What is guilt and how to deal with it

Guilt is a topic that comes up a lot when I am working with my clients. Whether it’s when dealing with their own clients or perhaps family and/or friends. Unfortunately what I have discovered is this can really take a mental grasp on their overall mental wellbeing. When I met Justine Carino a licensed mental health counselor through another project I was working on I knew I wanted her to help break down what guilt is and how it works.

If you always wondered about guilt and where it comes from keep reading.

In my research, I discovered that how we process guilt is usually linked to a trauma of some sort. How does a past trauma show up again for us when it comes to guilt?
When we experience something traumatic, our brain has a very difficult time processing the traumatic event and we don't know how to store it in our memory. Because of this, we try to make meaning of a traumatic event so we can try and understand it and process it better. Sometimes we assign a level of responsibility to ourselves to create that meaning. We get a feeling of regret that comes from the belief that you could or should have done something different at the time a traumatic event occurred. We take on some kind of accountability for what happened as a way to try and make some sense of it. On another note, we can have relationship trauma from early childhood in which a parent or caregiver often reacted in extreme ways that caused us to feel guilty for mistakes that we made. Their reaction to our mistake may have made us feel shame for making the mistake. Sometimes caregivers disproportionately blame us for how they were feeling or something going wrong. So now as an adult, we might feel guilty at the moment for a mistake we made, but are really connecting our inner child to an interaction with a caregiver from the past, therefore carrying the unresolved baggage from the past into the present.

You mentioned that guilt can be irrational at times, how so?

Guilt can be irrational when it is linked to some kind of "should" or "should not" statement or rule that we have created in our minds. We all create unwritten rules in our heads about the ways things "should or should not be." These are subconscious rules that you probably wouldn't notice until you really pay attention to your inner self-talk when you are starting to feel guilty about something. "I should weigh 125 pounds, I should fit into my pre-baby jeans, I should be able to make everyone happy all of the time, everyone should like me" etc. We create these rules in our minds to feel some kind of structure or safety for ourselves. Sometimes these rules are completely unrealistic to achieve because they are typically based on some kind of false assumptions or goals of perfectionism. As we all know, perfectionism is not attainable, so the guilt we feel when we do not achieve the "shoulds" is irrational.

I love how you break down different types of guilt from traveling for work mom guilt to full-time working mom guilt. What are three things that all these moms have in common?

All of these moms have an idea of what a "good mom" should look like, which is based on some standard that may be really hard or unrealistic to meet. All of these moms care about their children and want the best for them, but moms today are being pulled in more directions than ever before in our history. We are all trying to do way too much, and trying to do everything perfectly. We try to become perfect mothers and much of this pressure has to do with comparing ourselves to other moms around us and online. The "shoulds" show up when we start to measure ourselves in comparison to other moms and what their work-life balance may be like. "I should only work this much, I should be at everything all of the time, I should be pumping at work, I should have the perfect balance between work and home life, etc.” Well, I say, what do you mean should? Who says? Who makes these rules and why do we feel like we have to follow them perfectly? There are so many factors that influence decision-making for a mother and what works for one mother may not work for the other. “Shoulds” lead to the feeling of shame, and when we feel shame we hide and isolate, which leads to disconnection. This is where a lot of moms start to feel isolated in whatever "work-life balance" they are trying to maintain. There is no balance. There is just juggling. Sometimes you have to drop a ball here and there and that's okay.

For more information on Justine and her services click here.