TRANSCRIPT
I was recently talking with a group of people about the subject of guilt, and we were all exploring different ways in which we felt guilty. What I heard from a lot of people is that they felt guilty about things for which they really actually were not guilty. It brought back to my mind the subject of what is guilt. What I think is there are two types of guilt: there is healthy guilt and there is unhealthy guilt. Maybe I could also say there is real and honest guilt and there is fake guilt.
So what is the difference between the two? Well, for starters, I know some people who say we should never feel guilty. We should always feel confident about what we’ve done, and we should feel okay about ourselves. Guilt is, by its very nature, unhealthy. Well, I don’t agree with that. I think what makes healthy guilt is when we actually connect with the unhealthiness of our behavior and we feel bad about it. We feel bad about the bad things that we’ve done, perhaps to other people, perhaps to ourselves. It could even be to animals, to the world. But when we do things that violate others’ boundaries, when we do things that cause trauma to others, when we do things that impede the healing paths of others, when we cause unnecessary pain to other people, we should feel bad about it. We’ve done something that isn’t good. We’ve done something that isn’t healthy. We haven’t been healthy people in the world.
And what is the function of guilt? Guilt is that nagging reminder inside of ourselves that we need to change, that we need to look more closely at ourselves, that we need to say, “What have we done and why have we done this?” What caused us to cause harm to others? What caused us to cause harm to ourselves? What caused us to behave in inappropriate or unhealthy ways? Now, the answer comes down to we do unhealthy things because unhealthy things were done to us. Hurt people hurt other people, and we hurt people because we are hurt. So when we feel guilt, it’s a sign that we’ve done something unhealthy because unhealthy things were done to us. It’s a clue from life, from within our body, from within our mind, from within our emotions, from within our psyches that we need to heal, that we need to look at our history, that we need to look at what in our history is causing our present behavior. It’s actually a sign of self-love that we feel healthy guilt.
But what about the other side of guilt? What about unhealthy guilt? What is unhealthy guilt? Well, for starters, unhealthy guilt, or maybe fake guilt is another way to put it, is when we feel guilty for things that we actually shouldn’t feel guilty for. When we actually feel guilty for our healthy behavior, when we feel bad for things that we’ve done that are good, when we tell the truth and it threatens other people and we feel bad about it, we want to undo the healthy things that we do. Where does this start? This starts in childhood. It starts when we have parents or other authority figures over us who can’t hear the truth, who don’t want to hear the truth, who are blocked, who don’t want to look at reality, and who are threatened when we naturally and spontaneously, as children, are honest and tell the truth. It overwhelms them.
So when we set boundaries with people who want to violate us, when we say, “No, you can’t violate us,” and when we fight for our right to be self-healing, self-protecting, when we say, “No, you can’t intrude into our personal space, emotionally or physically. You can’t hurt me,” the people around us, the people who we need to love us, the authority figures in our lives who have control over our lives, when they feel bad, but they can’t ignore themselves, basically we take on the guilt that they should be feeling. But it’s twisted because we feel guilty for causing them the pain that they should be feeling. We feel guilty for waking them up to feeling the guilt that they should feel.
When we take on this unhealthy sense of guilt because they can’t acknowledge the healthy guilt that they have, they can’t acknowledge the bad things that they are doing, the bad things that they have done, the bad things that were done to them. Basically, when their healing processes are so impeded, so thwarted that they can’t move forward, what happens is when they have power over other people, they force the other people to also become unhealthy. They force the other people in their lives to play their unhealthy game. They force the other people in their lives to share the same denial that they have. And part of what they do is they take their guilt and they project it. They project it onto you. They project it onto me.
And what happens is little children, and this is so common, is that we feel guilty for things that we should never feel guilty for. We feel responsible for problems that we never caused, or we feel responsible to solve problems that are totally beyond our control. We feel bad that the people around us feel bad. We feel bad for telling the truth and that it wakes other people up and causes them to feel the pain that they need to feel in order to grow. And they can get very, very angry at us. They can blame us. They can say, “You’re making me feel bad! How dare you criticize me?” Well, maybe the criticisms that we have of other people are actually really quite appropriate. Maybe some of the things that we’re saying to these people actually are really healthy and very natural.
Maybe when somebody hits us and we say, “Don’t hit us! What’s wrong with you for hitting me?” the other person says, “Oh my God, something is wrong with me,” and they feel really bad. They feel guilty, but they can’t accept it. They can’t own it. They can’t, “Oh my God, there’s something wrong or something pathological with me.” So they say, “How dare you stop me?” and they get angry and they make you feel bad for it. And so what it ends up with is a pattern of people in their lives accepting guilty feelings from other people that they shouldn’t have and living with a sense of feeling guilty, perhaps even for their own existence, and living their lives trying to make other people happy, feeling guilty that they’re not making other people happy.
I think one of the most common ways that this plays out, and I see this all the time, is people, adults, not having their own independent lives, not growing, not healing, not having healthy relationships, not having their own sense of independence, and instead living to make their parents happy. Actually living to try to make their parents happy, living to try to fill in the gaps of their parents’ own problems, living their lives basically in the way that their parents should have taken care of them when they were children. Now adults are trying to care for their older parents, trying to make them happy, trying to fill in the gaps of their parents’ loneliness, trying to make up for their parents’ lack of healthy relationships, and feeling guilty that they’re not giving their entire lives to their parents. And their parents want them to feel this way. So many parents want their children to grow up and take care of them.
But is that appropriate? Is that the job of a child to grow up and take care of their parents? Even worse than that, how many children are parentalized? How many children from the time they’re one, two years old learn from their parents that their responsibility in life is to take care of their parents, is to make their parents feel happy, is to make their parents feel less alone, to make their parents feel less guilty? Maybe even to become the surrogate spouse that their parents don’t even have, the surrogate servant that their parents don’t have, the surrogate helper, the surrogate friend. Hmm, so many children really grow up feeling guilty that they’re not the perfect parent for their own parent. But the reality is deep inside, their parents should feel guilty that they weren’t better parents for their own children. Their parents have set up this whole dynamic of setting up a false sense of guilt, an unhealthy sense of guilt, a fake sense of guilt in their children. And for many people, that false sense of guilt can carry through.
Their whole lives, they can live their whole lives from the age of 2 to the age of 100, feeling guilty for their existence, feeling that they’re not doing enough to help other people who really don’t even necessarily deserve it. So what do we do? How do we sort it out? How do we sort out what is our healthy guilt? What are the things that we really should feel guilty for, and what are the things that we shouldn’t feel guilty for?
Well, the only way that I’ve found is to figure out what my true self is. To figure out who I really am on the inside, not what other people wanted me to be, not what other people expected me to be, not to be the person that received all the projections from the authority figures in my life and from the world around me. Now, because still, people still project a lot of stuff onto me. Instead, to find out who I really am, who I really am in my centered self, who my independent, emotionally connected self is.
And when I am able to do that through healing my traumas, through connecting to the truth of my feelings, I don’t like saying “inner child” so much because that gets into sort of weird spirituality stuff. But in a way, who was the real child that I was when I was little? And who did that person grow up to be? The real honest Daniel within me, the real honest self within each person. When I connect with that, that allows me to see who I am and who other people really are, who my true self is and who their true self is. And by comparison, to see what my false self is—the fake me, that me that I am trying to be what everybody else wants me to be—the little child that wasn’t allowed to be my true self.
And by comparison, also to see the false self, the fakeness in other people and their disconnect with themselves. Because so many people are so disconnected with who they really are. When I’m able to see who I really am, who other people really are, the ways that other people violate me—they violate the truth of me, violate the truth of my boundaries, violate the truth of myself. And when I see what other people’s true selves are, what their true boundaries are, I’m able to see my actions in perspective, and I’m able to see other people’s actions in perspective.
I’m able to see when they do things that are unhealthy to me, to themselves, and to other people. And I’m able to see when I do unhealthy things to other people and to myself. And when I do unhealthy things to other people and myself, and because I’m still a somewhat partially traumatized person, I’m not perfect. I still do unhealthy things to myself and to others. When I see that, I’m able to feel guilty for that.
And when I see other people doing those unhealthy things to other people and to themselves and to me, I think they should be feeling guilty. And if they don’t feel guilty, I think, “Ooh, this is a person that I need to take distance from.” And also, when they feel guilty and they try to put that guilt onto me, I’m able to say, “I don’t do that. I don’t play that game.” And it’s hard. It’s not easy because it’s an imperfect science, or you could say maybe it’s not even a science at all.
But I think the most important thing, again, is to really figure out the healthiness of my childhood. A lot of it has been really taking distance from my family, the people that set up these unhealthy patterns in me. And through that, really connecting with my independent self, in a way restarting the whole process of finding out who I am. And through that, clearly seeing who other people are.
Because as a child, like all children, unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed the real liberty to fully see who I was and who my parents were. And through that, I got all distorted in what my sense of guilt was. When I acted out in unhealthy ways, I often didn’t feel guilty about it, but I felt guilty about the things that I shouldn’t have felt guilty for.
Well, as I’ve healed, as I’ve done a lot of self-exploratory work in my life, really in my adult life, and really connecting with my own history of traumas, I’ve been able to put myself in perspective, my parents in perspective, my grandparents in perspective, and my behavior in perspective. And the whole subject of guilt really becomes much more clear.