Guilt

I’ve told you before about the differences between basic or primary emotions and complex or secondary emotions. Guilt belongs to the second group, and that’s what this article is about.

We feel guilt when we do or say something that in some way goes against our morals, our principles and/or the social rules of the culture we live in. The remorse and distress are greater if the consequences hurt people who matter to us. Although it’s considered a negative emotion because it makes us feel bad, like all emotions, guilt has a purpose for human beings and, when it’s experienced in a healthy way, it’s an emotion that motivates and pushes us to repair the harm we’ve caused, whether through an apology, a confession, helping to improve a particular situation…

Guilt also helps us reflect on ourselves, on our morals, where we stand on them, which direction we want to take…

Then there’s guilt that’s irrational in origin, badly managed and useless; I say “useless” because it no longer does its job. Basically, it’s surplus baggage. When does this happen?

• Some people have a natural tendency to feel guilty about everything, with or without reason. They tend to be people with low self-esteem, insecure and not very assertive, who tend to take responsibility for the negative consequences of situations when there’s no reason to or, if there is, take responsibility in an exaggerated and harmful way. Guilt is often irrational in origin because, as common sense tells us, nobody can be responsible for whatever goes wrong 100% of the time, and this is easy to check when you talk to the person, break the situation down and test their interpretation of what happened.
• Unhealthily managed guilt feeds itself through a set of irrational beliefs (life schemas, the ways of seeing the world that each of us has and has grown up with) and negative automatic thoughts. These are what nourish guilt so that it weighs more and more and lasts over time. People rarely notice what they’re doing, because they were brought up with this way of thinking, so they experience it as something “natural”, not irrational, and therefore don’t realise how much it contributes to their pain.

On top of this vicious circle of guilt, the person:

1. Either doesn’t dare to do anything to change the situation.
2. Or can’t do anything because they feel guilty about a situation that’s beyond their control. It doesn’t depend on them. Guilt of irrational origin.
3. Or has already taken one or more steps to resolve it, but they didn’t bring the results they hoped for, and they still feel guilty.

In every case we find ourselves in the same situation: a block, a standstill. And on top of that, the person experiences guilt as genuine torment.

How do we work with guilt?

At this point guilt stops being an emotion with a purpose and becomes a useless, meaningless burden. So what do we do with it? How do we work with guilt in each of these situations?

1. In the first case, the aim is to motivate the person to take action to resolve things and try to repair the harm, if possible. Depending on the case, we’ll first train the person in decision-making, social skills… But the ultimate goal will always be to carry out some kind of reparative action.
2. In the second case, it’s more about working at a cognitive level on the irrational thoughts and ideas that make the person feel unjustifiably guilty about something that doesn’t depend on them. Inflated responsibility, so typical of OCD but also found in many people who don’t have the disorder, will be a key point to work on here.
3. In the third case, the work will also be cognitive, but this time focused more on increasing the person’s frustration tolerance. We need to help them, as we’d say colloquially, “turn the page”.

In my view, the “easiest” situation (the least bad of the bad options) is the first one, where we work towards a change in the context. I find the other two more complicated, because cognitive work means tackling deeply rooted ideas. I’d also add that, at least in my experience in clinic, people never come in with the main goal of managing their guilt better; that’s something that comes up later, and its importance for the main problem (the one that brought the person to therapy) becomes clearer as the sessions go by. That’s when the interest in working on it arises.