Hello, I’m Jennifer Reid, MD. Welcome to this episode of A Mind of Her Own, the third in the series called Guilt Free, for Real. In today’s episode, I share 3 of the most common reasons guilt can be such a sticky emotion. (Hint: because it “helps” us in some ways.)

When I’m working with individuals as a psychiatrist, there are often situations where someone says, “I know that this is not good for me, and yet I keep doing it. I keep going back to a relationship that isn’t healthy for me. I keep doing an activity that I know is not healthy for me.” What we need to understand in those situations “What is it doing to help us in some way, even though that seems counterintuitive?”

It’s important to think about guilt the same way. Guilt actually can, in certain situations, help us, particularly in three key ways.

* Motivation: Many of us, (myself included), feel like guilt can be motivating. In fact, when we’re feeling like we’ve already done something wrong, it can boost our motivation, but typically not for a long-term situation and at a high cost. We are starting from behind, assuming we’ve already done something wrong, that we’ve already made a mistake. We’ve already demonstrated that we are disorganized or lazy or uncaring or all these different ways that we convince ourselves and feel guilty in order to motivate ourselves.

We need to work on recognizing where we are using guilt as motivation and see if we can tap into some other emotions. Maybe there’s something we really want to do, and if we haven’t done it yet, we can tell ourselves, “I really want to move in that direction. That’s something I want in my life and it is important to me,” rather than, “I’m such an awful person because I haven’t already made this change.”

* Guilt protects us from other difficult emotions. You may have grown up knowing that if you expressed anger, the caretakers in your life, whether your parents, siblings, friends, early partners, would respond in a way that told you “Hey, that’s unacceptable. You’re not allowed to feel angry. Feeling angry is unfeminine, and it’s making other people uncomfortable.” So guilt becomes a way that we keep ourselves from being able to truly feel, notice and express those more difficult emotions.

We might say to ourselves, “I shouldn’t feel so mad at my partner. He’s trying his best and I just need to deal with it. I’m overreacting.” Or maybe, “I shouldn’t be so mad that I got passed up for this promotion at work for someone that I don’t think was as well qualified.” We’re telling ourselves we shouldn’t feel these other emotions. This often occurs with grief. People will come in to my practice and talk about a loss that they’ve experienced, and say things like, “I didn’t do enough. I didn’t visit my father enough in the nursing home before he passed. I didn’t put enough attention into my relationship before this separation occurred. I didn’t appreciate having my children home enough before they moved out.” I think what we can recognize here is that guilt is protecting us from grief.

Why is this the case? Because when we are grieving, we are acknowledging that something has truly been lost, and this can be very painful. Guilt, then, tells us, “No, this is not grief. I feel this way because I’ve done something wrong so I need to focus on how I can be better.” In this way, guilt tells us we might have some control over this feeling.

It’s very hard to accept that we don’t have control over everything in our own lives, much less the safety and happiness and vulnerabilities of those others in our life. The risk of loving others is this vulnerability to loss. When we cover that with guilt, we’re also heaping self-criticism on top of what’s already a really painful time.

This is why I always encourage people that getting to those underlying emotions actually allows you to face them, to explore them, and, finally, to understand them. Interestingly, guilt can also step in and protect us from happiness. It can protect us from feeling too good about ourselves or too successful. We might say, “I shouldn’t feel so happy in my relationship right now because my friend is really lonely and she wants to meet someone.” We use guilt as protection, so we don’t feel too good and risk the possibility of future disappointment.

However, the cost of guilt in these situations is that it forces us to make choices that aren’t aligned with what we want and need, but rather with what we think we should do.

* Guilt helps us prove that we care. Another way that I really find guilt can be so sticky and hard to relinquish is that it becomes a way we demonstrate to ourselves that we care. If I don’t feel guilty when someone in my life is struggling, then I must not care. But this is not true. You can absolutely care deeply and with love for your friend or family member and yet not feel guilty, because you didn’t do anything wrong.

We can care deeply for our children, for example, and not feel guilty when they have a difficult day, as if somehow we could have protected them. If we say things that we think are appropriate, aligned with our values, and they feel disappointed, whether it’s our kids, our friends, our parents, that still doesn’t mean that we’ve done something wrong.

So these are some of the key ways, again, that guilt can be so sticky because it benefits us in some way. Whether it’s through costly motivation, its ability to protect us from other true and important emotions or its suggestion that we care enough.

However, shifting way from these “benefits” of guilt is so worth it, because you free up time and energy to make choices based on anything else. It might be anger, dissatisfaction, sadness, grief, happiness, excitement, but whatever it might be, you’re making decisions based on a true sense of agency. You’re saying, “This is what I want and need and I’m moving toward it.

I hope this was a helpful reframe for the ways that guilt can sometimes step into our lives. Tune in for the next episode where I’ll talk more about some of the individual aspects of the four furies of expectations, 1. constant caretaking, 2. hyper-accountability, 3. seeking perfection, and 4. trying to have it all, and why those can be so difficult for us to cope with in our relationship with guilt.

Thanks for tuning in! See you soon.

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Dr. Jennifer Reid is a physician, the host of A Mind of Her Own, and the author of Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations — available at major retailers.

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