Is guilt healthy and can it be felt while enjoying life?

0

Among the difficult feelings that befall a person, depriving them of strength, driving them into a dead end, the feeling of guilt takes pride of place. How does it appear? Can guilt deceive us, and if so, why does it happen? What to do if the damage caused or a mistake cannot be corrected? Is there still something that can be done? We understand with practicing psychologist Yulia Tkachenko.

Guilt as a signal

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, in his work “Man’s Search for Meaning,” included guilt, along with death and suffering, in the “tragic triad” of human existence. No one has ever managed to live a life without these three – death, guilt, and suffering. And yet, guilt is… an amazing gift. Why?

Normally, the feeling of guilt serves a specific function: it signals that we are at odds with our own values, have gone against what we ourselves consider right. We were rude to our mother, boasted to appear someone in front of new friends, lied about little things, although we consider honesty to be an important human quality.

Adequate guilt helps to understand where a person has broken with himself and how to fix or compensate for the harm caused to him (sometimes simply to himself, to his integrity) in the same way that physical pain allows you to identify malfunctions in the body in order to fix them. After appropriate actions are taken, healthy guilt disappears – it has fulfilled its function. So, when we feel guilt, are we guilty? But this is more complicated.

“The answer to almost everything”

Guilt should be proportional to the possibilities. And this is a very precise psychological supervision. Guilt is impossible without freedom of choice. If you had no choice, the feeling of guilt is false. Often such – imaginary – guilt arises in overly responsible people who feel responsible “for everything at once”, without specifics and a defined range of obligations. They pass a guilty verdict on themselves in advance, not knowing the details. For example, a mother may feel guilty that her child is often sick, although she does everything in her power for his health; an employee may worry about the relationship with her boss that has not worked out, not taking into account that on the other side is a wall of impenetrable hatred or envy.

Imaginary guilt has no specific reason. A person can constantly apologize without really knowing why, feel like a burden to others for no reason. At the same time, it is extremely difficult for him to answer a simple question: “What exactly am I guilty of?”

And then it is important to stop and clarify the situation of guilt: what exactly happened? Which of my actions caused this? What did I do, say, think? Could I have done something to make it different? What, when? Sometimes, after such an analysis, a person realizes that he did nothing wrong, and the feeling of guilt disappears.

Another marker of unproductive guilt: it seems to eat us up from the inside, while healthy guilt-responsibility allows us to grow.

Guilt-mistake

Existential analysis distinguishes real guilt for real guilt from guilt for a mistake. What is the difference and why is it important?

We make mistakes when we have the wrong picture of what is happening. We can yell at a child and then find out that it is not their fault at all. We can take the wrong position in an argument, defend one and blame the other without having all the information, and realize it too late. If the mistake can be corrected, it should be done. Apologize. Explain. But what if the consequences of the mistake can no longer be corrected? After all, then the feeling of guilt can be unbearable.

A good tool for working with guilt-mistake is the question: “Knowing everything I know now, would I have done the things I did then?” If a person sincerely answers “No,” guilt no longer has power over them.

“You are eating cake, and people are dying in the world”

One of the varieties of imaginary guilt is guilt for joy. Do we have the right to it if there are battles going on somewhere right now and people are dying? And here we should again talk about responsibility. What am I responsible for? At least for myself, my physical and emotional state. Am I useful at work, to my family, wife, husband, children, if I allow the news to emotionally crush me? Hardly.

You can be happy, joke. You can watch and do everything that will allow you to live normally and maintain your vitality: take care of yourself, sleep, eat, find something that brings joy. Even in the most difficult situations: in camps, prisons, during occupation, those who brushed their teeth, shaved, did exercises, allowed themselves to fall in love and have hobbies survived.

Spiritual writer Serhiy Fudel, who spent about 10 years in exile and camps, wrote: “…The meaning of life is terribly simple: try to always and everywhere preserve the warmth of your heart, knowing that someone else will need it, that someone else always needs us. And if a cup of lavender latte at the end of the working day allows you to preserve this warmth and bring it home, there is no reason for guilt.