across some quotes. Some are sprinkled throughout an ebook I’ve written on guilt. Here’s some I thought were good:

“Guilt is anger directed at ourselves.”--Peter McWilliams

“If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.”--Albert Einstein

“If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you what to do, then YOU DESERVE IT.”--Frank Zappa

“It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”--Oscar Wilde

“Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway.”--Isabelle Holland

“The guilty think all talk is of themselves.”--Chaucer

“Guilt is absent when the act is justified.”--Anon

“For socialists, not just the wealth, but the guilt must be redistributed.”--Andrew Sandlin

“Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow.”--Horace Bushnell

“It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong; how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressive to admit guilt and to repent.” Hannah Arendt

“You can bear anything if it is not your fault.”--Katherine Fullerton Gerould

“Guilt is regret for what we’ve done. Regret is guilt for what we didn’t do.”--Unknown

“I have half a conscience to go ahead and do it, and feel guilty afterwards.”--Unknown

“Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.”--Erma Bombeck

“Fear is the tax which conscience pays to guilt”--Anon

“Whoever blushes confesses guilt, true innocence never feels shame.”--Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.”--Coco Chanel

“I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?”--John Steinbeck

-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

Dealing with Guilt--Part VII

This is the last in a seven-part series of articles on dealing with guilt. Please read the first six before reading this one. Written by a psychologist.

To continue…

There are some who will not abandon religion in their quest for a guilt-free existence. Unfortunately, religious people often suffer the greatest guilt.

“I’m an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.”--Edna O’Brien

For you, the last option is to repent. Although guilt is not seen as a very positive emotion, repentance is seen as a very important factor to improve our ways of thinking and behaving. In this light, the positive/transforming aspect of guilt can be that we admit our mistakes, ponder over them and motivate ourselves to not repeat negative actions. If you are Christian, this means relief from sin and acceptance into Heaven. That is REALLY BIG relief. Freudians would say repentance is the ultimate experience of reducing superego pressure. I’d say, if this is the only way you can experience relief from the pressure of guilt and/or shame, go for it. While it binds you to the mechanism of self-denigration, it also gives you a way out--better that than being guilty, suffering and having no escape.
Because Christians do not have a monopoly on guilt, neither do they have exclusive rights to repentance. Here’s an affirmation from a traditional repentance verse from Buddhism:

“For all the evil deeds I have done in the past, created by my body, speech and mind, from beginningless greed, hatred and delusion, I now know shame and repent them all.”--Unknown

In the “East," the above is perhaps the simplest but most widely practiced verse of repentance. The practice of Buddhist repentance is not so much the asking for divine forgiveness; rather, the clear recognition of our unskillful actions done intentionally or unmindfully through our body, speech and mind, which are the results of our lack of compassion and wisdom, originating from our attachment, aversion and delusion. After recognizing our misgivings, we make resolutions to be as mindful as we can, to never repeat them under any circumstances. In this sense, Buddhist repentance is about forgiving oneself through expressing regret and turning over a new leaf, absolving oneself of unhealthy guilt while renewing determination to further avoid evil, do good and purify the mind with greater diligence.

-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

Dealing with Guilt--Part VI

This is the sixth in a seven-part series of articles on dealing with guilt. Please read the first five before reading this one. Written by a psychologist.

To continue…

Can I make those irrational beliefs conscious and better deal with them, then? Here’s some techniques I sometimes use:

• Decide that if you must feel guilt, it will be for only five minutes. Guilt does have a purpose and if that purpose is to improve your behavior, legitimately, then yield, because you have learned something valuable. Feel the guilt. It won’t feel good, but it is instructive. This is deserved or healthy guilt. Then…
• Make amends. This is constructive behavior remedying healthy guilt. This is different from paying penance, which implies guilt but also hints that a guilt-free state of mind can be had for a price.
• Stop trying to be perfect. Nobody is perfect and don’t even try to be. Besides, imperfection is much more interesting. The world is not black and white. It is gray, and composed of wiggly, curvilinear, not straight right-angled lines. Get used to it and stop beating yourself up.
• After you’ve decided that you have suffered enough, get irritated with suffering and move on. For unhealthy guilt…
• Use an imagery scenario with "guilt" as an object you packaged in a nice box. Take it the top of a mountain and throw it off a cliff--for good.
• If you can’t do this, you still deserve to solve this problem. Value yourself, because…
• You deserve to be good to yourself. Repeat this out loud a few hundred times. (If this is a self-esteem problem, see The Four Powers of Self Esteem.)
• You deserve to have others be good to you, too!
• Develop perspective. Guilt and shame are obstacles because they keep us trapped in our self-centered melodrama entitled "How Bad I Am." They perpetuate suffering. Regret, on the other hand, realizes that we erred, leads us to purify, and motivates us to refrain from acting like that in the future. We improve while learning to feel better.
• Reflect on your motivation. An act done with a positive intention, especially without any self-interest is not necessarily negative, although other people may be harmed by it.
• Is your guilt more shame based? Think about the differences between shame and guilt.
• Think “externally” or “hyper-rationally.” Imagine a being from another planet came down to earth and reviewed your predicament from the perspective of a detached, disinterested alien. What would he think? Is it really such a big deal? Does this problem have more than one solution?
• Reframe. This is a psychological technique that allows one to look at things from the big picture, or to re-think the problem using a different perspective. Imagine that the person who did that (guilt-inducing) action no longer exists. That person is you, and you are different now. Is this person (you) who did that action five years ago the same person you are now? If s/he were exactly the same person, you would still be doing the same action. The present "you" exists in a continuum from that person but is not exactly the same as him or her. Look back at the person you were with compassion. You can understand the suffering and confusion s/he was experiencing that made her act in that way.
• Change or accept the circumstances. If you can change yourself or the situation, do so. Take charge (another form of assertiveness). If you can't change yourself or the situation for a good reason, accept it. Not acting when or where we can and could act can lead to frustration and guilt in the long run. Acting when and where we actually cannot or should not do anything can also produce guilt. Think ahead of the potential consequences when considering whether to accept what is vs. trying to do or say something to reduce guilt.
• The next-to-last antidote to guilt is forgiveness, which is the subject of the last of the three ebooks on ambivalences. Try to understand your motivations and to accept your limitations. Try to imagine another person doing the same thing you did (or didn’t do), who grew up thinking and feeling as you, thus behaving as you. You would probably “understand” such a person and have some empathy for his or her actions. Why not apply the same principles to yourself?

-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html

Dealing with Guilt--Part IV

This is the fourth in a seven-part series of articles on dealing with guilt. Please read the preceding three articles before reading this one. Written by a psychologist.

To continue…

Guilt-inducing ploys mislead or misdirect you. Because many irrational beliefs lie behind guilt, you may be unable to sort out the dynamic, much less your feelings. Speaking of feelings, the primary one underlying most of these manipulations will again, be anger, but be on guard for hurt, sad, and others. It is important to be objective with yourself when you are experiencing guilt. Be sure that your decisions are based on sound, rational thinking. In other words, make sure you are squarely aware of the ruse, your feelings and the alternative third standard.
What irrational beliefs or negative self-scripts are involved in guilt? Here are some examples. Beware of those who would try to elicit these to control you with guilt.

• I do not deserve to be happy.
• I am responsible for my family’s happiness.
• I am responsible if either positive or negative events happen to the members of my family.
• If my kids fail in any way, it's my responsibility.
• My children should never suffer in their childhood like I did in mine.
• My kids should have more material things than I did.
• There is only one "right" way to do things.
• It's bad to feel hurt and pain.
• It is my fault if others in my life are not happy.
• It is wrong to be concerned about myself.
• People are constantly judging me, and their judgment is important to me.
• It is important to save face with others.
• It is wrong to accept the negative aspects of my life without believing that I am responsible for them myself.
• I must not enjoy myself during a time when others expect me to be in mourning, grief or loss.
• I must never let down my guard; something I’m doing could be evil or wrong.
• I must always be responsible, conscientious and giving to others.
• How others perceive me is important as to how I perceive myself.
• No matter what I do, I am always wrong.
• I should never feel guilt.
• If I feel guilt, then I must be or have been wrong.

-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page202.html