The Heavy Burden of Guilt: 4 Steps to Free Yourself

Understanding Guilt

Guilt is a social construct. It’s been hammered into our brains by religion, cultural norms, and judgy friends and family members for quite a long time. Guilt is a handy tool to keep people in line. If you step out of these imaginary lines, you’re a bad person and/or you should be punished. I don’t know about you, but none of that feels empowering or like it will create positive, lasting change in a person or their behavior.

Reframing Guilt

I’m going to blow your mind here - guilt is optional. You heard me right! After making a mistake, we don’t have to feel bad about it or ourselves. Consider this, you’re with a friend and you didn’t get much sleep last night. She’s telling a story you don’t find very interesting, and you abruptly tell her you don’t have time for this and you have to go.

Most people would feel pretty bad about this almost immediately, “How could I have said that to her?” or “She must be hurt?” or “I’m a horrible friend.". The reality is, you’re a human being and you made a mistake. We all make mistakes, and making mistakes doesn’t mean we are bad.

Now you get to choose how you will respond. Do you think you need to feel bad about yourself to apologize? Probably not. Imagine if you skipped all the hand-wringing and beating yourself up and went straight to the apology. So, you made a mistake, you recognize it, and you go directly to making amends. Think of all the time and mental anguish you’d save by skipping that nasty “feeling guilty” step.

Is this easier said than done? Oh yes! Feeling guilty is, unfortunately, heavily ingrained in most of us.

Here are 4 tips for letting go of guilt:

1) Recognize when you breach your code of conduct or your values. Face the music head-on.

2) Once you’ve faced your behavior, you will probably feel the “pangs of guilt” somewhere in your body. Maybe you feel discomfort in your heart, pressure in your head, and/or a knot in the pit of your stomach.

3) In your mind, go to that part of your body and engage it in conversation. Ask it what it’s feeling and what it would like to say. This part of you may be eager to chastise and tell you to feel bad about yourself, “You are a bad person” or “Look, you did it again! What is wrong with you?”. You can then respond in a calm, loving way, “Making a mistake does not make me a bad person, and I can make this right without feeling bad about myself.”

4) When you give voice to that part of yourself and engage it in conversation, it feels heard and will stop stomping around trying to get your attention. Then, you can feel freer and better able to address the situation from a less emotionally charged place.

Does this take practice? Yes. This is a muscle that will need to be exercised so it is stronger and stronger until one day you’ll notice the feelings of guilt are all but gone!

Going through these steps before addressing what you’ve done will result in a more heartfelt apology, and save you from experiencing the dark, heavy feeling of guilt. Nice, right?

Want to learn more about processing and letting go of guilt? I’m here to help, let’s connect.