How to Stop Feeling Guilty

As I often comment to my patients, guilt is a strange emotion. One can feel guilty for no good reason at all, just as guilty as when one has a good reason for the feeling. And, conversely, one can fail to feel guilty when it would be clearly justified and appropriate. Though people can have trouble with both kinds of emotional glitch, I most often find people struggling with an excess of guilty feelings.

What does guilt do for us anyway? Well, we need some access to guilty feelings to get along in a civilized world. Guilt can point both forwards and backwards. With prospective guilt, we stay out of trouble when a pang or twinge of the feeling alerts us to something we may be about to do that we should not. To take a mundane and proverbial example, it keeps our hands out of the cookie jar. In the other direction, we can feel guilt retrospectively, for something that we have already done. Thinking back on some action, we feel guilty for having done it, and perhaps undertake not to do it again. Without this internalized meter for right and wrong, our actions would be limited only by external constraints, and our uncivilized life would most likely be, as Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So, if we need some guilt to keep things together, but often have more than we need, how can we tell which feelings are appropriate and which are false alarms, as it were? One can imagine a car alarm. Car alarms are annoying and you want to spare people unnecessary annoyance. It sounds the same whatever makes it go off. You want it to go off if someone tries to break into your car. You don’t want it to go off if a cat walks past it. And you don’t want to spare your neighbors that much that it doesn’t go off even if all the wheels and radio are removed and it is left on bricks. One can think of guilty feelings, otherwise indistinguishable from one another, as falling into one of two categories, justified and unjustified. We want to be able to pay attention to justified guilt, and take appropriate steps in those cases, but to just notice and let go of unjustified guilty feelings.

Let’s say that guilty feelings are justified if they fulfill both of the following conditions, and are unjustified if they fulfill only one or neither: (1) Someone is hurt by something that (2) you did intentionally. (As moral philosophers and ethicists would tell you, there will counter-examples to this neat definition. But we are doing everyday psychology, not philosophical ethics.) So if no one is hurt by something you do or if you did something quite accidentally that hurts someone, you will be trying to work on just noticing the guilty feelings that you may experience, labeling them for yourself as unjustified guilt, and trying to let them go rather than acting on them or continuing to ruminate about them (ruminating can be a kind of private practice for action).

Here are some examples:

(I) A patient recently told me about some new sneakers she bought for herself. Her old ones had quite worn out, to the point where one of her toes was starting to poke through. She found some new shoes that were a kind of cross trainer that didn’t have an open tongue but were a sort of one piece slip on shoe with laces to keep them snug. She described them as the most comfortable shoes out of the box she had ever owned. She said that when she went out in her new shoes it was “like going outside in my slippers. I feel like I’m getting away with something. I can’t stop thinking that I should take them back to the store.”

My patient was feeling guilty for having new shoes that were too comfortable. We know already that it’s hard for her to give herself nice things from the fact that she let her old ones practically fall apart before replacing them. But we hear something problematic also in that she is now ruminating about taking them back instead of just enjoying her new ‘outdoor slippers.’ So we can ask our two simple questions: Was someone hurt by something you did intentionally? Well she did knowingly buy and wear her new shoes, but it’s hard to see where someone has been hurt. This falls clearly into the unjustified guilt category. Our work together is going to aim to help her understand why it doesn’t seem okay for her to be comfortable, and to practice just noticing her guilty feelings rather than acting on or ruminating about them.

(II) During a session a patient suddenly remembered that he had scheduled a business call during our appointment. He thought he was a terrible person for letting this happen and keeping his colleague waiting. He started to get confused and panicky. Should he end his session early? What would happen if he kept this person waiting? We looked at his reactions and tried to see if he could decide how to handle this sudden onslaught of guilty feelings. Was his colleague going to be hurt by this? It depends how you see it: inconvenienced sure, but does that really count as being hurt? It might depend on who you ask, but we could agree at least that this wasn’t a very big injury. Had he meant to keep his colleague waiting? Although sometimes people do things intentionally without realizing it, lets say for simplicity’s sake that this was just an accident, not motivated by any hidden wishes to be difficult. So, our analysis suggests an accident with very little harm is not something one should feel guilty about. He was able to calm down after this and use the rest of his session productively, planning a simple brief apology to his colleague when he called for the slight inconvenience.

(III) A different patient told me about how he had broken up with someone years ago and how he still felt “bad” about it (“bad” usually means guilty, but one should always check). They had been dating for a short while, weeks rather than months, and things had been pretty good but not amazing. Just before a holiday, she had, without any prompting, given him a key to her apartment. Later that week, instead of meeting for a date as planned, he texted her that he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship and that he didn’t want to keep seeing her. She replied by text the next day, seemingly poised about the whole thing, and telling him that as for her apartment key he could just “toss that in a dumpster.” It was at that moment, reading between the lines that she felt rather tossed into a dumpster by his breaking up with her that way, that he began to feel quite guilty about how he had handled things. He continued to have pangs of painful guilty feelings about it on and off for years afterwards.

In this case, asking our questions about the situation, was someone hurt by something one did intentionally, the answer about these retrospective guilty feelings is probably that yes, they are justified and he should have felt a bit guilty about this. She was hurt by his thoughtlessly dumping her by text message instead of at least speaking to her face to face about the relationship they had together, and he was clearly responsible for it. It would have been better actually if he had had a little prospective guilt about this situation and thought about what it might have been like for her to be broken up with by text message. A prospective pang of guilt might have brought about something else that, though maybe still painful, would not have been guilt-worthy. But he was able to get himself to turn a blind eye to his action until after it had been completed, and in fact until he was confronted with a poignant turn of phrase that this otherwise sensitive man could not ignore. He went on ruminating painfully about this for a long time afterwards as punishment for himself, which is mostly what people do when they feel guilty about something. Better would have been for him to find some way to try and make amends to the person he had hurt, in some way that she would appreciate, like perhaps writing and apologizing or asking if she wanted to say anything to him in person. It isn’t always possible to make amends for our guilt-worthy actions, but where it is this can avoid years of empty self-punishment.

(IV) Many women have difficulties with sex in general and orgasm in particular because of problems with guilty feelings. A very common pattern of anorgasmia is where a woman starts to become aroused but then has to stop and interrupt the arousing sensations before orgasm is achieved, and this may occur with masturbation or with a partner. This is usually because some guilty feelings have begun to intrude themselves into her mind as she approaches orgasm and so she stops herself from continuing. She may be more or less aware of this process. In this situation it is probably clear that no one will be harmed by her orgasm, so right away we can put this into the unjustified guilt category of feelings to be just noticed. Sometimes women can get around these inhibitions by shifting, in their minds, the responsibility for their arousal to another person, and so can be orgasmic with a partner but not by themselves: I’m not doing this, this is being done to me.

This kind of case brings up the question of who is being harmed by something with no apparent victim. Very often one finds on investigation that it is someone important to the person who seems like they will be harmed by seemingly harmless acts. A common model for sexual inhibitions in women is something like the following: My mother would be disappointed > being disappointed means being hurt > I should stop this. Although it may sound a bit 19th century, sadly I have found again and again that mothers communicate negative attitudes about sex to their daughters in myriad subtle and direct ways, throughout their lives, which inhibit them as adult women.

(V) A similar example came up in working with a man with divorced parents, now both retired. Their divorce had happened in his teen years and been acrimonious. In particular, my patient’s mother had been very bitter towards his father, despite she being the one who pursued the divorce. His father began dating soon after but his mother never remarried nor even dated. My patient’s father was handsome and successful and had several relationships during my patient’s teens and twenties and now into his thirties. My patient knew something about these and his mother would pump him for information, which he resisted as best he could. After a recent lunch with his father during which he met his father’s latest flame, my patient was racked with guilt in anticipation of meeting his mother the following week. Should he tell her about his father’s new inamorata or not? She would want to know and be angry with him if she found out some other way and discovered that he knew.

This example of prospective guilt seems I think unjustified. First, his father’s beginning a new relationship is not his doing, so by they second of our two criteria — was it something he did — my patient is off the hook. And second, it is hard to see what harm would come to his mother from my patient’s keeping this information, which does not even belong to him, to himself. But would his mother see it that way? If she is (1) hurt, and considers my patient to have hurt her by (2) keeping some information from her, even if the information didn’t belong to him in fact but to his father, should he not feel guilty? Here we see how insidious guilty feelings can be and how hard it is to shake them off. Especially with ties of filial love, how another person sees things can be very (too) influential. It may take some work and close questioning to see that although one person may perceive harm in something, many others may not. One can learn to feel that it is okay to choose a wider perspective on “hurt.” His mother’s feelings may be hurt, but that is really her problem, not his. And although she may hold him accountable for this information, it does not belong to him. If his father wants to let his ex-wife know about his dating that’s up to him, and no on else.

Being able to label some guilty feelings as unjustified, and working to just notice them instead of trying in various ways to do things with them, may have to involve not just a quick assessment of injury and intention, but also being able to resist others’ perceptions of hurt or responsibility and substitute one’s own broader standards instead. Sometimes, as in the last example, these are actual living people who wish to lean upon standards of guilt that they created within you. But very often, as in the penultimate example, these are internalized standards that others have set up within us a long time ago and which feel now more or less like our own. These can be the hardest to change, but ultimately free up the most resources for living our own lives.

Note: personal details have been changed and disguised.

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