Like any negative emotion, guilt causes great discomfort. It creates clamps in the body and this interferes with normal blood circulation. This is how diseases of internal organs and systems can appear. Any negative emotion that gnaws at a person must be eliminated. This is important for physical health and psychological comfort.
What did you feel or feel guilty about?
It is best to answer this question in writing. To make it easier for you, here are examples of other people's answers:
- That I cannot alleviate the condition of clients, that I am powerless to help them quickly (I am a psychologist).
- Because she had no time for the child, she yelled at everyone.
- For the inability to help family/friends.
- I don't do enough.
- I felt guilty that I was not ready to sacrifice my health for the sake of my relatives.
- Because I can take care of everyone in the best possible way, I don’t know exactly how.
- Guilt for not being able to do everything I should do, for not meeting the expectations of loved ones.
- Instead of getting a new profession (which is very necessary and which I was heading towards before the crisis), I baked pies and lay on the sofa.
- Because she had grandiose plans and did nothing.
- Guilt that someone else has problems around me, but I live happily.
- Guilt for being irritated and angry with my husband.
- For eating a lot.
Desire to please in everything
The guilt complex most seriously affects relationships with the outside world. A person ceases to feel capable of great achievements and is afraid to act in accordance with his inner convictions. He unconsciously develops a desire to please everyone. This is done in order not to anger the interlocutor or provoke the development of a quarrel. However, the habit of meeting other people's expectations does no good to anyone. Soon a person loses his individuality and ceases to understand what he needs in life. This is the case when the feeling of guilt can be so overwhelming from within that there is no strength left for active action.
I should have...
Based on the answer to the first question, what should you or should not have done? What was the expectation that you violated? What should that state and behavior look like in which you would not feel guilty? In short, how were you supposed to function? What to do/what not to do?
Try to write it straight, even if it looks crazy - it doesn't matter. For example, if you understand that you should have been a superman, then write: “I had to be a superwoman so as not to feel guilty.”
Examples:
- It’s a joy to learn, tidy up, and develop 28 hours a day. And there was nothing to unravel. Tyutya.
- Be a support to clients in any star, even if I die myself; take care of the child in any condition.
- To work successfully and do many other things, which many succeed, is not at all superhuman.
- Continue studying with your teacher or at least study on your own.
- To be support and support, to bring reassurance to an anxious partner, showing that I am nearby.
- It’s better to be prepared: create more financial reserves just in case.
- Be super calm and balanced.
- Do your best and cope with stress quickly and without consequences for work.
- Study every day and absorb tons of new knowledge.
- Have a lot of resources to listen to loved ones, to devote a lot of time to them, not to buy anything for yourself, but to help people with money. Keep the kids more occupied. Don't be afraid, don't be cowardly.
- Keep yourself in good physical shape.
- I feel a lot of grief because my plans didn’t work out as planned, and I have no right to enjoy any other stability.
- Hold on, be superhuman and not experience strong emotions.
- Get enough sleep, pump up your abs, learn two languages and programming, be super smart, wise and prudent.
The answers often contain many descriptions that seem like overgeneralization: for example, “I should have always... never... regardless of any conditions or any corrections.” In short, this is a kind of code of a moral neurotic: “I must always be successful in all my endeavors.”
This is a direct path to guilt. The problem is that it is difficult for us not to have such expectations, because society and family invested them in us, and then we continued to invest them in ourselves.
I hope you have thought through your answers and seen that your expectations of yourself and others' expectations of you are excessive. Surely this understanding will help someone correct them a little.
Feeling depressed
The guilt complex, one way or another, affects our perception of the world. A person begins to feel that nothing good awaits him in the future. Of course, this is always an exaggeration, but one cannot get rid of negative emotions too quickly. Nightmarish dreams can haunt you for quite a long time, preventing you from feeling happy and self-sufficient. A feeling of depression occurs in response to constant overstrain of the nervous system.
Sadness and despondency become human companions. He stops noticing how he misses opportunities that arise and often gives up even before he tries to take the first step. Such a state does not in any way contribute to starting to take care of oneself, does not lead to development. The personality is controlled by despondency; only negative impressions accumulate in it. The person simply begins to slowly fade. He can no longer so openly rejoice at some successful acquisitions, since he constantly looks back at his past.
Who expected this from you?
Evaluate whose expectations these are? Yours or someone else's? Who expected this from you? How familiar are you with the feeling of not meeting expectations? Is this what you expect from yourself or was this something that was once expected of you? Or are they still waiting? For example, “I should have been a superman” - whose expectation is this? The approximate balance of expectations is 50/50: equal parts of ourselves and others.
It may turn out that these expectations are internalized, i.e. learned in childhood without criticism. Internalization is a psychological mechanism in which we non-judgmentally take on someone else’s rule. Whether it is good or bad, we will still take it, and it will live in us as a model of behavior, as instructions for our actions. While we are small, we need support to develop and grow, and other people's rules are good as support, especially if they come from loved ones. This is how internalized expectations arise.
Feeling of insignificance
A child's guilt complex often appears in response to the exorbitant demands of his parents. That is why father and mother need to give up the idea of comparing their child with other children. Otherwise, the child will never learn to understand his achievements.
He will somehow cease to feel his worth, so he will strive to please others in everything. The feeling of insignificance has an incredibly destructive effect on the emotional component. As a result, self-esteem falls and the child does not want to make any efforts to achieve any satisfactory results. A guilt complex towards parents can also appear in adulthood if a person has not been able to successfully organize his life. In some cases, people become so focused on despair and hopelessness that they stop noticing the prospects available.
Three ways to forgive yourself
If that's what you're expecting, this is a story about your Inner Critic or a superhero's cape. Perhaps if you can forgive yourself for not being a superhero in a sparkling cape, not omnipotent and not in control, you will feel better.
Try to forgive yourself. I don't know if you will succeed, but I want to emphasize: we always act at the limit of our capabilities, even when it seems to us that this is not the case. At the limit of capabilities, knowledge, skills.
And at every moment we do the best we can. And it's not our fault that it often looks bad. This means that this is what it is, our best, and it can hurt, but I’m sure that you can still try to forgive yourself.
We are all living people, and a crisis is an extreme condition. It's normal to not be able to act like a superman, even if outside of a crisis you were like a superman. And even more so if they weren’t like that outside the crisis.
How to forgive yourself? Sometimes it helps to imagine that a close friend or your child is in your place. We often have more mercy for others than for ourselves, and we would not blame others for the same. We easily agree to support them.
To practice this technique, you can imagine yourself as a soccer player who has missed the ball three times and failed to score a single goal. This player has two coaches.
One begins to say: “Well, why are you doing this, how are you doing this, you’re stupid, you’re not prepared, you can’t do anything, go, I don’t even want to waste time on you.”
And the second one says: “Oh, well, you tried so hard, it was probably your best blow, it doesn’t matter, do you want me to work out with you? Come here on Wednesday, we’ll train, and I’ll see what exactly you can’t do.”
Which coach do you think will help you, as a football player, achieve better results? As a rule, everyone says: “Of course, the second one!” Then the next important question is: “What kind of coach are you for yourself? How do you treat yourself?
The second mechanism for forgiveness is to compare yourself to others. Our experience is largely universal. If something happens to you, then it also happens to others. There is nothing unique about the processes you are experiencing. Both the emotion of guilt and the reason why we feel it in a crisis are also not unique. If someone else can forgive themselves, then so can you.
The third mechanism of forgiveness: you are the only version of yourself, and no one has as good a reason to be kinder to you as you do. Most often, no one needs this. Therefore, it is better to try to be the first person kind to yourself in your own universe. Come on, be brave!
Decreased self-esteem
A guilt complex necessarily changes your attitude towards yourself. The personality suffers, desires and aspirations begin to be perceived as unimportant and not deserving of special attention. There is a significant decrease in self-esteem. Against the backdrop of strong experiences, a person begins to doubt his own capabilities. Any undertakings seem dubious to him and the prospects are vague. This state can be explained quite logically: when we feel guilty about something, the desire to achieve something and make certain efforts disappears.
Now, if I...
What else helps to work with feelings of guilt? Remove the subjunctive mood. Instead of thinking in the spirit of “I should have...”, “If only I had...”, “That’s a shame I didn’t...”, try thinking, “Next time I’ll do it differently.”
This is generally a cool technique. The fact is that people with feelings of guilt often think in the subjunctive mood, but this should never be done. And if you catch yourself doing this, then stop immediately and convert it into the phrase “Next time I...”. That's all. No subjunctive moods, absolutely.
Psychological discomfort
Due to constant stress, a person gradually develops a state that cannot be called pleasant. It begins to undermine him from the inside, influencing the everyday process of making important decisions.
Psychological discomfort contributes to the fact that the individual has to constantly suppress his interests. When we compromise our own values, we experience fear, resentment, disappointment, and ongoing anxiety.
How it manifests itself
Anyone who has felt guilty at least once knows how this unpleasant feeling manifests itself. There appears emptiness, disappointment in oneself, an obsessive desire to go back and do differently, to compensate for the damage caused.
If we talk about a pathological, heightened sense of guilt, then it can be recognized by the following signs:
- Constant apologies that go beyond reasonable politeness. For example: “Excuse me, can I come in?”, “Sorry, am I disturbing you?”, “Sorry, please, if I’m taking up your time!” etc. So a person puts the interests and values of another above his own, is afraid of causing discomfort, looking intrusive, interfering, and considers himself to have no right to count on anything. Such people are often prone to excessive self-examination and self-flagellation.
- Feeling unworthy, not good enough, not smart enough, not beautiful enough. For some, the idea that you can be happy, rich, successful is almost sinful. Hence, preserving the family “for the sake of the children” or “so that mom doesn’t get upset” and other situations.
- Aggression, excessive criticism, the desire to be right, to have the last word in any dispute. By manifesting himself in this way towards other people, a person seems to be trying to ward off the danger that someone will reveal his weakness and imperfection. And the best defense, as you know, is an attack.
- Unexpressed aggression manifests itself in the form of suppressed emotions, as a result of which a person becomes overly friendly, afraid to enter into an argument, express his opinion, or be rejected.
- Another way it manifests itself is increased anxiety, which is difficult to control and sometimes even difficult to track. It would seem that everything is good in life, but something still torments you.
Guilt also has physical symptoms. Most often these are:
- sleep disorders;
- digestive problems, nausea;
- headache;
- muscle spasms;
- tearfulness.
Useful materials on the topic
I have prepared a selection of several courses that will help you get rid of guilt and other negative experiences.
Brain fitness
Description. A very unusual course on getting rid of negativity. It's not cheap, but the price is worth it. By purchasing a course, you first of all receive theoretical material, tests and exercises to work with any negative thoughts. After 1-2 weeks, you receive a device by mail for more effective development of the program - a neural interface.
If you look at the guy in the picture, you will just see the neural interface on his head. This little machine analyzes the waves your brain constantly emits. Naturally, depending on the emotions you experience, these waves will be different. From the neural interface, bluetooth information can be uploaded to your personal Wikium account, where it will be analyzed, after which you will receive specific recommendations on how to get out of an oppressive state.
I have never seen such programs on the Internet before. Wikium experts recommend using the neural interface for only 15 minutes a day, although you can do this more often, especially to see the amplitudes of fluctuations in different emotional states.
Authors: practicing psychologists from Wikium.
Cost: 17,990 rub.
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Brain Detoxification
Description. This is a cheap training course that will help you quickly remove all negativity from your head and start living a full life. There are ten lessons with theory, but they are accompanied by many exercises, techniques, tests, tables and diagrams.
Of course, not only guilt is analyzed, but also other emotional experiences. Remember, have you ever had a time when an unpleasant situation or memory just wouldn’t leave your head - you constantly replayed thoughts and images in your mind that oppressed you, and you felt more and more depressed? It is these conditions that an expert teacher will help you get out of. No pills or other medications.
Authors: Victor Shiryaev.
Cost: 990 rub.
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Emotional intellect
Description. We need emotional intelligence not only to better understand the emotions of others and communicate more effectively with them. It also helps to control our own emotions and not give them the opportunity to take over our mind.
There are twenty lessons in this course, they are accompanied by tests, exercises and many, many simulators. According to the teacher, every student who undergoes training here gains a sense of calm, self-confidence, and can easily stop any negative experiences. After completing the first ten lessons, you will notice that you begin to concentrate better on the tasks at hand and fall asleep calmly at night.
Author: Oleg Kalinichev.
Cost: 990 rub.
Start studying
Be sure to check out the free materials that Wikium offers. First of all, webinars. They are held weekly and the topics change periodically. Most often, the topic of the webinar is the human brain, its secrets and features of work. There are also purely psychological topics - on communication, emotions, interaction with other people.
The second interesting thing is free exercise equipment. There are one hundred of them, they are divided into groups according to the skills they develop. Most simulators are aimed at memory and thinking, but there are, for example, an emotional intelligence simulator and other programs on psychological topics. There is no need to pay for anything.
Mental self-regulation from 4Brain
Description . Another high-quality material that will help you calm down and start living a full life, despite the stress and negativity around you. You will undergo training for 5 weeks, the total number of lessons here is 25, the duration of one lesson is only 20-30 minutes.
The authors try to give as little theoretical information as possible and focus on practice. You will practice your skills through games, exercises, and tests. The course contains the most popular and modern techniques from domestic and foreign sources.
You can study from a tablet computer or phone, because the 4Brain interface is well optimized for mobile devices. The summary of materials with test results remains with you after complete completion of the training.
The course is not suitable for those who have been experiencing very deep depression for several months or years. To get out of it, it is better to contact a professional psychotherapist.
Authors : Alena Luneva, Dmitry Radin, Evgeny Buyanov, Kirill Nogales.
Cost : 1,990 rub.
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Understanding the reasons
Nothing in our life happens just like that. There are reasons for everything. It is necessary to understand the reasons so as not to remain in such a painful and depressing state for months and years. Perhaps some situation occurred in the past that subsequently influenced the attitude towards oneself. Being guilty of something is quite a serious test.
Not everyone can stand it. It often happens that after a couple breaks up, people experience a certain awkwardness in front of their own children. A complex of guilt towards a child for divorce is a fairly common situation. Some parents are ready to literally shower their child with endless gifts just to compensate for the unpleasant feelings that he or she has experienced. Of course, this is not a way out. Positive changes will begin only after admitting your own mistakes.
