Feeling Guilty About Things
This was engendered by Wayne Perkins’s email of Aug. 16’04, saying no need to feel guilty, it’s a waste of time.
If there’s no feeling of guilt wouldn’t our present actions be different, less responsible? Guilt is such a horrible feeling that most of us try to avoid it by leading good and careful lives.
The Irish get rid of their guilt by going to confession, but that is something of an abrogation of responsibility, not working through what you’ve done and seeing if you can fix it up yourself, rather palming it off to some higher place or being.
Doesn’t feeling guilty mean something? Doesn’t it mean that you care deeply? Some people feel no guilt. Surely that means they lack some caring along the way, to be so unworried about what they did or caused to happen.
If there’s no guilt what is a person feeling after they’ve hurt someone, said something embarrassing, done something untoward, not fulfilled some promise? What do they feel? Nothing? Surely there must be some pang of “I wish I hadn’t done that” or “What must the other person be thinking or feeling due to my action?” There should be some positiveness to do with fixing things up, moving quickly into reparation mode.
I really can’t believe that there is anyone so thick skinned as to feel no guilt or remorse or compassion – actually I think a lot of compassion stems from guilt.
Feeling guilty indicates empathy. You wouldn’t want it to happen to you, so you feel bad and try to make amends. If there’s no feeling bad about your action, possibly you’d do nothing, certainly not go to confession.
Many people feel bad or guilty about personal habits. This is personal guilt as opposed to universal guilt which brings the weight of the world on your shoulders. The former is a silly kind of annoyance which can be dispelled by diminishing its importance. A common example is eating something you’ve been told not to – you were warned it was bad for you, told that it will make fat, give you spots or turn your stomach. So you went ahead and ate it anyway because you wanted to. What happened? Probably none of the things you were told would happen, but the guilt at what you did starts to niggle. You didn’t respect the wishes of someone else, someone older, certainly wiser. You didn’t respect that person enough to follow their advice. What if they found out? On it goes. This is personal guilt, sometimes with a bad stomach.
A good way to avoid it would be to get rid of parents, other close relatives and some well-meaning friends. On balance though you’ll probably decide to keep them for the other advantages they afford. One way to handle this is to have the ability to keep hidden from them all the awful stuff they told you not to do, then you can secretly revel in doing it without being found out. Some people find that tricky because they then feel guilty about covert actions. Personally, I never had any problem with that – I got to do what I wanted, and I knew my action affected me and me alone, and what other people didn’t know anything about wasn’t going to cause them any grief. An example of this for me when I was a lad would be reading late way past the time I’d been told was light out. All I had to do was tell myself reading was good for me, they were my eyes, it was my sleep and if I could do it without getting caught, that was fine by me. So the thing is you have to have some sense of “me” to handle guilt. You have to be able to reason it out so that what you do or don’t do isn’t going to cause problems for others, and the sky won’t fall in on you for doing it.
Another personal example is smoking. I knew it was probably bad for me. Most of my friends were doing it at university, so why not me? I knew that older people thought I was foolish. Now I know that these days it’s anti-social to smoke, countries banning it in public places. However, way back in the 1960s, there wasn’t much pressure not to smoke, what you enjoy is all right. When some guilt crept in about ruining my health, I often told myself how well I’d done to give up from about 15 a day for a few years in my early twenties to a daily maximum of about six cigarettes), and never indulging in the presence of non-smokers who are some of the most impolite people ever, tut-tuttingly disapproving of you. Smokers would never tell others to start smoking! I made up for the bad habit of smoking by exercising much more to overcome deleterious effects on my health, and I also used a special filter to take out some of the bad black stuff. I told myself it all came down to how you personally handled situations, making them acceptable to you and sometimes others.
I would advise people to beware the total giving up of what you want to do. That will create reverse guilt. You’ll wish you had done it. And you’ll ask yourself what would have been the outcome, and you tell yourself everything would probably be all right. So some means should be found to do what you want to do without harm to others and with enjoyment for yourself.
You need to be able to discriminate, to have some awareness of yourself, of what’s right for you and of what’s not so good. Just because someone has told you something, doesn’t mean you have to do it. Guilt’s breeding ground is in being impressionable. The more seriously you take other people’s commandments and advice, the more you’ll feel guilty. Then you’ll need more personal strength or clandestine operating to overcome that.
Universal guilt is a more serious matter. A shrug of the shoulders and some subtle reasoning do not dispel this weight. This is hubris, it’s the wrath of the gods; this is what society tells people not to do for the general and the commonly agreed good of society, out of respect for other people and their possessions.
However, some people were born unlucky or brought up badly – maybe parents didn’t bother with them much, didn’t give them advice to feel small personal guilts about. I think that the more we’re advised as kids the better, showing that parents and teachers care about them, trying to pass on their own cherished values. No advice can be seen as no caring, so you feel you can go ahead and do anything you like. It’s terrible for a child to feel unwanted with no ideas or advice to consider, no good person to model themselves on, drifting through school breaking rules and causing grief all around. My thesis is that if people have a few more opportunities to feel small guilts and deal with them, then larger transgressions may not happen. I don’t see anything wrong with feeling guilty provided you have the wherewithal to manage it. Feelings of guilt can be positive. People not feeling guilty will lead to universal guilt which is a serious matter.
In fact, I would bet that some murderers don’t know how they did what they did, and possibly wish very much they hadn’t. I think society handles such cases badly. I’ve read about people being stuck in prison for years for something they did when they were teenagers. They have since repented, since improved themselves, since shown that they would not repeat such a deed, but they are still in prison suffering for something that cannot be changed. The cost of keeping people in prison is horrendous, equally the cost of youth detention. In New Zealand the cost of keeping someone in jail for a year is $150,000 – I don’t know why there can’t be a more helpful and effective way, perhaps cheaper too.
I believe that Finland and a few other countries try to treat their prison population as well as possible with a lot of counselling and rehabilitation. This is more humane, and I’m sure there are better outcomes. Possibly though in many other countries, the belief in punishment is too ingrained, something to do with powerful people saying the wrong-doers don’t deserve any help.
Other points about tiny personal guilt: you can change it; you can manipulate it; you can use it as a force for good and you can make it your friend. You can trust the feeling and take what you like of it, leave out what you don’t. The trick is to know that it’s just a feeling and is probably foundationless. It doesn’t matter too much, so don’t make a great thing of it. I am constantly giving myself a break from my small guilts. I tell myself that living my life more positively is more important than being mired in “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” and keeping an eye on the sky for thunderbolts.
Guilt can be to the average person what adrenalin is to the athlete. It drives you on to do better. Just as stress and nervousness in the sportsperson can be channeled into something positive to lift the performance, so guilt can be used to help you recognise what to do or not do in your life. Without some twinge of guilt how do you know what’s not OK? The great thing is to welcome it and not worry about it. It is contributing to keeping you out of trouble, to living a better life. A little guilt perhaps means you care a lot about other people and about outcomes.
And I don’t feel at all guilty about writing this! Except perhaps it could have been better expressed.