Reflections on how guilt can operate to either enhance or damage our relationships, and how guilt can be an important companion to our growth.
Some people avoid experiencing guilt at all costs, even when the guilt is warranted. Other people spend far too long in guilt, and they experience it at times when it is not warranted but, for various reasons, is the preferable choice. Guilt can operate as an illuminating guide on the path forward, or it can become the default emotion that we experience as a way of avoiding more difficult feelings underneath.
Healthy guilt is the feeling that let’s us know we have hurt someone we love. It is part and parcel of caring deeply for someone – that in our flawed and imperfect condition, we will hurt, disappoint, and let down the people we care about. Healthy guilt is associated with an urge to reach out and repair – and so it is associated with re-connecting and making amends in service of the relationship. Without clear access to this healthy guilt, we can become defensive in all sorts of creative and automated ways – we may minimise the pain we have inflicted on the other, we may turn the other person into a monster in our mind (“they deserved it!”), we may justify our actions in ways that try to avoid noticing the full force of the guilt, we may take on the victim position ourselves to elicit care-taking from others, or we may ignore the situation completely and distract ourselves with other less-guilt-inducing things (time to jump on social media…). All of these defences keep us distant from the discomfort of the guilt, but they also keep us distant from reaching out and repairing the relationship. If we ignore this kind of guilt, we ignore a chance to strengthen the relationship. In defending against a feeling of guilt, we detach a little more from the relationship. We choose comfort in the present moment over the resilience of relationships in the longer-term.
When it comes to long-term relationships, a pattern can emerge where repair and ‘making amends’ just doesn’t take place at all. Tiny traumas take place every day, perhaps, and yet each person sweeps things under the rug, continuing on without confronting the hurt and making the repairs. “Life is too busy” some might say – but what is more important than taking care of your relationships? They are the bedrock of our wellbeing. If you nurture them every day, in the smallest of ways, then they grow stronger over time. If you damage them but then never look at the damage – or if you are damaged within them, but never expect to have that damage acknowledged – then the relationship becomes weaker and more fragile over time. It can even become an engine of your own self-destruction.
Unhealthy guilt is something different. It is the guilt that a person feels in place of another feeling that they wish to avoid. Unhealthy guilt doesn’t fit the situation. For example, it can be the result of noticing an unjust situation, but choosing to take the emotional hit rather than to notice the urge to assert oneself. Unhealthy guilt is the feeling that Partner A might experience every time Partner B screams and yells at them about not doing something ‘well enough’. Rather than notice the anger that Partner A feels towards Partner B for treating them so critically and aggressively, Partner A attacks themself and notices only an unhealthy guilt inside which keeps them apologetic, remorseful, and silent. What began as anger towards someone else becomes self-attack (unhealthy guilt).
But, given how uncomfortable guilt can feel, why would we ever choose this unhealthy guilt over another emotion like anger? We can usually trace this back to our earliest years of life and what we learned, both explicitly and implicitly, about certain emotions. What did you learn about feeling anger? What did you learn about feeling guilt? What did you learn about keeping people who mattered to you close? Were you more likely to be accepted and cared for if you were crying and remorseful, or if you were expressing your dislike of a situation loudly and aggressively? Did the people around you acknowledge when they hurt you, and try to make repairs and re-connect? Or were you required to sweep things under the rug and never bring it up again? Or to take on the responsibility even when it wasn’t yours to take on? “I’m so sorry that I did something that made you treat me so poorly”. What were the maps that got created inside of you about how helpful or destructive different emotions could be in terms of keeping relationships in tact? Did you have a relationship early in life that showed you how anger, guilt, love, firm boundaries, and warmth could all co-exist inside a relationship without being punished, rejected, humiliated, or overbearingly coddled?
Healthy guilt is important. It is an acknowledgment deep inside of us that someone we care about has been hurt by our actions. Regardless of “blame”, it is a signal that we might want to reach out and check-in with that person, and to try and repair the connection. Repair is not always possible. Repair is not always something that you will decide is best for you. But healthy guilt is a nudge towards it, and it gives us something to consider alongside all the logic and reasoning and cognitive-word-salad that can go on in our heads when we find ourselves in conflict. Wisdom comes from taking our emotions into account, not just our logical mind. But the challenge can be to first get very clear on what those emotions are – because defences are tricky and sly, and it’s not always obvious to us what we are feeling.
Unhealthy guilt is a way of doing what we think is needed to keep a relationship in tact, and/or to avoid the discomfort of standing up for ourselves. It is at the expense of our vitality, however. We crush ourselves down in those moments, rather than face the other feelings inside us. We choose ‘keeping the relationship in tact’ over our own self-worth. If you notice that this happens for you, you can ask yourself in those moments “what am I feeling underneath this veil of guilt and self-attack?”.
I could write about guilt for hours. And this is what I have learnt most vividly in my last few years as a therapist – that one single emotion can hold so much important information about who we are, how we learnt to be in the world, what fuels or repairs our suffering, and how disconnected we can be from what happens at our most basic emotional level inside. It is the most courageous and illuminating quest to get to know your emotional landscape, and it far supersedes the world of cognitions and reasoning in its transformative power (in my humble opinion).
Komentar