 experience which is renewed in the present moment.
When it comes to guilt, Freud was the expert, but he certainly didn’t have a corner on the market. Guilt comes in many forms and it can be boiled down to a set of five basic types. You’ll learn what those five types are, but first let’s take a look at how psychologists define guilt.
Guilt is, first and foremost, an emotion. You may think of guilt as a good way to get someone to do something for you out of a sense of obligation. Guilt is not a very good motivator. It’s more accurate to think of guilt as an internal state. In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states. It’s one of the “sad” emotions, which also include agony, grief, and loneliness, according to one comprehensive framework.
Like other emotions, there is no one explanation for guilt. The traditional Freudian view is that guilt resides under the surface veneer of our behavior. The psychodynamic theory of Freud proposes that we build defense mechanisms to protect us from the guilt we would experience if we knew just how awful our awful desires really were. Specifically, Freud linked the feeling of guilt, and its related emotion of anxiety, to the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development.Young children, he believed, desire having sex with their opposite-sex parent. Eventually, these desires become submerged and transformed into sexual attraction toward others of their own age.
From a cognitive/behavioral point of view, guilt is an emotion that people experience because they’re convinced they’ve caused harm. In cognitive theory, the thoughts cause the emotions. The guilt of emotion follows directly from the thought that you are responsible for someone else’s misfortune, whether or not this is the case. People who experience guilt on a chronic basis, according to the cognitive perspective, mistakenly suffer under the illusion that they have caused other people harm. Their negative emotion follows from their tendency to misinterpret what happens to them and not to question the logic of their conclusions.
In cognitive therapy, treatment often involves teaching people to rid themselves of their “automatic thoughts” that they’ve caused others to suffer. People constantly plagued by guilt are also taught to recognize their “dysfunctional attitudes” so that they recognize when they’re going through such mental processes as catastrophizing (making the very worst of a bad situation) or overgeneralizing (believing that if one bad thing happened, many more must have as well).
In contrast to the psychodynamic view of guilt, the cognitive perspective gives the average person some clues for fixing the tendency to blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. According to the cognitive view, if you change your thoughts, you can change your emotions. Once you realize that you’re inaccurately seeing yourself as causing others to suffer, you can readjust your mental set and more realistically figure out your role in whatever grief came their way.
What Does Guilt Feel Like?
Guilt can be categorized by the following feelings, according to Emotional Competency:
- Feeling badly about your actions
- Failure to meet another’s standard of behavior
- Transgressing a moral imperative
- Having empathy but not acting from empathy
- Dissatisfaction from our assessment of a decrease in social acceptance or contribution
- Failing to prevent harm to another
- Not meeting your responsibility to others
These emotions continue, providing the following guilt-cycle (per Emotional Competency):
Starting at a neutral state, an incident occurs in which you fail to meet your own standards, others’ standards, or there is a dissatisfaction based on your own assessment. Guilt is the feeling that corresponds with the interpretation of the incident.
How Do I Remediate Guilt?
In order to remediate your guilt, the following are recommended:
Accept Responsibility: Feel remorse, understand what you did wrong, and take responsibility
Remorse: Genuinely feeling bad about what has happened, assess the situation
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