Kiss My But!
By: Susan Kelley
Tags: Psychology, Relationships, Self Improvement

Kiss My But!

Letting Go of Reactive Guilt

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Unhealthy guilt is irrational. This is where you feel guilty but you have no real, actual control over the situation. It wasn’t your fault. There is, of course, healthy guilt, that is the kind we feel when we’ve actually done something wrong like hurt someone’s feelings intentionally or willfully stolen, thereby violating what we know is a code of ethical standards.

But what I want to address is rather the sense of reactive guilt. Reactive guilt is “a response to an overt act of having violated one’s own internal standards of acceptable behavior,” according to changingminds.org. So what does that mean, really? That you only did something that you, yourself, feel bad about? That no one else was harmed in the way?

Umm…

Let’s step back for a moment.

Examples of reactive guilt are things like:

“You should call your mother more often.” Yes, perhaps, but you don’t. You don’t call her because it is a thoroughly unpleasant experience, so yeah…except then you feel bad, and that reactive guilt thing kicks in.

“What if she, like, dies or something? Or just gets really sad that I didn’t call?”

You nailed it. Reactive.

A more productive response to reactive guilt is something along these lines:

But — “I would call my mom more often BUT it is not an enjoyable thing for me, so I don’t really think I need to do that. I’ll maybe sketch out a schedule for those things that I find acceptable and stop guilting myself.”

Now you’re catching on. More action, less reaction.

Another example doesn’t necessarily come strictly from within.

Your (manipulative) husband implies that taking a pottery class is selfish and will mean he has to watch the kids on Wednesday nights.

“Yeah, I probably won’t be very good at pottery anyway, and the money would be better spent on clothes for the kids.”

Hold on. Really?

How about the non-reactive response:

“I’m aware that I’m no pottery pro, but that’s not really the idea. I can balance a once-a-week pottery class, he’s not a babysitter, and I’ll suggest a couples’ cooking class or something next semester. When he says he’s not interested in couples’ cooking, I’ll say, ‘good — there’s a pottery class that night. Maybe.”

Ok, I get it. These are very canned, and reactive guilt is a loaded thing. It’s complex and varied and filled with nuances that go far beyond what some pre-planned silly back-and-forth can do.

The basic premise is that we feel reactive guilt when we believe that we have acted against our own best interests or moral compass, with or without outside pressure.

According to Good Therapy, guilt and shame often get all mixed up together, when in fact they can be very disparate things. I’ve written quite a bit about how guilty I feel about sticking with a terrible marriage and the damage I think it has done to the emotional growth of my kids, for example, but I am not genuinely ashamed of that.

There is a dividing line.

I feel shame for some actions I took along the way, but those are my own. Maybe I’m splitting hairs. We each come to feelings of guilt as an internal mechanism.

The connection seems to be that many of us feel guilt more over actions not taken, and shame over actions taken.