Guilt Will Eliminate Your Joy and Then Blame You For It
By: Jason Henry
Tags: Personal Growth, Personal Development, Self, Self Improvement, Guilt

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

I’ve been having recurring nightmares for the past four weeks with the same theme. It involved me and a woman I dated a few years ago.

We had chemistry and history (and a few other subjects) but I suggested that we see other people. I had a feeling that as much as we liked each other, we weren’t as good of a match as we probably should be.

Later that year we met up and had a chat. Turns out she did find someone else and he proved me right. He was a better fit for her than I was. The only problem was that he passed away just as the relationship was about to take on a more serious commitment label.

I couldn’t help but think that I could’ve helped her to avoid this if only I had decided to be with her.

Oh if only I could predict the future more accurately, then she wouldn’t have had to suffer. Sometimes I thought she still was.

But after having the fourth dream about her in four weeks, I did what I felt I had to do.

I spoke to her and asked her how she was doing. Maybe there was some psychic reason she kept popping up. I told her about my recurring dreams which made me fear that she wasn’t okay, but she responded that she was fine.

I didn’t mean to alarm her but I told her not to worry because the issue was clearly in me.

So I began to think about the content and emotional tone of the dreams. Then I realized that while it was true that I was having recurring dreams about her being angry at me, I had been having awful dreams in general about all sorts of stuff.

I could never remember the dreams with any significant detail, but I remembered how I felt waking up: lousy, unmotivated and that I was or had made a mistake.

And then it hit me. I was wracked with guilt.

Guilt is berating yourself for a perceived mistake. If you fail to get something, hurt someone or are unsuccessful at carrying out what you or your tribe think is right, guilt can only come up when you get angry at yourself for your failure.

If you come from a religious background, guilt is the hatred you feel for yourself when you fall short of what your deity wanted from you. Guilt is the antithesis of self-love.

It’s no wonder I had these dreams. No one was actually angry with me. No one was blaming me for anything. I was angry at myself because I thought I made a mistake that hurt people.

But even if people were angry with me, I cannot feel guilt unless I condemn myself.

I think one reason people maintain their guilt is the same reason people refuse to forgive. When someone does something wrong, they are labelled a bad person.

That’s why cancel culture has no problem mining someone’s tweets from 2011. “Once a bad person, always a bad person.” But the truth is that this person isn’t necessarily a bad person. They probably just had a bad attitude in a moment several years ago.

Apparently, people aren’t allowed to make mistakes. But we will eventually look back at this era of condemnation and see that those who spearheaded it were dead wrong for doing so. They were just projecting.

It is fair to call out injustice when you see it. But to maintain anger at someone who is hurting others is stupid. Take it from someone who has been condemning himself for god knows how long.

It didn’t make me a better person. I didn’t heal. If anything, it all got shoved into my shadow because I had to hide from the fact that I was a flawed person. It’s utterly ridiculous! Of course I’m flawed. Who isn’t? Call me out when I’m wrong but there’s literally no point in maintaining anger.

Of course it is easy when you’re angry at someone else because you think you’re not doing anything to yourself. But in reality you’re just holding onto burning coals as some sort of act of righteousness. Holding onto resentment causes stress so you’re just hurting yourself anyway.

Is it any wonder it would be hard to drop the self-guilt? If you can’t see how letting go of condemning yourself makes a hell of a lot of sense, you won’t do it for other people. If you can’t see how condemning others is foolish, would you really let yourself off the hook?