GUILT — A Prison of Your Own Making

Being responsible is fundamentally different from being guilty.

Most of us have been raised within a specific way of thinking, an old thoughtware of Responsibility, where taking Responsibility means “I can not do it right, I am at fault, and I will be punished”. It is truly a burden, because in this woldview being responsible is automatically linked to being guilty. There is the fear that something could go badly wrong. Using that old thoughtware, it is most probably that you equate Responsibility with Guilt. But Guilt is nothing more than a concept. A concept, which will cost you a tremendous amount of your precious life time and energy, when you are stuck in it like a prison.

Guilt Is a Concept

A concept is a set of ideas that seems to hang enough together that you can imagine it is real. Guilt is a concept that emerges from the belief that there is such a thing as right and wrong. Guilt is about internalized norms, rules, values and laws.

If you can prove that you are guilty by proving that you have done something wrong, then you get rewarded the identity of “the guilty one”. You walk around in the world holding on to the identity that it is always all your fault. You believe in stories like, “The project is not done in time. It is my fault, I could have done more. My partner is not happy and it is my fault because I did not take enough care of them. My children are failing in school, I should have helped more with the homework”.

The benefit of holding on to the identity of Guilt is that you can finally be accepted by the authorities, for example, your parents, your teachers, your boss, your colleagues or your partner. By being guilty, you are playing the game of these authority figures which can in return take care of you. You play small and give them your energetic center, giving them your attention and your power to create. You will receive attention such as “Everything is okay, you are not a failure” and being rescued by someone doing it for you. Being guilty, therefore, defines who you are, what you are able to do and where you belong.

“If you feel guilty, what that means is that you are going to do it again.”
Ron Smothermon | Winning Through Enlightenment

Being guilty is like an excuse, a currency you pay to get permission to repeat your irresponsible actions over and over. Most religions created rituals for absolving yourself of Guilt, only to indulge in the very same “sin” again. If you are guilty enough, then you prove that you are powerless to create any New Results. You pay to avoid taking Responsibility for what you have created as well as what you did not create. The identity of Guilt kills any impulse from your Being, your feelings or your ideas, because if you would really create something great, then you could not feel guilty anymore and would not be accepted by your original environment any longer. So you live an adjusted life under the radar within the framework of Guilt.

When reading this, your survival strategy could react in different ways. For example, you might try to escape the prison of “being guilty” by being guilty about being guilty. You fight the prison with the same set of strategies. This will not work, you will most certainly end up in Shame. (The distinctions about Shame are a completely new article I will write soon.)

Let me say it in different words. If you try to “take responsibility” for having avoided Responsibility by being guilty of your action, without changing your relationship to Guilt, you will do so by being guilty again. The way you have learned to “take responsibility” is by being guilty. This is a very old thoughtmap and it created no new results, just more Low Drama. The Responsibility that I am talking about here is from the new thoughtmap of Responsibility.

Guilt is one version of the extremely common game called Low Drama. In Low Drama, you are stuck in a vicious circle. It starts by thinking “It is all my fault” and that triggers an intense emotional reaction. Once you experience this emotional snowball, you have confirmation that your concept of Guilt is right. After all, you feel what you think. You feel your experience and therefore it must be true that you are guilty. Is that true?

Guilt Is A Mixed Emotion

The research in Possibility Management regarding Mixed Emotions started about 10 years ago, and has only deepened ever since. I, particularly, have been focusing my research on the experience on the mixed Emotion of Guilt and Shame*.Guilt has turned out to be an intense emotional experience in which the following three core Emotions are mixed: unconscious anger, unconscious sadness and unconscious fear.

Mixed together, these Emotions feel like an unmanageable wall of Guilt. But Guilt doesn’t help anyone. Therefore, the next step is to unmix these three Emotions and get immensely valuable energy and information from each of the pure Emotions when they are unmixed. This praxis may sound unfamiliar to you, hence, I give you a fictional example for unmixing Guilt, to see the value and notes for actions in it.

• You feel angry because you did not ask when the deadline was and now I have to pay a fee.
• You feel fear that your partner will reproach you for this unplanned expense.
• You feel sad because you have had the impulse to ask about the deadline and did not pay attention to it.

Unmixed, each Emotion gives you the opportunity to leave the prison of Guilt. There is anger to pay the fee immediately and to avoid further charges. You can use the information of your fear to ask your partner for a conversation and to create intimacy, instead of lying or hiding. Allowing your sadness can help you to reconnect with your own needs and impulses.

With the ability to observe your own Emotions by unmixing them and to self-assess your own actions, you have an important key for leaving Low Drama. And there are so many more to exit the Guilt game. I have suggested some of them below as experiments that can be used in everyday life. I wish you much joy and success in your research.

Keys to Exiting the Prison of Guilt

EXPERIMENT 1: S.T.O.P._I.T.

First, acknowledge that Guilt is a concept. It is your decision whether or not to accept Guilt as a prison. Ron Smothermon writes in his book “Winning Through Enlightenment,” humorously and at the same time aptly painfully, “So, in case you have been wondering what to do about guilty feelings, here it is: stop. Stop what? Stop feeling guilty. Do whatever you do minus the guilt. […] Guilt clearly has no constructive uses, so be rid of it.”

You can determine how you express yourself, what you take responsibility for and what you decide to do. You can also decide to stop feeling guilty. I highly recommend watching the following sketch on YouTube to land the possibility of “S.T.O.P._I.T.” in all of your bodies. Enjoy!

When you have done this experiment, enter Matrix Code GUILTxxx.01 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.

Nevertheless, willpower is not enough to make lasting changes. We cannot simply replace “wrong” beliefs or decisions with “right” ones. Change requires practice. And practicing requires to feel.

EXPERIMENT 2: “Sorry” — Stop Apologizing in an Inflationary Way

Apologizing, especially with the little word “sorry,” can become automatic. For example, you apologize ahead of time that what you cooked might not taste the same because not all the ingredients were available. Or you drop something and you apologize for it to everyone in the space. You say something, can’t gauge the other person’s reaction, and immediately apologize without even hearing what the other person has to say.

To get out of this habit, do a radical pirate agreement. Everytime you say “sorry” or unconsciously apologize you have to pay your pirate partner an amount of money that really hurts, when you have to hand it over. Let’s say 50 € / $ per “sorry”. In this way the experiment lands with all its force in your emotional and energetic body. If you keep apologizing, guess what, the amount of money wasn’t high enough. It has to hurt for you to stop.

When you have done this experiment, enter Matrix Code GUILTxxx.02 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.

EXPERIMENT 3: Make a Do-Over

In this experiment, every time you catch yourself consciously having an emotional reaction, make a do-over. Emotions occur in our emotional body. They come from different sources. Often from your past, as uncompleted feelings. They also come very often as not authentic feelings taken over from external authority figures.

Feelings, on the other hand, come up in the moment, they provide you with information and energy, you act on it accordingly, and thus the Feeling is completed. Emotions have nothing to do with the present moment or your counterpart, but are projections. Feelings are Feelings. Emotions are Emotions.

When you notice such an emotional experience for the first time ever, it can be quite shocking. It all feels so real. You feel anger, sadness, anxiety, joy or in any wired mixture and it lasts longer than just a moment. Your agitation lasts for minutes, hours, or maybe even weeks or years. This Emotional Mix has you firmly in its grip and you even feel guilty for your actions.

At first, you probably won’t notice your emotional reaction until days after the conversation. Continue to practice being aware of the difference between Feelings and Emotions. Eventually you will find yourself getting angry in the middle of a conversation and starting to blame the other person, or getting tearful and putting all the blame on yourself.

And suddenly the penny drops: “What I feel has nothing to do with the present moment!” Pause! Breathe! Realize that you were reacting emotionally in that moment, that there was just a projection going on, and that you were about to believe in your own Guilt story. Then turn to the other person and say: “ Crivens! (an exclamation of surprise, Scottish) I am having an emotional reaction right now, would you believe it? It has nothing to do with you! I used you for my emotional wounds. I am grabbing my Beep!Book right now, and write down this gateway for healing, and I will do an EHP (= Emotional Healing Process to heal old wounds) by next week. Can I have a do-over right now with you?”

And then you start over again.

When you have done this experiment, enter Matrix Code GUILTxxx.03 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.

EXPERIMENT 4: Emotional Healing Process (EHP)

Guilt is a Mixed Emotion of anger, sadness, and fear that is reflected in your emotional body. They feel intense and you may even think these are Feelings. It is not so. However, you can use Mixed Emotions as a gateway for an Emotional Healing Process (EHP), which can be very diverse in its form. For EHPs, you have a spaceholder who supports you to resolve the Emotions by navigating with you to the root of the cause. Please find more information about EHP at the link above.

If no spaceholder is available at the moment, you can try the following experiment.

When you have done this experiment, enter Matrix Code GUILTxxx.04 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.

EXPERIMENT 5: The Resolution of Guilt — Respecting Your Own Needs

As soon as you feel guilty, stop, take a breath and get in touch with what is going on inside you. Let go of all judgments and “should” thoughts. Listen to these thoughts without acting on them. These should-thoughts are in most cases parent or vampire (= energy sucker) voices that keep you trapped in the prison of “I should” and “I need to”.

Pay attention to the physical reaction that comes with them. Feel in your body where this “should / shouldn’t” is anchored. You may get hot, cold, restless. Thoughts begin to circle. Do this further exercise so that the voices don’t get a grip on you at all. Dive one level deeper. Look at your needs that lie beneath this Guilt attack. These needs often go in two directions.

1. Ask yourself what buried needs these voices are trying to remind you of. What lies beneath the “should”?
2. Ask yourself what needs you want to meet when you are not doing what you think you “should” be doing.

Ask yourself what you can do now to meet, or at least attend to, both the needs in point 1 and those in point 2. Only when you notice that the feeling of Guilt changes (when the should-voice has no more energy), then go into action and take care of it. Even if you haven’t come to a solution, allow yourself to grieve for those needs that you can’t meet at that moment.

One example to make this exercise a little more understandable. A voice comes up to you: “Our visitor is coming in four hours. I should clean the bathroom before they get here.” A slight panic rises in you, your guilty conscience plagues you as to why you didn’t do it much earlier. Breathe. Listen to the voices — don’t go into action yet. The voices continue to come up like, “It’s always so neat at their place, they will think I am messy. I should clean. But my partner never does anything either. I don’t feel like cleaning at all now. The weather is so nice. Maybe we should meet outside.” And so on and so forth. Just listen.

Once you have listened carefully, separate the Emotions by saying them for yourself. “I feel anger because…, sadness because…, fear because…”. When the individual Emotions are so clearly in front of you, you can now look for the hidden needs in them. Mostly these go in opposite directions, as described above. Without being triggered by the “must” any longer, how might you now take care of your needs and the situation? Maybe you like to clean the kitchen counter because you’re going to cook together later and you’d like it to be beautiful. And then, leave the rest of the flat as it is and ask your partner for a walk.

When you have done this experiment, enter Matrix Code GUILTxxx.05 in your free account of the StartOver.xyz game.

EXPERIMENT 6: SPARK 120 — Guilt is a Concept

For further experimentation with Guilt, I recommend SPARK 120 “Guilt is a Concept”. (S.P.A.R.K. stands for Specific Practical Applications of Radical Knowledge and they are written by Clinton Callahan). In the SPARK you will learn, among other things, how to sustainably pull the concept of Guilt out of all your bodies and also how to separate the three Emotions of anger, fear and sadness, so that they do not block as a Mixed Emotion but you can consciously use them for yourself with all their information and energy.

Love,
Lisa

*For more information about Guilt & Shame Trainings & Coachings, feel free to contact info@lisaommert.com.

P. S. The processes mentioned above are also part of the online training “Guilt & Shame”, in which we work intensively with the Emotions of Guilt and Shame.

P.P.S. Wenn du diesen Artikel in deutscher Sprache lesen oder weiterleiten möchtest, so findest du diesen auf www.lisaommert.com.