d 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
Restitution: 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