Guilt

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When we mess up, we shouldn't dwell on feeling guilty. What....you say??? That makes no sense! While feelings of guilt & remorse are supposed to prick our conscience & help us to see how our actions may have affected someone else in a negative way, & while such feelings are useful in helping us to learn from what we said or did & to try not to repeat our mistakes, focusing on the guilt & not the lesson learned, serves no good purpose. It benefits no one.

I believe we are wired to experience guilty feelings when we do something wrong, because that's our brain's way of keeping us from killing each other & preserving our species. I mean, if we didn't feel remorse or guilt when we hurt someone or did something bad, then we might continue doing it, or someone might react negatively to what we did, & it could start a chain reaction of negative events that could be catastrophic. 

Take two people in a committed relationship, for instance. One of them is abusive to the other, & feels no guilt. That happens often. We hear about such people on the evening news, when someone has paid the price with their life. It could be that the abuser continued on with feeling no guilt & the abuse escalated to the point of death to their victim. Or it could be that the victim had simply had enough of the abuse & lashed out at their abuser. Either way, had the first person only just allowed themself to feel guilty & to express remorse, things might have turned out very differently. 

The same holds true with anyone who has spoken a harsh word, lost their temper, been impatient, cut someone off in traffic, lied, cheated, behaved selfishly or whatever. Feeling guilty for doing any of those things is a good thing, because it helps spurn us into action, & if we allow ourselves to learn from this guilt, then it will help prevent us from repeating the actions that we are feeling guilty for in the first place.

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People get guilt & shame confused though. Guilt is designed to spurn us to act in a different way in the future, than we did in the first place. Shame on the other hand, is designed to keep us trapped in the cycle of feeling guilty. It's really hard to learn & move on, when we are constantly punishing ourselves for what we did wrong. There are some things that we may have done that are so bad, that we SHOULD have deep remorse for. For those things, we should make sure we can see the lesson we need to learn, & apply that lesson to our life. We need to do all we can to make amends to whomever we have wronged or hurt. 

BUT........

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We should not be in a continual state of guilt & remorse to the point where we are hanging our head in shame, refusing to smile, denying ourselves happiness, & basically punishing ourselves because we feel that is what we deserve. When we do that, not only are we not seeing the lesson & trying to move on in a different direction, but we are taking the focus off of the wrong thing we did & the lesson learned from it, & placing the focus instead on garnering sympathy from others, perhaps even the person we wronged, by making others feel sorry for us because we are feeling so distraught & sad. WE are not the ones who deserve the sympathy - the one(s) we've hurt are. Yet when we get stuck in the rut of shame, we are basically telling others to feel sorry for us because we are being punished unfairly for what we did wrong.

Sometimes, the consequences of whatever it is that we did wrong, are pretty huge. We may have to face those consequences & endure them. We should not try to get out of the consequence we have earned. It might be ugly, but had we not done what we did, the outcome might have been different. Maybe the outcome would have remained the same if we had done things differently, but perhaps how we felt about the outcome would have been different. 

Let me use the example of the abusive couple again. Let's say that the abuser in the example felt remorse for abusing the other person. Let's say the abuser felt SUCH remorse & guilt, that they allowed it to affect their demeanor, their mood, & the attitude about who & what they are, & about life itself. What often happens in situations such as this, is that the victim of the abuse ends up feeling sorry for the one who committed the abuse against them, because they are behaving in such a pitiful manner, that to be mad or hurt at the person for the abuse they committed, makes the victim now feel guilty for wanting the abuser to feel remorse & to face the consequence that was deserved. 

When we allow shame to dictate how we will view ourselves & the things we have said or done, then we are deflecting the guilt & remorse that rightfully belongs to us, & are putting it onto the one(s) we have wronged, or onto the people who have witnessed the wrong thing we did. We are saying "I know what I did was wrong, & I am scum of the earth & deserve this miserable existence I am now having to live with". Such statements as that, evoke pity from others, even if the person never actually makes the statement verbally, but just has the attitude which that statement conveys. If we have done something wrong, then we SHOULD feel guilty for what we did. 

BUT......

Then we should learn from that mistake, do our best to atone for it & make amends if necessary, to whomever we may have wronged, & then MOVE ON!! We don't have to live in the mistake. We don't have to be defined by it. We ALL make mistakes, & we ALL hurt others at one time or another. Maybe the consequence of what we did could have been avoided if we hadn't done what we did, but then maybe it would have happened anyway, & what we did just hastened the process. It's hard to say. All I know is that we prevent ourselves from learning from our mistakes & ending the hurt & moving on, when we wallow in shame & self-pity for what we've done, instead of trying to apply the lesson we have learned from it, & trying to make things better. 

We will keep seeing stormy skies when we wallow in our shame
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It is unfair to those we have wronged, when we put them in a position of having to feel sorry for us when they see the self-pity we are wallowing in, for the thing we said or did. It serves no useful purpose when we do that, & in fact, it may prevent the one who was wronged, from being able to move on & heal, because rather than being rightfully angry & hurt for what was done to them, & being able to grieve from the hurt, then heal, then move on, they are prevented from expressing their right to do just that, because they are busy trying to comfort & reassure the one in the wrong, & to let them know that they are NOT scum of the earth as they are claiming themself to be. Does this make sense? I hope so, because I am done.

So in a nutshell...........

(Haha, fooled you....you thought I was done, now didn't you? Okay, I'm almost done)...When you mess up, & you hurt someone, then APOLOGIZE (be sincere about it - don't give a half-baked apology, & don't shift the responsibility for your behavior onto someone else by saying something like "I'm sorry you were hurt by what I said"). Then ask for forgiveness. Asking for forgiveness goes beyond just saying you are sorry. It is apologizing, but it is asking the other person to extend forgiveness to you for what you did. They don't have to forgive you if they don't want to. That is their choice. But the right thing to do is to ask for forgiveness just the same. Then....once you have done this, ask yourself what you will do differently to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.  

THEN DO IT!

LEARN FROM IT!

MOVE ON!

Dwelling on shame & torturing yourself with an attitude of self-pity, takes the focus off of you & what you did, & puts it onto how much YOU are hurting for what you did (instead of how much someone else is hurting for what you did). I know that not every reader believes in God. So for those who do, let me just say that God gives us guilt to teach us & guide us into making better choices. Satan gives us shame to keep us trapped into the cycle of guilt & remaining stagnant in the pain that our actions caused. Shame keeps us from healing & moving forward, & it prevents the one we have wronged from being able to heal & move on also, because the focus is put into making US feel better instead of making the one(s) we wronged feel better. Whether one believes in God & Satan or not, the concept of what I'm saying still makes sense. This is some food for thought. Enjoy the meal....