Guilt is our inner compass, which tells us that we have gone astray, have somehow betrayed our principles, ourselves. This structuring emotion helps us to be more empathetic and considerate in our relationships with others. But it can also greatly complicate our lives.
Tension, awkwardness, anxiety, self-blame — we painfully experience situations in which we had to break our obligations and promises or not justify someone’s expectations. However, the paradox is that the ability to experience our guilt is a sign of our psychological health, experts say. This feeling makes us understand that we have acted badly, betrayed our values, violated moral principles.
“For example, I get angry with myself all day after a conflict with a supermarket clerk. After all, it was possible to restrain oneself, to show patience, understanding and endurance, not to respond to rudeness. But I got into a squabble, and such behavior is contrary to my internal code, and now I worry that I behaved unworthily, I regret my words and I am ready to apologize, ”the reader shares with us.
“Awareness of guilt makes us better,” says social psychologist David Myers. — Obeying this feeling, we confess, apologize, help others, better feel the suffering of others and try to avoid bad deeds. And this means that we ourselves become more sensitive, and our relationships with others become more human.”
Guilt is so easy to arouse in each of us that others often use it to manipulate us.
The stricter and more demanding we are of ourselves, the more likely we are to experience guilt. In fact, this sharp feeling is a sign that allows us to move in the right direction. It is a structuring emotion, a guarantee that we will not confuse good and evil.
“A society without guilt would be the most lawless and most dangerous in the world,” says emotional psychology researcher Carroll Izard. However, in practice, the feeling of guilt does not always lead us to reasonable and humane actions. Moreover, more often it plunges us into an abyss of exhausting and senseless anxiety. Why is this happening?
Universal emotion
Just like anger and surprise, sadness and fear, guilt is one of the most universal and most ancient emotions. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan considered it almost innate. His colleague Melanie Klein, one of the leading experts on early childhood, argued that it arises in the first months of life because of the mixed feelings that a child has for his mother: he can love and not love her at the same time.
Guilt is part of the mental life of a healthy person. (Only some mentally ill people who perceive other people as inanimate objects are deprived of it.) “It is the basis of our conscience and morality, or“ Super-I ”, as Freud called this structure of our personality,” explains psychoanalyst Ekaterina Kalmykova. “And it is important for us to strive not to “cure” this feeling, but to accept it, to learn to understand where we are really to blame and where we are not.”
Guilt is so easy to arouse in each of us that others often use it to manipulate us. “So you don’t have time to visit me? the grandmother says to her granddaughter with a sigh. “Well then, come to my grave.”
Our inner judge does not always distinguish between the real and the imaginary, and therefore, in some sense, we are all doomed to be guilty and suffer. We create, for example, our ideal image, and then worry that we cannot live up to it, regarding it almost as a moral fall: “I hate myself because I am not as good (smart, caring, patient) as I should be «. Worse, we can suffer from our own imperfection and punish ourselves: «Give up the pleasures», «Think of others, and then about yourself.»
Constantly feeling guilty, we begin to treat ourselves worse. You can cope with this feeling by analyzing your actions, admitting your guilt and trying to make amends in one way or another. “But sometimes a person is unable to do such (sometimes painful) work and chooses a destructive reaction, thereby only exacerbating the problem,” says Ekaterina Kalmykova. — The feeling of one’s own «badness» can be accompanied by anger and even hatred towards those whom a person has harmed. Or he seems to “wall up” the guilt inside himself, tightly closing the “door” to it. And he lives like nothing happened. This protection only works temporarily.
deceptive feeling
Guilt is not always justified. Sometimes it haunts us even though we have not committed any wrongdoing. A mother who leaves her baby with a nanny to go to the movies can feel like a real criminal. Another phenomenon is well known: when a miraculous survivor of a plane or car accident is tormented by guilt for the fact that the rest of the passengers died. How does this deceptive feeling arise, which is inevitably accompanied by strong feelings and a constant (often even increasing with time) need to atone for one’s guilt?
“This is how the protective reaction of the psyche of a person who cannot recognize his own impotence then and the impossibility of changing what happened today is manifested,” explains Ekaterina Kalmykova. — There is a fantasy that he took advantage of someone else’s chance to survive, took it away from another. Experiencing guilt for a fictional reason, a person actually suffers from his helplessness.
There are many people who for decades bear the burden of guilt for the divorce of their parents, for their illness or death.
When a person blames himself for any reason, even without committing a moral offense, this is neurotic guilt. “She also has pain and shame, but she also has a special characteristic,” says existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. This feeling looks wistfully familiar: “Of course it’s my fault! It’s always my fault!» This feeling — «guilty, as always» — is formed in childhood, when the child cannot yet give a balanced assessment: what can be demanded of oneself, and what cannot be done.
For example, he cannot be held responsible for the mother’s mood. There are many people who for decades bear the burden of guilt for the divorce of their parents, for their illness or death. Of course, this is not their fault, but the feeling learned in childhood and entrenched creates a kind of rails along which their life rolls. How to cope with this feeling that poisons life? “We need to figure out how it was formed,” answers Svetlana Krivtsova, “and rethink all situations of childhood guilt from the standpoint of our adult self.”
Choice of two evils
Guilt is multifaceted. We are going to Turkey for a week, instead of spending a vacation next to a sick mother. But a restless conscience demands that we be punished, and therefore in Turkey we unconsciously forbid ourselves to enjoy the sea and the sun. Or another plot: a man promises his mistress to leave his wife for years. Only right now he cannot do this: she is in poor health, she needs him too much. Guilt avoids a difficult situation of choice.
I must say that the very concept of a misdemeanor, violation of a moral norm is not always unambiguous. The conflicts of life that we face are sometimes so complex that it is extremely difficult to establish the boundaries between bad and good. Immanuel Kant argued that lies are always evil. But how many examples of noble lies do we know! Who, for example, will condemn negotiators who deceive a terrorist in order to neutralize him? What about lying to save the innocent?
And sometimes we get trapped between feeling and duty, when any choice makes us feel guilty. An excellent example of this is Nikolai Leskov’s story «The Man on the Clock». Standing at his post near the Winter Palace, sentry Postnikov hears screams from the direction of the Neva and realizes that a man is drowning in a hole. To leave a post means committing a crime, to stay on a post means a person will die before his eyes.
After painful hesitation, the soldier decides to save the drowning man. However, he violated the oath, and his sense of guilt is such that he is ready to suffer any punishment and is even pleased when he receives “only” two hundred rods in the end. This story is based on a true case. Each of us has faced dilemmas of this kind, and only our conscience, our ideas about good and evil, can help us cope with them.
Wanting to be yourself
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argues that the only thing we should really feel guilty about is the rejection of our desires, «moral cowardice.» This, of course, is not about the fact that any of our whims must be immediately satisfied. And certainly not about criminal inclinations or perversions. He speaks of the life force that can fill our existence.
For example, the thirst to compose or draw, which encourages poets and artists to create, despite poverty and hunger. This is our desire to be independent, choose our own path in life, manage our time, be close to those we love — no matter what others think about this.
It is possible to get out of the state of guilt only through the understanding of the present, through the recognition of one’s true desires.
“A real sense of guilt suggests that we have done something that does not correspond to our essence, and therefore have lost a sense of our integrity,” Svetlana Krivtsova believes. — Guilt, if it is real guilt, is accompanied by severe pain, shame, it deprives you of peace, does not give you the right to feel sorry for yourself, to sympathize with yourself. It’s as if the person can’t be himself anymore.»
It is possible to get out of the state of guilt only through an understanding of the present, through the recognition of one’s true desires and … mistakes. Through our ability to say: «I want», «I accept». By taking responsibility for your aspirations and actions. Conversely, the more we strive to escape from the gloomy or somewhat frightening aspects of our «Self», the stronger the feeling of guilt will be in us.