Unfortunately, guilt is one of the most powerful of motivators for people all over the world. It tells us what to do. It tells us by saying: If you don’t do this you are going to feel really bad later. It tells us by saying: S/he is so sad, so fragile, so broken, so whatever, that I just have to do this for him/her. It tells us by telling us that duty and obligation are good things, which inform us of the strength or goodness of our characters. But guilt is actually one of the most powerful disturbers of mental health.
The most disturbing of all of the aspects of guilt is in the fact that we have all been taught that it is a good thing to feel guilty. We need a guilty conscience, don’t we, to keep us in line? Guilt, when thought of this way, is a kind of guide. It will keep us clean. It will make us into good people. Indeed, many of our identities are based entirely on how we deal with guilt. If I strive always to do the right thing, I am very likely responding to unconscious guilt triggers to BE someone who always does the right thing. If, on the other hand, I am fairly often working on being “bad,” I could be responding to unconscious triggers that dictate the behavior which will prove to me that I still exist—for if I am “bad” at least then I exist to a world that otherwise does not know I’m here.
The problem with both using guilt as a chief motivator and/or identifying with guilt is that as long as guilt has that much power, the authentic self has very little. Indeed, we can live entire lifetimes out of duty, obligation and the guilt, which makes us do those duties and honor those obligations, yet not live a single day fully alive. Guilt actually prevents our waking up to who we are.
But if we take away guilt, won’t we all just go to hell in the proverbial hand-basket? How will we know right from wrong if we don’t have guilt or potential feelings of guilt to guide us? How will we know how to behave if we remove guilt from the equation?
The fact that we even ask such questions is evidence of how dependent we are on guilt and its often incessant nagging to guide our behavior, even our thoughts and those feelings we will allow into conscious awareness. We need guilt. And to the degree that we are dependent on guilt, that is the same degree to which we are completely out of touch with our own authenticity. In fact, the more aware we are of how tired we are of feeling guilty, the closer we are coming to realizing the authentic self.
If you get nothing else from this blog, get this: The authentic heart is enough to guide us. Compassion and passion are enough to guide us to do for and with others what is real to do for and with others. Passion is enough to help guide us into the right careers and hobbies. Compassion for self and other is enough to guide us into appropriate boundaries and appropriate giving. Experience with compassion for self, can guide us into making the right relationship choices. We don’t need guilt. It is a total waste of mind and heart space.
But we have not been taught to trust the human heart. We have been taught to trust guilt instead. It is as if the world were saying to us: Here’s the list of shoulds—if you don’t do them then you should feel guilty. That list is as long as the one given to us by our parents and other forces in our early upbringing, as well as that additional list we add to the original one through magical thinking.
Magical thinking is made up of bargains: IF I do this, THEN that will happen. When we are raised—as most of us have been—to believe that guilt is an important guide, then experience and negative reinforcement perpetuates that belief, adding to it with all manner of bargains. IF I go mow the grass for my sister again today, (even though I really hate doing it and she could get someone else to do it easily) THEN she will continue to like me and believe that I’m a great older brother.
We honor the list instead of honoring our authenticity. When I mow the grass for my sister yet again, while carrying that ball and chain of resentment up and down the grass I mow, what I need to know is that that resentment is actually trying to save my life. It is telling me that what I am doing is not authentic. There is something else waiting in the wings—something much more authentic—that I can do with my time and energy. But I’m afraid that if I break the pattern and do something more authentic, my sister will get really mad and will no longer think of me in a positive way. So, I choose guilt—most often saying something like, “I have no choice.”
Guilt is a choice. It calls us to obey it, but if we choose authenticity over guilt, we are making a choice. Likewise, if we make a choice to go with the guilt, we have made a choice. The calling to obey is only there with such a strong, loud voice, because we have been perpetually obeying its incessance. We may choose to do something different, something more authentic, and then spend time writing down all the nasty things that guilt says to us after we have chosen to disobey it. If we do that we are likely to come to know just how abusive that guilt actually is.