titution: Improve and avoid future mistakes, apologize, and make appropriate reparations to injured parties.
Failure to do so may lead to inaction or denial, in which the other party or other circumstances are blamed.
What Are The Five Types of Guilt?
Armed with this background, let’s examine the five types of guilt and—more importantly—how you can cope when guilty feelings come your way.
Guilt Cause #1: Guilt for something you did. The most obvious reason to feel guilty is that you actually did something wrong. This type of guilt may involve harm to others, such causing someone physical or psychological pain. You may also feel guilty because you violated your own ethical or moral code, such cheating, lying, or stealing. Guilt over your own behavior can also be caused by doing something you swore you would never do again (such as smoking, drinking, or overeating). In each of these cases, there’s no doubt that the behavior occurred.
This is Healthy Guilt: The result when you knowingly have done something wrong.
It’s appropriate to feel guilty when you’ve done something wrong. Feeling the emotion of guilt for an action deserving of remorse is normal; to not feel guilty, may be a sign of psychopathy. The problems occur when you ruminate over this guilt. An action in the past cannot be changed, no matter how much you wish it would. Accept the fact that this happened, apologize to the person or persons you harmed, and then figure out how to avoid committing the same act in the future. If you’ve violated your own personal standards (such as through overuse of alcohol or cheating on your partner), you can best avoid straying in the future by seeking support from others who can help you rid yourself of this habit or help you to keep on the up and up. Finally, because of our natural tendency toward ego-centrism, we assume that others place far more importance on our thoughts and actions than they actually do. The behavior over which you are tormented by guilt, such as inadvertently insulting a friend, may hardly have even penetrated that friend’s consciousness.
Dealing With Guilt Cause #1: It’s completely normal to experience guilt in these scenarios-whether you harm yourself or someone else. If you didn’t feel any guilt in these scenarios, then this could be an indication of a deeper and more complex psychological problem. To overcome guilt in this situation, it’s important to accept that whatever happened has happened-and there is nothing you can do to change it. The best way to deal with guilt is to accept it, apologize, and prevent it from happening again.
If your reason for guilt was caused by overstepping your boundaries, morals or ethics, such as overusing alcohol or drugs, lying or cheating, the easiest way to prevent these issues from happening again is to get rid of these habits. Some ways to do this is to seek professional help or seek support from a friend or family member.
Guilt Cause #2: Guilt for something you didn’t do, but want to. You’re thinking about committing an act in which you deviate from your moral code or engage in behavior that is dishonest, unfaithful, or illegal. This is a tough type of guilt to handle. It’s true that you didn’t actually commit the act, so you’re still sitting on the moral high ground. However, we all know that the very fact that you’re contemplating an act that violates your own standards can be as guilt-provoking as the act itself. If you’re beating yourself up for these forbidden and taboo thoughts, you can try the good old Freudian defense mechanism of repression (where you stop up the hidden desire) or denial (where you don’t acknowledge it). However, this is unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome because by defending against your feelings, you may actually fall prey to them and behave in a way that gives you reason to feel guilty. An approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides some guidance for how you can cope with this type of guilt. You can recognize that you have these illicit thoughts, accept them as part of who you are right now, and then, commit 