Guilt Tripping

WE ALL DO AND SAY THINGS WE LATER REGRET especially in the heat of the moment when we’ve been provoked by someone else’s words or actions that upsets us. It’s not until after we’ve cooled down a bit and begin to think about our untoward behaviour that feelings of guilt and remorse invade our mind.

We are all too often bombarded with these guilty feelings. We tend to saddle ourselves with a self imposed yoke of responsibility for any wrongdoing that we believe we may have inflicted on someone else, whether they are aware of it or not.

No matter if it’s real or imagined, the negative feelings resulting from our wild outburst evokes inner suffering, regret and self loathing. It churns over in our mind, so much so that we tend to neglect our own happiness and well being while we try to remedy the situation.

We are willing to do anything, even kowtow in an attempt to right our perceived wrong. The anguish of guilt is the result of what we imagine we’ve done wrong to someone else. The incident that originally caused the guilt no longer exists, but our mind can’t let it go, which causes us to suffer unnecessary self torment.

“I try to keep my self-disapproval secret. I know that.
They most likely don’t think about me the way that I think about me. The recriminations against that negative, unloved guilty self that I live with in my head 24/7.”  

If truth be known, the person that we feel guilty of supposedly wronging has moved on and forgotten the incident altogether, if they were ever aware of it in the first place, and yet we cling to the memory. It invades our mind like a malignant cancer.

All of this guilt lives inside of us not in the other person that we feel we’ve wronged. If we really want to stop feeling guilty all the time, we must learn to forgive ourselves all the time...

Dan’s Quote: “Guilt is an emotional weapon that we use to inflict self harm”

Header: Sunset over the Pioneer River in ‘Mackay’ Queensland, Australia.