Guilt Resources

by Band Back Together | Jul 19, 2018

All day, every day, we all experiences hundreds of emotions. Some are positive, some are negative, and all serve a purpose. Emotions prompt us into action by organizing and motivating our response. Emotions can be broken down in a number of ways. All emotions start with a prompting event, which is then interpreted. an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that he or she has compromised his or her own standards of conduct or has violated a universal moral standard and bears significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse.

For example, if you lose your job, you may interpret that to mean several things, such as: “I did not perform my duties well.” This interpretation prompts internal changes within our body, such as increased heart rate, becoming flushed, or shaking. These internal responses also lead to action urges, which we then act upon, such as crying, yelling, or escaping the situation.

After we act, there are after-effects, such as feeling distracted. This process generally happens very quickly, and can be categorized as sadness or anger.

Primary Versus Secondary Emotions:

A primary emotion is a direct reaction to a prompting event.

Secondary emotions are those we feel about our primary emotions.

For example, after failing a test, a person may feel disappointed. However, if the person feels guilty for then letting his or her parent down for failing the test, guilt is the secondary emotion because it is guilt about the disappointment.

What is Guilt?

Guilt is one of the most complex emotions that we feel. It is almost always a secondary emotion in response to a primary emotional response. Guilt is often a response to a perceived decrease in a social standing. Guilt often motivates behavior related to social expectations in that it “punishes” us for socially unacceptable behavior. Guilt is defined as a deep feeling of remorse for an act which may or may not have occurred in the past. Therefore, guilt becomes a past experience which is renewed in the present moment.

When it comes to guilt, Freud was the expert, but he certainly didn’t have a corner on the market. Guilt comes in many forms and it can be boiled down to a set of five basic types. You’ll learn what those five types are, but first let’s take a look at how psychologists define guilt.

Guilt is, first and foremost, an emotion. You may think of guilt as a good way to get someone to do something for you out of a sense of obligation. Guilt is not a very good motivator. It’s more accurate to think of guilt as an internal state. In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states.  It’s one of the “sad” emotions, which also include agony, grief, and loneliness, according to one comprehensive framework.

Like other emotions, there is no one explanation for guilt. The traditional Freudian view is that guilt resides under the surface veneer of our behavior.  The psychodynamic theory of Freud proposes that we build defense mechanisms to protect us from the guilt we would experience if we knew just how awful our awful desires really were. Specifically, Freud linked the feeling of guilt, and its related emotion of anxiety, to the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development.Young children, he believed, desire having sex with their opposite-sex parent. Eventually, these desires become submerged and transformed into sexual attraction toward others of their own age.

From a cognitive/behavioral point of view, guilt is an emotion that people experience because they’re convinced they’ve caused harm. In cognitive theory, the thoughts cause the emotions. The guilt of emotion follows directly from the thought that you are responsible for someone else’s misfortune, whether or not this is the case. People who experience guilt on a chronic basis, according to the cognitive perspective, mistakenly suffer under the illusion that they have caused other people harm. Their negative emotion follows from their tendency to misinterpret what happens to them and 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

Guilt Cycle:

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 penetrated that friend’s consciousness.

Dealing With Guilt Cause #1: It’s completely normal to experience guilt in these scenarios-whether you harm yourself or someone else. If you didn’t feel any guilt in these scenarios, then this could be an indication of a deeper and more complex psychological problem. To overcome guilt in this situation, it’s important to accept that whatever happened has happened-and there is nothing you can do to change it. The best way to deal with guilt is to accept it, apologize, and prevent it from happening again.

If your reason for guilt was caused by overstepping your boundaries, morals or ethics, such as overusing alcohol or drugs, lying or cheating, the easiest way to prevent these issues from happening again is to get rid of these habits. Some ways to do this is to seek professional help or seek support from a friend or family member.

Guilt Cause #2: Guilt for something you didn’t do, but want to. You’re thinking about committing an act in which you deviate from your moral code or engage in behavior that is dishonest, unfaithful, or illegal. This is a tough type of guilt to handle. It’s true that you didn’t actually commit the act, so you’re still sitting on the moral high ground. However, we all know that the very fact that you’re contemplating an act that violates your own standards can be as guilt-provoking as the act itself. If you’re beating yourself up for these forbidden and taboo thoughts, you can try the good old Freudian defense mechanism of repression (where you stop up the hidden desire) or denial (where you don’t acknowledge it). However, this is unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome because by defending against your feelings, you may actually fall prey to them and behave in a way that gives you reason to feel guilty. An approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides some guidance for how you can cope with this type of guilt. You can recognize that you have these illicit thoughts, accept them as part of who you are right now, and then, commit yourself to changing your behavior so that you don’t follow through on them. Rather than shove them under the surface, you can embrace your illicit thoughts and desires and work on reducing them through conscious effort.

Dealing With Guilt #2: f you are feeling guilty for having wrong or immoral thoughts, then it is best to accept these thoughts are part of the present. Then, make a plan to change them to prevent yourself from actually falling victim to your thoughts and committing such act(s). Most people will try to dismiss these thoughts, repress them, or “shove them under the rug.” However, this isn’t the healthiest way to deal with these thoughts. These thoughts can eventually lead you actually to commit them. The best way to deal with them is to accept that you through them and then make a conscious effort to reduce the power of those thoughts as well as the effects on you.

“False” Guilt. Emotional complexes can be just that-complex. Most people experience unhappiness due to their own irrational and incorrect thoughts about themselves, others, and the world.

Sometimes we experience guilt even when we think we did something wrong. In these cases, we might feel just as guilty as if we did something wrong. For example, we might think of a rival coworker losing his or her job, or secretly hope that a friend’s or ex’s relationship fails. These thoughts often derive from our vengeful wishes, but we know deep down inside that these thoughts are illogical in some way. However, it is still difficult to negate these beliefs and thoughts.

In some severe cases, you haven’t done anything wrong, but have convinced themselves that they did. Believe it or not, this can happen easily, especially when intense emotions and feelings are involved.

Guilt Cause #3: Guilt for something you think you did. As cognitive theories of emotions tell us, much of the unhappiness we experience is due to our own irrational thoughts about situations. If you think you did something wrong, you can experience almost as much guilt as if you actually committed the act — or more.  One fairly typical cognitive source of guilt is the magical belief that you can jinx people by thinking about them in a negative or hurtful way. Perhaps you’ve wished that a romantic rival would experience some evil twist of fate. Should that evil twist of fate come to pass, you may, at some level, believe that it was due to your own vengeful wish.  At some level you “know” that you’re being illogical, but it’s hard to rid yourself completely of this belief.  We also know that our memory for past events is highly flawed. It’s possible for you to have done nothing wrong at all but to misremember and think that you did, particularly when there are highly charged feelings involved. Suspects can have false memories implanted into them that convince them that they not only were at the scene of a crime, but actually committed it.

Before you start accusing yourself of wrongdoing, make sure that the wrongdoing actually took place. If you’re distorting your recollection of events to make you seem more at fault than you are, it’s time for a hearty dose of reality testing.

Compassion Guilt. There are situations when people feel like they can’t help another person enough. For example, consider a friend or family member who has recently gotten divorced or who has passed away. You have devoted your time to be there for your friend or family as often as possible, but it’s time to return to your responsibilities, such as work or even caring for your own family. As a result, you begin to feel guilty because you can’t live up to the expectations that you set for yourself in supporting them.

Psychologists refer to these situations that lead to guilt as compassion fatigue. These situations can lead to burnout for two reasons:

1) because trying to care for another while also caring for yourself and your obligations is extremely challenging

2) overwhelming guilt. The overwhelming feeling of guilt coupled with fatigue leads to compassion fatigue

Guilt Cause #4: Guilt that you didn’t do enough to help someone. Perhaps you have a friend who is very ill or who is caring for an ill relative. You’ve given hours of your free time to help that person, but now you have other obligations that you absolutely must fulfill. Or perhaps your neighbors suffered a tragic loss such as the death of a relative or fire that destroyed their home. You’ve offered days and weeks of your free time but, again, you find you can’t continue to do so. The guilt now starts to get to you and you try desperately to figure out ways to help them despite the toll it’s taking on you. Psychologists use the term compassion fatigue to capture this feeling of burnout. Though used typically to describe professional helpers, it can also occur among people who offer continued informal support to others in need.  Adding to the overall emotional drain of the situation is the guilt you overlay on top of the fatigue because you think you should be doing more.

You can decide or not whether you want to continue to make the sacrifices needed to help these individuals. However, it’s important to separate your desire to help from the guilt you fear will overwhelm you if you don’t. Acting out of guilt can only drain you further and ultimately make you a less effective helper.

Dealing With Guilt #4: Guilt can be overpowering, so before you get down on yourself for doing something wrong, be sure to ask yourself if you did something wrong or if you only think you did. Distorting your memory of events can only make it seem like you were at fault.

Guilt Cause #5: Guilt that you’re doing better than someone else. The experience of survivor guilt is one recognized by professionals who work with combat veterans who outlive their fellow troops. Survivor guilt also occurs when people who lose families, friends, or neighbors in disasters themselves remain untouched or, at least, alive. Applying not only to people who live when others in the same situation have died, though, survivor guilt also characterizes those who make a better life for themselves than do their family or friends. First-generation college students, for example, often feel torn by conflicting emotions about their success in school. They want to do well (and their families want them to also), but the students themselves feel guilty that they are getting opportunities that their parents or siblings did not. To “protect” their family members, they may engage in self-destructive behaviors that ensure they won’t make it in school.  Logic would dictate that the family truly want the student to succeed (and thus bring honor to the family), but this logic is lost on the student due to survivor guilt.

Emotional Regulation Resources

by Band Back Together | Jul 11, 2018

What Are Emotions?

The term ’emotion’ is one that is both complex and very simple. On the lowest-level, emotions are how you physiologically and mentally respond to a stimulus. Someone tells a joke, you laugh. You suffer a loss, you cry.

Emotions are the building blocks of our experiences, and allow our body to manage the stress of each situation more easily. For example, there are many situations that are just plain overwhelming and laughing or crying can be a way to release some of the steam. Further, emotions serve to protect us by allowing us to feel fear.

Despite all this, emotions can still be kind of a pain in the butt. No one really likes to be snot-nosed and puffy-faced. Just keep in mind that without emotions, we would have a very flat experience. What is joy without knowing sadness? What is loss without love?

What’s worse is experiencing these emotions and not understanding what they are and how we process them.

Why Do We Experience Emotions?

As mentioned, emotions serve several purposes in the human experience.

Building Blocks: As the building blocks of the human experience, the average person experiences tens of emotions every day. While estimates vary, it is safe to say that there are fewer moments throughout the day that you DON’T experience emotions, than when you do. Even as infants we experience the rudimentary emotions – happy, sad, scared, angry. Many of these emotions are “fundamental” in that just about every culture in the world can identify them consistently.

The most critical emotional development we go through occurs in childhood. As a child, it is often difficult to identify emotions and properly labeling them. Failure to develop this skill can lead to a more difficult emotional experience into adulthood. Mis-identifying emotions can make it more difficult to identify what you are feeling and why, and thus to resolve or respond to the situation more effectively.

Finally, emotions do much to color our everyday experience. A life rich in emotions gives context, balance, and perspective to the situations you experience.

Bio-Feedback: Another main purpose to emotions is that they provide “bio-feedback.” Essentially, emotions tell us how our body and mind are feeling and direct the body in next actions, such as “fight or flight.”

Stress Dispersal: In a technical sense, the body is placed under continual stress the entire time you are awake. As we all know, life rarely allows you a day completely devoid of all stressful situations. When this stress occurs, emotions again help your body out by releasing hormones to give you a leg up on responding to the situation. Additionally, sometimes strong emotions can be a major stress-relief, such as when you rage, sob, or laugh.

Emotional Context: Emotional context is what makes our lives richer. The contrast between emotions adds depth and significance to what we feel, why we feel it, and when we feel it. Knowing unfettered joy is made more significant by devastating sadness. Fear is more poignant by moments of safety and contentment. Emotions all balance each other and add a rich layer of understanding to everyday life.

Survival Instinct: This doesn’t apply to all emotions; however, some emotions including fear, terror, unease, and anxiety, serve as a warning. These emotions again cue your “fight or flight” response to kick into gear so that you can respond to a potentially harmful or life-threatening position. As endorphins flood your system, non-vital systems shut down so that the body can create reserves in case of prolonged, immediate, and severe action.

What Do Emotions Feel Like?

This is one of the hardest things to learn about emotions. Not only is there an intellectual experience to how we experience emotions, but there are also many, many physical cues we are given to understand emotions as well.

Heart: The heart plays a role in just about every emotion we experience. As you experience an emotion, your heart rate may speed up, race, flutter, or in some cases, slow down. You may experience this as a pounding sensation, light-headedness, coldness, or a rapid fluttering experience.

Skin: A lot of the bio-feedback we get is from changes in our skin. You may start to sweat, shiver, become cold, or become clammy. In some cases, you may flush as blood races to your cheeks, or you may become very pale.

Mouth: When we are scared or nervous, sometimes we get a “cotton-mouth” feeling where the mouth becomes very dry. Your mouth might feel sticky and dry, and it may become hard to speak. Other experiences include a “lump” in your throat or excessive salivation.

Temperature: Depending on the emotion you feel, your temperature may change to accommodate changing needs from your system. As your heart races and your breathing increases your body temperature may go up. However, if the blood drains from your face, you are sad and heavy feeling, your temperature may go down.

Stomach: A lot of people “experience” emotions in their stomach. This can include feeling butterflies, a pit in your stomach, stomach aches or cramps, or nausea.

How Do Emotions Work?

In order to best understand emotions, it’s important to understand the “life-cycle” of an emotion. How does one start? How do you identify it? What happens then? Here are the steps of how we experience an emotion:

1. Prompting event: An initial event occurs that prompts a response.
2. Your interpretation of the event: This refers to how you view the event – positive, negative, etc.
3. At the same time as you’re interpreting the event, automatic changes occur in your body. This includes things such as releasing neurochemicals, hormones, and changes in your body, such as temperature changes, heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, and nerve impulses.
4. As the automatic processes get started in your body, you then begin to physically react. These are voluntary responses, such as facial expressions, changing your posture, taking action, and verbal expressions.
5. All of these pieces come together to allow you to name the emotion you’re experiencing.

This is a totally hard concept to explain as well as to understand. Here are some examples to further demonstrate how emotions work.

You’re driving in traffic when someone cuts you off, almost causing you to get into an accident. (prompting event).

You register the danger, as your heart-rate spikes, you get a dose of adrenaline, your stomach drops, and you gasp. (interpretation, automatic changes).

You scowl and yell “Watch it you jerk!” (voluntary reaction, verbal expression)

Emotion experienced? Anger.

You sit down with a nice cup of coffee from your favorite coffee shop. The person working at the espresso bar smiles at you (prompting event).

You feel butterflies in your stomach, your spirits lift, and you feel giddy (automatic changes).

You smile in return (voluntary reaction).

Emotion experienced? Infatuation

As you can see from these examples, there are physical body cues that accompany each emotion. They can overlap and some emotions may feel very similar to one another. It is also worth mentioning that there can be multiple prompting events. For example, after smiling at the person at the espresso bar, maybe he or she gives you his or her number. That can be a new prompting event.

Once you get the hang of identifying the emotions you’re feeling on a regular basis, you can start looking at “secondary emotions.” Most typically these are emotions such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment. Secondary emotions are the result of feeling an emotion about your emotion, such as feeling guilty about being disappointed.

How Do I Know What Emotion I’m Experiencing?

This is by far the hardest question. Learning the language of emotions is not an easy thing, especially if you have spent many years not knowing what they are or how to articulate them. The key to truly learning emotions is to practice practice practice.

Practice is key- which includes practicing when you’re happy and practicing when you are sad. The more you evaluate these emotions, the better able you will be to identify them and thus process them.

To help get you started, here are some general descriptions of some emotions.

• Happiness: For many, happiness is best described by feelings of lightness in the body and in the spirit. Your skin may feel tingly and you may feel like you can jump out of your skin. Smiling and laughter are often expressions of happiness. Happiness can also be described as being in a good mood, being good-tempered, and being bubbly. Tasks often feel easy and the time may pass quickly.
• Sadness: Sadness is often described by feelings of heaviness. It may be difficult to complete tasks as it is hard to get motivated. Sleepiness is common, as well as the tendency to isolate yourself. Crying is a common physical expression of sadness, as well as feelings of a lump in your throat, a pit in your stomach, or anxiety.
• Anger: Anger is one of the most varied emotions. Anger can be very hot in that your face and skin feel flushed and you might start sweating. You may raise your voice and act impulsively. You may ball your fists, and make your posture taller and more leaned forward. Crying is possible. Anger can also be very cold in that you become very controlled and contained. Often the voice lowers and becomes softer. There are feelings of fury that are measured rather than impulsive, as behavior and words are very calculated.
• Fear: Fear is pretty much universal. Often it is characterized by large spikes in adrenaline that allow your body to react quickly to the situation. Some people react to fear by crying, screaming, gasping, panting, laughing, or by reacting physically such as to lash out physically.
• Joy: Joy is a sub-set of happiness. However, joy is often a term used as a bigger expression of happiness. Joy is often about feelings of endless possibilities and potential. You may feel on top of the world and empowered to do anything you set your mind to.
• Love: Love is another varied emotion from person to person. Some feel butterflies in their stomach, others feel tingly, and others still feel a lightness about them. Some people smile unprovoked, or hum and sing. Infatuation may be a more physical expression, whereas true love is a deeper emotional feeling.

What Do I Say/Do In An Emotional Situation?

So hooray! You’ve learned the basics about how to identify your emotions. What do you do if all you feel are an abundance of emotions all the time? Emotions can be extremely overwhelming depending on timing, space, and issues involved. The trick to regulating your emotions is to find ways of slowing down those emotional processes.

As the outline suggests above, if you can interject some logic into the emotional experience, it is possible to slow the feeling down enough that you can process it on your terms, instead of letting it control you. A good way to introduce logic includes “observe and describe.” Observe what you are feeling in your body. Where do you feel it? How strong is that feeling? What is prompting these feelings?

All of these questions do much to take an emotional step back. You can also use visualization techniques. Imagine that you are taking your emotion and placing it on a shelf in a box. You’re not ignoring it, you’re just setting it aside. Ignoring emotions often make them stronger and they return time and time again. If I say not to think about elephants, all you think about are elephants.

Here are some other ways of taking an emotional step back:

• Breathe breathe breathe.
• Count to ten.
• Take a deep breath in, and release it slowly.
• Take a break – even if this means going to the bathroom to get some space.
• Talk it out.
• Journal about your emotions – What did you feel? When? What about?
• Yoga/meditation/spirituality/religion.
• Therapy.
• Exercise.
• Mental health day.

There are also times in which you are in the middle of an intense situation. Here are some phrases that may help you take that emotional step back if needed.

• I feel too upset to talk about this right now.
• I want time to think about how to respond.
• I feel [emotion].
• It seems like we both/all are very invested in this issue. Let’s take some time to think about it, calm down, and approach the issue from a fresh perspective.

Remember, it’s all about taking care of you. Emotions don’t have to control and mystify you. Think of it as another language to learn. Practice in a variety of situations, even if that means taking the emotion apart after the experience, and remember to take a break and find ways to regain control of the situation.

Page last edited 7/2019

Archived Resources

by Band Back Together | Jun 13, 2018