Overcoming Self Guilt

Overcoming self guilt is very important, since it hurts your self esteem and puts a break on your self improvement process.

“Guilt is the source of sorrows, the avenging fiend that follows us behind with whips and stings.”
-Nicholas Rowe

Did you ever blame yourself for something negative that happened to you or to someone else? Did You feel that ‘something you said, something you did or something you did not do’ was responsible for that? This is self guilt.
Overcoming self guilt is important to unburden your mind.

How this Self Guilt evolves?

It evolves by your own thinking process. It may be initiated by you or by somebody else.

Self guilt initiated by your own thought process

Many suffer from self guilt.
It happens to me sometimes, when I suddenly wake up from my thoughts to find that my mind was busy in self blaming process for the last 15 or 20 minutes. My thoughts jumped from past to future and back, unknown number of times.

What do I think of?
It is really shocking to realize the type of thoughts that flood my mind.

What did my thoughts consist of?
Thoughts from my past- related to all failures, regrets and guilt. The mistakes I made, the wrong decisions I took and the opportunities I missed because of them. The guilt was because of ‘I shouldn’t have said that’, ‘I acted so stupid’ or ‘why didn’t I do that?’ type of things.

Thinking of the past with guilt and regret leads to mental stress, low self esteem and sometimes, self hate. To get over such mental agony, people may resort to alcohol, drugs etc...Hence, overcoming self guilt is essential for your self improvement and success.

• Why some of the decisions of the past seem wrong now?

• Why some of acts of the past seem stupid now?

• Why some of the things you left out in the past seem to be missed opportunities now?

The decisions seemed to be correct at that time. Otherwise you would not have taken such decisions or acted that way. But, why do they seem wrong now?

Because, you have grown and more mature now. You are wiser. Growing up is a continuous process. After a few days or months or years, you may regret some of the decisions you have taken today. Today you are right- unless you have intentionally taken a bad decision, in spite of knowing it is bad.

Guilt triggered by others

People can and sometimes do blame directly or act in a way to trigger guilt in you in many ways. Be aware of such attempts. Overcoming self guilt is more difficult if you dance to their tunes:

• People try to blame you for their misery if you don’t respond positively to their requests.

• Your guilty feeling can increase if people around you reinforce your feelings.

• People can magnify your faults or accuse you of inactivity to cover up theirs.

• People display phoney misery to arouse your sense of guilt.

• People exert pressure on you by listing out the consequences if you don’t act favourably.

What are the bad effects of self guilt?

• In a workplace or similar scenario, you may try to make everyone happy by overexerting yourself.

• You want to go that extra mile for them, even ignoring your needs.

• You will be worried over the possible negative consequences to others because of your action or lack of it.

• It confuses, misleads and misdirects you.

• It will interfere with your thinking process and decision making.

• You will be forced into inactivity because of the fear of doing something wrong that my cause failure for you or discomfort to others.

• It results in low self esteem, self hate and erosion of self confidence

• In severe cases, it may force you to get addicted to alcohol, drugs etc…

Overcoming self guilt

I became aware of a very interesting and shocking fact out of the analysis of my thoughts. My thought process was concentrating only on mistakes/failures and completely neglected the good things, right decisions and success from the past.

This is unfair and biased. Think of the good things from your past life. Congratulate yourself. Celebrate even the small things you did, that resulted in happiness in your or someone else’s life. It aids the process of overcoming self guilt.

Don’t be guilty of the past. Learn from it and move on. You have your weaknesses and strengths. Did you take bad decisions because of some weakness you have? Work on that weakness and try to overcome it. Pool up your strengths and improve upon them.

Focus on what you can do now- if you can rectify the bad result of a past decision/act.

There may be past factors, the bad effects of which can still be corrected by acting now. But, it is possible, your ego may prevent you from taking such corrective actions. It is better to overcome your ago and make amends rather than suffering from self guilt.
As an example, if you lost a friendship because of what you did or said in the past, make amends. May be, a simple ‘sorry’ from your heart is what is required.

There may be other factors, the bad effects of which can’t be altered by any action now.

What factors make you feel guilty?
The first step in overcoming self guilt is: List out the important factors, one below the other, that give you maximum guilty feeling.Leave one or two lines of space under each factor.
Why do you feel guilty?
Give the reasons under each factor. To make things easier, let me give some examples.

Self guilt examples:

• Did your relationship with a friend get affected negatively because of something you said or did?

• Did you lose a career opportunity because you refused to take up an assignment?

• Do you feel that your child’s future could have been better if you sent him to a better school/college?

• Do you feel that you could have looked after your parents better?

• Did you lose some money because of a wrong investment decision?

Are these reasons really genuine?
Examine each reason under each factor. Are you sure you are the one to be blamed for it?
Unbiased in your judgement is a must in overcoming self guilt. You will be surprised to find that, for many things, you had been unnecessarily blaming yourself. This type of analysis will take away a lot of load from your mind. You will be left with much less number of factors to deal with.

So, what is the point in pondering over them? Loading your mind with ‘past’ guilt results in taking the ‘present’ out of your focus.
Focus on things you can do now. Since you have the past experience to bank on, try to minimize such mistakes by concentrating on what you do. Concentration is possible only when your mind is free, especially of past guilt.

It is difficult but, you can do it. Be patient with yourself. You need all your self control to push away the guilt.

We all have the power to do what want and focus on what we desire. When your mind wanders to the old negative thoughts, drag it back. It needs practice and perseverance.

Mistakes and failures are part of life. It is part of evolving.

“When guilt rears its ugly head confront it, discuss it and let it go. The past is over. It is time to ask what can we do right, not what did we do wrong. Forgive yourself and move on.”
-Bernie S. Siegel

Analyzing your thought process is the stating point in overcoming self guilt.

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