FEELING GUILTY OR being made to feel guilty is one of the commonest experiences we go through. When we’re kids, our parents send subtle guilt signals to make us conform to set standards of behaviour. Once we’re married, our spouses play similar games. When we’re parents, our children don’t spare us. But, as we discussed in our last article, guilt is a futile emotion that immobilises us in the present and changes nothing. In this article, we will look at some typical guilt signals, payoffs of choosing guilt and strategies to get rid of it.
To read the first part of the article, Are you prone to feeling guilty? Stop… right now, please click here.
Typical guilt signals
In his 1976 bestseller Your Erroneous Zones, American psychiatrist Dr Wayne W. Dyer has listed ways in which our loved ones use guilt as a manipulative tool. Some of these are:
Parents: When there are young children in the house, it’s very common to hear mothers asking them to do some task or the other. Equally common is their tendency to make excuses and mothers’ tendency to send out guilt signals to make them comply.
Suppose a mother has asked her 12-year-old son to take chairs up to the terrace for a party. And the child has replied that he will do it after finishing the video game he is playing. What would be the mother’s typical response? “Never mind then, I’ll do it – with my bad back. You just sit there and enjoy yourself.” Immediately, the child would feel pangs of guilt, likely imagine his mother falling down the stairs and start doing what he’s been told.
Some other typical parental guilt signals are “I went through 18 hours of labour to bring you into the world”; “I stayed married to your father because of you”; and “You’re giving me a heart attack”. Signals to stir sexual guilt, which is very often carried into adulthood, include such statements as “You should be ashamed of reading such (pornographic) magazines, you shouldn’t even have such thoughts”.
Two-way street
Spouses/lovers: Who hasn’t heard love partners firing statements such as “If you loved me, you would have called me” or shooting hurtful looks at each other? According to Dr Dyer, these are common tactics used to make “a love partner conform to the other’s demands and standards of behaviour”.
Children: When a child senses that his mother/father cannot bear to see him unhappy and feels guilty about being a “bad parent”, he uses that guilt as a manipulative tool. So, he throws a tantrum to wangle candy at a supermarket. Or he says things like “But Phoebe’s father allows her to do it” or “You don’t love me” to get his way.
Dr Dyer says: “The parental guilt game can be reversed. Guilt can be a two-way street and children are just as apt to use it in manipulating their parents as the reverse.”
Payoffs of choosing guilt
Here are some reasons why we waste our present moments feeling guilty about the past:
(i) By filling the present with feelings of guilt, we are able to avoid working on ourselves in any effective or self-enhancing way. “Very simply, like so many self-defeating behaviours, guilt is an avoidance technique for working on yourself in the present. Thus, you shift responsibility for what you are or are not now to what you were or were not in the past,” writes Dr Dyer.
(ii) By shifting responsibility, we are able to dodge the hard work and the risks of changing ourselves. “It is easier to immobilise yourself with guilt about the past than to take the hazardous path of growing in the present.”
‘Being forgiven’ payoff
(iii) Many of us believe that if we feel guilty long enough, we will be exonerated for our lapses. This is called the “being forgiven” payoff.
(iv) Guilt allows us to return to the security of childhood when others would make decisions for us. “The payoff is in being protected from taking charge of your own life.”
(v) Guilt is a means of winning the approval of people who don’t condone our behaviour. It is a way of showing those we care for that we know the proper way to behave and are trying to fit in.
Six elimination strategies
Some of the strategies suggested by Dr Dyer to eliminate guilt are:
(i) Keep telling yourself that the past is dead and no amount of guilt you feel for something you’ve done will change anything or make you a better person.
(ii) Ask yourself what you are avoiding in the present moment by feeling guilty. Once you identify it, you can start working on it and get rid of the need for guilt. For example, if you’re guilty about having an extra-marital affair but are carrying on, you are probably avoiding examining your marriage. Obviously, working on a bad marriage is tougher than sneaking away with a lover.
(iii) Start accepting things about yourself that others dislike. Once you get over the need for approval from others and are happy with approval from yourself, the need for guilt will disappear.
Make your own rules
(iv) Review your value system. Stick by the code of ethics you believe in, not what is imposed on you.
(v) Tell those who try to manipulate you with guilt signals that you can live with their disapproval. “Thus, if Mama gets into her guilt act with… ‘I’ll get the chairs, you just sit there’, learn new responses like ‘Mom, if you want to risk your back on a few chairs because you can’t wait a few minutes, I guess there’s little I can do to dissuade you,” writes Dr Dyer. It will take a while for people to catch that they can no longer control you emotionally. Once they get that, attempts at manipulation will stop.
(vi) Make a list of the things you feel guilty about. Depending on severity, give yourself points for each on a scale of 1-10. Add up the points. Ask yourself how much difference the total score — whether it’s 100 or 100,000 — makes to your present. Once you see that the present is the same no matter what the score, you’ll understand that your guilt is a waste of time.