How to deal with guilt feelings and where they come from

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

I’ve heard Brené Brown and others make the distinction between guilt and shame. They say the former is useful and positive because it tells you when you’ve done something wrong.

That may be true for those who grew up in somewhat healthy homes. However, for those of us raised in homes with abuse and neglect, guilt can be a conditioned response.

Rather than telling you when you’ve done something wrong, guilt is your go-to feeling. It feels like home because feeling wrong is so familiar to you.

One of the symptoms of unmet childhood needs is over responsibility. That means you take on things that are not yours to take on.

This contributes to the codependency and lack of boundaries that characterize your relationships. When things break down, you assume it’s your fault and your responsbility to fix it.

Guilt & narcissistic control

If you were raised by a narcissist, guilt may have been used to control you. Your caregivers encouraged you to take the blame for anything and everything to make themselves feel better.

The guilt you feel whenever you set a boundary with a toxic family member is not helpful or truthful. It’s your unhealed inner child trying to protect you from a parent’s wrath which would have felt life-threatening at the time.

This false guilt can feel so terrifying to the nervous system that you’ll do anything to get rid of it. That means apologizing or bending your boundaries to get back in the narcissist’s good books.

The nervous system, ungoverned by time, does not know you are an independent adult now. It fears your parents’ rejection or abandonment the same way it did in childhood.

Your guilt is a toxic parent’s tool to keep you manageable and under their thumb. Unlike healthy parents, yours encourage your guilt to avoid feeling their own.

Narcissists and other toxic people lack the empathy and compassion necessary to parent effectively. Their need to feel right and special supersedes any love or care they have for their children.

So, you feeling guilty benefits them and they’ll use it to get what they want from you. This may be hard to hear, but I say it so you’ll know not to trust guilt the way some self-help experts suggest.

The problem with urgent action

When you feel guilty for setting a boundary or going no contact, that’s a conditioned response from childhood. You try to free yourself from the uncomfortable feeling by taking an action.

Action taken out of such duress comes from an unhealed inner child. As a result, it will only hurt you in the long run because the inner child thinks short-term.

It people pleases because that’s what it believes will keep you safe right now. It isn’t thinking about your quality of life down the road.

So, when you feel compelled to do something to rid yourself of the feeling of guilt, stop. Instead of pushing the feeling away, accept it.

That’s not the same as admitting wrongdoing, because your guilt is no measure of your rightness or wrongness. You’ve been conditioned to feel bad anytime you stand up for yourself or refuse to self-abandon.

Instead, allow yourself to feel guilty and do nothing to change the feeling. Feel the guilt and uphold the boundary or maintain the no contact.

Unlike what the experts say, guilt for a trauma survivor is not a reliable measure of wrongdoing. It’s something other people have used against you, and it’s time for that to stop.