When you have wronged someone or done something wrong, you get this feeling. When you have made a mistake you sometimes feel guilty.
Guilt is the feeling of uneasiness. Guilt is where you reflect on yourself, and it’s where you take responsibility for your actions.
Have you ever felt guilty over something?
Not everyone has the gift of being able to feel guilt. Guilt is important. Thanks to guilt you can apologize and fix your mistakes, however guilt can also be unhealthy.
If you have done something wrong, something against the morals you have been taught, you may get a feeling of uneasiness. You may feel guilty over what you’ve done. This will lead you to go and apologize or try to fix your mistake. This is where guilt is healthy, because it makes you look back at what you have done.
On the other hand, you may feel guilty over something you can’t control, over something that ought to happen, and you can’t change it, but even then, you blame yourself, and tell yourself that you’ve done something wrong, when you haven’t. And that’s when guilt is unhealthy.
After feeling guilty over something for a long time, you tend to have this thought “I should not be forgiven.” But no, everyone has the right to be forgiven. You should forgive yourself and reflect on your actions instead of being stuck with the feeling of guilt, you have to acknowledge your mistake, learn the lesson, seek forgiveness, then forgive yourself and move on.
There are people who can’t experience guilt, and those people are often people with psychological disorders. Since guilt needs the person to acknowledge their mistakes and their wrong doings, people with psychological orders like, anti-social disorder don’t feel guilt. People with anti-social disorder have no empathy, they tend to treat others harshly, and they don’t consider the consequences of their negative actions nor learn from them. Another example are narcissists. Narcissists are self-centered and arrogant, they lack empathy. Because narcissists are so full of themselves and their ideas, they don’t like to admit their mistakes. That’s why most narcissists don’t feel guilt, although narcissist who feel some empathy can feel guilt.
Most people think that guilt and shame are the same, but actually they are not. As its written above guilt is the feeling of regret after doing something you consider wrong. While shame is a mixture of negative feelings and thoughts about yourself.
You feel guilty because you have done something wrong, but you feel ashamed because you think you are worthless and full of flaws. You also feel ashamed when you break a social or cultural value.
Shame is usually how you think and feel you appear to yourself, your family and others in general, while guilt is usually when you feel remorse, regret over something you did, you acknowledge the person you wronged, and you are regretting what you did for them.
The effect of both unhealthy guilt and shame are negative and sometimes chronic. Unhealthy guilt makes you want to keep punishing yourself, guilt also traps you, which makes it hard for you to escape it, if you left it take over you.
Shame can make you feel insecure, humiliated and give you the fear of being rejected by the people around you. It makes you want to isolate yourself from both what makes you feel ashamed and people.
Never bear guilt and let it torture you, always acknowledge your mistake, make up for them, forgive yourself and let it go. Don’t ignore guilt and bear with it, or else you will lose the door to free yourself and you will always be stuck in this part of your life. Take a moment to look at your feelings and what you did so that everyone can live in peace.
