5 Steps To Escaping Toxic Guilt

What does guilt have to do with anxiety? Quite a bit, actually.

I know a thing or two about guilt and worry. I’m sure everyone does. But people who struggle with chronic anxiety and depression take guilt and worry to its greatest heights. It gets to the point where it actually feels normal to worry. For people like us, it’s just a way of life.

As I’ve explained before in my previous posts here and here, people suffering from anxiety aren’t normal. Anxious people are above-average, analytical, creative, and highly sensitive (to name a few). These are all great traits to have–if used properly. Proper use of these traits would be to use the traits to focus on things outside ourselves, like using our creativity to write a book or start a blog. Used improperly, like so many of us do, and these same wonderful traits can really work against us. This is when we take the things that make us stand out, the intelligence, creativeness, and sensitivity, and turn them inwardly, and use them to be really mean to ourselves, and eat away at our self-esteem.

All that to say this: since people who suffer from chronic anxiety and depression are really good at using their good traits against themselves, guilt and worry are behaviors that can be unbelievably self-destructive if we practice it. They both eat away at our self-esteem when practiced frequently, so naturally, they cause anxiety and depression.

We spend much of our time dwelling on things that happened in the past and feeling really guilty about them (because we’re so sensitive), or we’ll worry about things that will happen in the future (because we’re analytical and sensitive). Both are excellent ways of removing ourselves from the precious present moment and robbing ourselves of any happiness we could hope to enjoy.

So, why do we feel do guilty?

There are many, many things that we could feel guilty over. Maybe you’ve done something in your past that you’re not proud of, and you still haven’t totally forgiven yourself for it yet.

Maybe your guilt is over present behavior. You may feel you’re a bad person because of something you’ve done recently. Maybe you feel you’re not being a good friend because you didn’t answer your friend’s phone call because you didn’t feel like talking. Or maybe you yelled at your parents when your emotions flared high, which they tend to do in people with anxiety and depression.

You may feel you don’t spend enough time with your parents, or your family. The people in your life–your parents, spouse, sweetheart, or children know which of your buttons to push to try to make you feel guilty because they know that guilt works on you. Guilt is a powerful emotion to use against someone to try to control them.

Perhaps you feel guilty for learning to put yourself first and start telling people no. As crazy as it sounds, taking care of yourself, especially as a woman, can bring about massive feelings of guilt.

A very dear friend of mine once asked me if I could be her almost newborn baby’s nanny while she and her husband worked throughout the week. They wanted to keep their child out of daycare for the first year of her life, not to mention have their child with a trusted friend. I was working a part-time, flexible schedule then, so I had the time on my hands. And I was very much looking forward to getting in some practice with the baby (for when I have children of my own someday), not to mention bonding with the little bundle of love. Overjoyed, I agreed.

My friend then told me the days she needed me–4 days a week, all day. I was only working 2 days a week at that time, but they were full days too. When my friend told me those days, I immediately knew it was going to be a problem. That meant I’d be working 6 days a week with only one day to myself for… well, quite a while. I should’ve told her that then, but I figured I could handle it. I was going to make this work if it killed me.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that working at that pace for nearly a year would probably slowly do just that. I was going to need at least an additional day to myself. I knew I’d burn out if I worked that schedule for nearly a year. And then what good would I be for the baby, my client I had on the weekends, or myself? So, I told my friend this and tried to negotiate. If I could get just one more day off during the week, I would be able to do it.

Unfortunately, there was no way to make that happen. More regrettably, I had no choice but to turn the position down.

This is a time in my life where I harbored an immense amount of guilt. Even though I knew I was just looking out for myself, and everyone involved, I punished myself with guilt for about a year.

Wherever your guilt is coming from, the underlying self-hate theme for it is always the same: “I’m a bad person because I did or said that. I did something wrong. I deserve to be punished.”

The thing is, no one can make you feel guilty. You choose to feel it.

Often, when you feel guilty it makes you feel that people will think better of you if they see you “feel the guilt.” This is especially true if you’re around the person or people you feel you committed the wrong against. By feeling guilty and letting these people see it, they know you’re paying for what you did. I did this so much with my friend whenever we were together after the nanny deal fell through.

We often harbor guilt for many years as a way to pay ourselves back for what we did. After all, we deserve to feel guilty, right? For some people, feeling bad has become such the norm, and so familiar that feeling good (as we’re naturally supposed to) actually brings about bouts of anxiety! Most of the time, people who continually blame and torment themselves blow the things they said and did way out of proportion. You’d be willing to forgive your family member or friend for what you’re plaguing yourself over, so why can’t you do that for yourself?

Ok, there may be certain things you did in the past or the present that were not right. We’re human. We mess up. It isn’t wrong to feel a certain amount of remorse for some of the things we’ve done. It’s a natural human thing to do. But dwelling on those things won’t solve anything. It won’t propel you back in the past so you can change the situation or the outcome, and the only thing it does for the present moment is to ruin it for you.

Action Steps For Guilt

When it comes to guilt, ask yourself these questions:

1. Did I consciously and deliberately do something just to wrong someone else? Did you do this wrong out of a need you felt you needed at the time? (i.e. I need of understanding, more time to yourself, trying to protect your sense of peace when you refused your co-worker’s company at lunch, etc)
2. Is the wrong something you can make up for? Is it something you can make right or apologize for?
3. Was the wrong that happened someone else’s fault? Are you feeling guilty over something someone else is really responsible for?
4. Was the wrong you did really that awful? If so, by whose standards?

Try doing these things:

Start by taking a good look at what you did that has you feeling so guilty. Put it in perspective by asking yourself the questions above. Be honest with yourself, not critical when answering the questions. This may be hard at first, but like anything, practice makes perfect.

1. Set a time limit on your guilt. How long will you suffer for your mistake? An hour? A day? A few days? Weeks? Years? Do you see where I’m going? Set a time for how long you’re going to dwell on your mistakes. During this time, take some time alone to think about what has you feeling so wrong. Reflect on why it happened. What was the situation at that time? What can you do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? To gain something positive from the experience, what can you learn from it? Maybe you’ve grown from the experience. Became more responsible, more mature. This sounds a lot better than beating yourself up about the incident, doesn’t it?
2. Understand that sometimes people will try to make you feel guilty because they know you well enough to know that guilt works on you.  It’s already difficult overcoming guilt, but it can be twice as hard if the person is deliberately making you feel guilty for something they feel you did to them. Understand this: No one has the right to do this to you. Try your best to recognize this as their problem.
3. If you can’t release your guilt, then if your wrongdoing is something you can apologize for, do that. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed. Get it off your chest if you need to. Harboring it around hurts you. Letting go by apologizing (sincerely) is an incredibly freeing thing you can do.
4. Remind yourself constantly that you’re human. Firmly realizing this gives you the freedom to make mistakes. We all make mistakes. We all do things we’re not proud of. The difference between people who don’t dwell too much on guilt and the ones who do is that the first batch of people forgive themselves, learn from their mistakes, and move on to try again.
5. List the things that make you feel guilty. Then come up with forgiving and freeing responses for them.  Example: Guilty: “I yelled terrible things at my mother when I was furious at her.” Forgiving response: “I guess I need to let that go and forgive myself. I can’t change it. I’ve apologized (or go apologize if you haven’t). I have suffered enough.”

What are some of the things you’re feeling guilty about?

I asked myself this question before. I wrote it down. Wanna know what I wrote?

“I’ve felt guilty for a long time for just living. For being alive and enjoying myself. For totally losing myself in that precious present moment I’d spent so much time pursuing. How could I be happy when some of the people I loved weren’t? How could I be happy when my uncle died, and there is so much pain in the world?”

See how my sensitivity was totally working against me?

Forgive yourself. Be good to yourself. Take care of you. Tell yourself as many times as you need to hear it that the past is over and done. You can’t do anything about it. Don’t waste precious, precious moments by dwelling on the past. Life is too short. So, I promise, it’s OK choose to be happy.