Can Guilt be Good?

What is guilt actually? Is it perhaps just a milder form of shame?  While many people confuse these two emotions, they’re actually fundamentally different:

Shame tells us that our essential character is fatally flawed, and that we are fundamentally bad, unworthy, or defective people.

Guilt, on the other hand, is feeling pain over acting (or considering acting) in a way we disapprove of. Or it can be feeling pain over actions that we neglected to take, such as not showing up for someone.

While guilt is painful, not all pain is bad.  There’s pointless, destructive pain which we should avoid, and then there’s the pain of growth. When we experience guilt, it provides us with useful information that can help us improve our lives.

Facing Justified Guilt

Facing our present guilt can save us from making painful future mistakes. When we’re about to take an action and notice feeling guilty, we can ask ourselves if our planned action will violate our moral standards or create unnecessary pain. If so, we can choose to behave in a different way that will yield less future regret.

Facing our past guilt can also be constructive. If we see that our past actions or inactions caused someone needless pain, we can apologize for what we did and try to alleviate the damage.  Taking appropriate responsibility for our past mistakes reduces our sense of guilt, and even if the other person doesn’t forgive us, it still helps us forgive ourselves.  Moreover, once we fully own our errors, we can be on the lookout to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Incidentally, we can also feel guilty about actions and inactions that hurt only ourselves.  Here too our strategy is similar – we face our mistakes, correct the damage caused as best as we can, and resolve to not repeat them.

Facing guilt in this way positions us to live in a kinder, more effective manner going forwards.

Facing Unrealistic Guilt

Can our guilt, however, be overblown or unrealistic?  Yes, if we’re living with unrealistically lofty expectations of ourselves.  Here too, objectively viewing our guilt yields useful information for improving our lives. If we examine our guilt and find that our behavior actually seems appropriate, then we know that we need to adjust our expectations of ourselves. If we see that we feel guilty over trivial matters, than we know we’ve internalized unrealistically perfectionistic standards for ourselves that no human could possibly meet.

Unrealistic guilt causes needless emotional pain and hurts our mental health.  It distracts us from fully enjoying life and connecting with others.  Moreover, such guilt can also distract us from daily tasks and sap our energy.  If we see that we’re suffering from unrealistic guilt, we can treat ourselves with self-compassion just as we would treat friends who’re being needlessly hard on themselves.  And we can resolve to be less harsh and unrelenting in our expectations of ourselves going forward.

Facing Guilt Responsibly

Ignoring guilt is like ignoring the warning lights on a car dashboard.  Whatever’s wrong will only cause us more pain the longer we refuse to deal with it. Guilt only leads to growth if we face it responsibly – if we  rationalize our behaviors and distract ourselves to avoid feeling pain, our guilt will only intensify and we’ll feel increasingly wretched.  Avoiding our guilty feelings may also lead us to avoid the people we feel guilty over harming, thus denying us opportunities to make up for whatever pain we’ve caused.

In either case, whether or not our guilt is justified, there’s no benefit in sweeping it under the rug.  Instead, it’s best to view our guilt objectively and then correct either our behavior or our unrealistic standards for ourselves.  Either way, facing our guilt gives us tools to grow.

Well, connect to self-esteem therapy in New York City for the best solutions.