Carrying the weight of Guilt, or gently letting go ...?

Guilt is an emotion first emerged in a person at the age of 3, when one starts discovering and exploring about the existence of choices between own desires and the rules that one needs to obey in order to gain love, to draw gentle attentions from the others and to be fed. The conditions of self are determined and guilts cultivated through the interactions with the intimate caregivers. As the natural instinct to survive, a young child understands the price of sacrificing his/her instinctive genuine craving and in exchange to please the caregivers, gain their approvals.  The guilty conscience arises when they disobey the caregivers’ orders, break the pre-set rules, distress the caregivers and consequently become disfavoured for some time by the caregiver. Gradually, a child starts denying the inner values of these desires, because they are perceived wrong and they seem bad. And, subsequently, these conditions to avoid guilts not only become part of his/her identities in those people’s lives, they also form the subjective, ethical boundaries that he/she desperately attempts to adhere to. 

Rights and Wrongs become clear in a child’s concept of world to be accepted by the others, even though these rules have not been set by the child him-/her-self, but the others. When the little children grow into adults, the thoughts of wrongs are still bearing the weight of guilts even without physically committing the actions of the so-called wrongs yet.   

Guilt is a strong, uneasy emotion that a person usually would strives to avoid it by all cost. When you are unable to avoid the guilt, as one of the psychological actions, your attempts to blame the other person is the common way to project and rid of the discomfort of energy out of the self (because hold down to it is too painful and it is always easier to pass onto someone else). Psychoanalyses have discovered that some of the guilt-provokers are guilt-sufferers themselves, too. 

Blaming is a common technique used by the individuals troubled by self-guilts to project the uneasy, discomfort out with the self, because to contain that volume of guilts is unbearable and exposing one with incredible vulnerability to face the self to the issue’s accountability (e.g. it may be easier to divert the blames to the partner as if you bear null of the responsibility in this decision).   

This Guilt circuit self-fuelling wild and fiery for long decades is exhausting, underneath the quiet display is the anger, uneasiness and frustrations looking for a release. That relief is the longing for being forgiven by the other person, for being accepted, loved and recognised as doing just fine (e.g. recognised as a good mum, being accepted, loved by her daughter).   

The methods to process the guilts are:

1.     To find a Psychotherapy Counsellor who could provide you the Tender Loving Caring environment for you to talk about them – this works well especially when the guilts are intertwined with shames (Core);

2.     Through the therapy, the counsellor would assist you to find the forgiveness from the situation (Actions);

3.     Understanding guilts were there in order to discipline our desires since we were little. When we grow out of the dependent childhood, we could take off those outdated conditions, too. How to take these off is to accept their existence, acknowledge them been serving the purposes in the past, and then to Befriend the guilts – whenever the sensations of guilts arise, be gentle, caring and accepting the self (Acceptance);

4.     Self-compassion – to empathically understand one cannot be at two places at a time, doing two things at a time (e.g. being mum at home versus earning money at work) and to explore what you would say to you friend who was the one suffering from these guilts (Gestalt).