162. Why do I feel guilty all the time?

I'm really excited for this episode. I think that the emotion we're speaking about today is one that we don't talk about enough, and what I really want to explore is the psychology behind guilt, particularly chronic guilt, or feelings of guilt for things that we haven't done, or holding

carrying an emotional burden that we don't deserve to. It is such a common experience, sperience, I think, particularly amongst people in this generation, to feel this lingering feeling that we have done something wrong even when there's no evidence for it, or that someone is secretly mad at you, that you are a monster. Here is a spoiler, you are not a monster. You have just been conditioned into

believing that you are responsible for other people's emotions. This is a concept known as the guilt complex, intense and frequent feelings of guilt that aren't associated or connected to any event in particular. Guilt is so interesting to me because it's such an intricate emotion and a lot of psychologists still don't really understand it that well. We don't

really know where it comes from, why it occurs. Obviously, there is this very traditional idea of guilt, this very severe sense of guilt that is associated with committing a crime or doing something horrific or something that you deeply regret. And of course this kind of guilt does exist, this sense of blame for the harm that you've caused others. But I don't really think it's the kind of guilt that most of us in our twenties are actually experiencing.

This kind of guilt where we commit a crime, we do something bad, it's called reactive guilt. But we can also just have guilty thoughts which we never intend to act on, but they kind of sit in our brain and fester and convince us that we are evil. We also just feel a real general guilt about the injustices in the world. Existential guilt because we feel responsible for

other people suffering. But I think the kind of guilt that we mostly experience is guilt towards things we haven't done or are yet to do, Guilt around upsetting people or displaced guilt feeling that sense of shame or accountability for another person's emotions or for choosing to behave in a way that is completely justified but might upset other people.

This has become a lot more common and I think relatable for people in their twenties, especially because there's this very deep philosophy around not only just being a good person, but also treating this decade with a certain like distinctiveness, a certain romance, and that places a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations on us, and not just straightforward expectations about living up to your parents' dreams for you, or taking advantage of opportunities or being successful, but also

these expectations to be doing the most, to be living a fantasy life, to make everybody happy, to constantly be happy yourself. For a lot of us, that is not the case, and I think we often feel guilty that perhaps we are wasting what some would call the best years of our lives, or that we are passing up privileges that other people would die for. We feel guilty for choosing to rest. Then we feel guilty for choosing

to go out. We feel guilty for spending too much time at work, but also guilty when we're not working, Guilty for choosing to prioritize ourselves, guilty for making mistakes. That is just one facet, but another common aspect has to do with our relationships and our friendships. Friendships, I have this belief are the most important relationship that we have in our twenties. You know, some of us find partners, a lot of us are still connected to our family.

But the real lifeblood of our twenties, the real people who hold us up, who keep us feeling connected, are our friends. And with that sense of connection comes a sense of expectation of not wanting to let them down.

We feel like we need to be more available. We often encounter a fear of missing out, but deeper than that, a fear of disappointing people, especially as we slowly become adults and are trying to figure out who we are as individuals, trying to find more time for ourselves, working more investing in our careers and also trying to maintain those relationships, be a good friend. And I think it's in those moments where we experience this intense sense of

obligation to other people. We cannot always be what others expect us to be. Sometimes we do the wrong thing because we are still learning, because we are still kind of like we are baby adults. And the emotional aftermath of not living up to a sense of expectation or obligation from others is this intense guilt, feeling like you are secretly a bad person. Essentially, guilt is that feeling that you aren't a good person, and that doesn't actually need to be the truth if you feel that way.

And I've been thinking about this a lot in my own life recently, because chronic guilt is a feeling I experience, and I've spent a lot of time attempting to come to terms with. It's one of those kind of mental blocks that I'm constantly trying to work through. I'm trying to work through these dilemmas where I feel like a

bad person for just prioritizing myself. You know, I feel a lot of guilt at not working as hard as I should or taking time off even when I know I deserve it, because I feel like I need to work harder for my opportunities, or that there is a certain standard or quantity of work that I need to

do before resting. And then, of course there's the guilt of not being a good friend, for saying no to things, for canceling plans, for not being the same person that I was at eighteen or nineteen who wanted to go out all the time, Guilt that I've changed and that somehow I owe it to other people to stay the same.

And part of my experiences with this emotion has been this underlying sense of blame or responsibility again for how others feel, and with that a persistent anxiety that someone out there is mad at me, someone is holding a grudge, someone is upset by something I've done unintentionally, whether it is forgetting to reply to a message or having plans when they ask me if I'm free, And it's highly senseless and irrational, and I think a part of our

experience of guilt is also quite egotistical. I've been ex thinking about this a lot, but when we are experiencing misplaced, chronic guilt, it's often because we are exaggerating the impact of our actions and choices, we kind of overestimate how much people really care, how much damage we're actually able

to do. There are a myriad several factors that come into this, including but not limited to, perfectionism, people, pleasing tendencies, the childhood guilt wound, anxiety, sensitivity to criticism, and then sometimes there are simply moments when you act in a way that betrays your values, and that's something that we need to come to terms with. So we're going to

explore all of that. We're going to explore the emotional experience of guilt, including how to kind of overcome moments where you feel responsible for something that has happened when it might not actually be your fault. So all of that and more let's get into it. So there's an important distinction that we need to make straight off the bat. Guilt can come from either doing something or not doing something,

and either from a perceived or an actual wrong. We are highly attuned to moments where we might have misbehaved or acted against the social norms, and that is because guilt is so core and critical and primal to how we as humans have kind of evolved and been socialized. Many psychologists suggest that guilt is primarily a social emotion. It exists to tell us when we have acted in a way that is contrary to cultural norms, and it comes from a realization that your actions affect others around you.

It's really interesting because the ability to feel guilt or at least responsibility is actually one of the critical kind of stages or milestones in a child's emotional development, because it indicates that they are aware that their actions have consequences and that other people have their own emotional lives or feelings that we can alter an impact. That kind of goes to show how core it is to the human experience. It's also really fascinating because a lack of

guilt is also very problematic from a clinical perspective. The inability to feel remorse is a huge indicator of an antisocial personality disorder, of a lack of empathy. So whilst guilt might leave us feeling anxious, disappointed, and deserving obsessing over the past, we could make an argument that without it you might be even in a worse place than

you are now. The other thing I think is important to point out just doing a bullet point list of the general understanding of guilt right now, but it's important to point out that guilt and shame are all so different. So guilt comes from doing something that you believe goes against your morals to harm another, whether you actually did harm that person or not. But shame it doesn't necessarily mean that what you've done is wrong or a moral

It might not have necessarily hurt someone. It's more that you're going against how society believes, you know, should be behaving. You know, for example, you can feel shame about your weight or your sexual identity. It doesn't mean that it was wrong or that you deserve to feel that way, Whereas guilt is more around knowing that what you did goes against something deeper about how society chooses to treat others,

even if that wasn't actually the case. I want to turn to chronic guilt here because that is actually the main focus of this episode, and I've just gotten way too distracted. But there are some of us who are kind of cursed with feeling guilt more than others. And

then there's four reasons in particular why that might be. Firstly, if you're a people pleaser, if you have high empathy or a childhood guilt wound, perfectionism, and then of course guilt that is triggered by a mistake or a behavior that is going to lead to excessive rumination and playing back that moment. Those are the four main reasons why there are certain people out there who feel guilt more

than others. Let's start by examining people pleasing here. People pleasing is perhaps the most understandable factor to me, because I think when we have that high level of sensitivity to others' needs, we also have the highest level of sensitivity to someone's disappointment with us as well. People pleasing for a bit of a refresher It occurs when we really prioritize other people's feelings, happiness, and needs over honoring our own needs. The thing is, people pleasing behaviors and

tendencies from the outside look really good, right. It looks like you're really polite, like you're really agreeable and generous and nice. Society really approves of these behaviors. It doesn't necessarily mean that people pleasing is healthy, though, because every time we willingly do something for others because we think it's gonna make them happier, because we think it's gonna make them like us more, and it comes at an inconvenience to us. We are abandoning ourselves. We are embodying

our false self for the benefit of someone else. So there is this book called Real Talk and it was written by this amazing therapist called Tasha Bailey who she was actually on the podcast last month, and she explains this really well. She explains how people pleasing tendencies normally emerge from what we call the foreign response. We've talked about this before, but essentially psychology used to believe that when we encounter a threat in our environment, we could

either fight back or run away. That is our fight or flight response. But recently they've noticed a new type of response to In fact, the first one was freeze, we just don't do anything, and the second one was fawn. And the fawn response occurs when we kind of essentially roll over like there's a predator there, it's gonna eat us, and we like wag our tail and we're really nice

and we appease the threat. If someone is angry at you for like stealing their parking spot at like a kmart or whatever, instead of like trying to fight them about it or running away or ignoring them. If you are activating your fawn response, you apologize profusely, you smile, You try and be complimentary as a way to minimize

the threat. People pleasing is born from this response, and we often learn it from being in environments where we realized that it was better for us if other people didn't see us as a threat, or we made ourselves smaller to avoid their anger. When we have lived like this for a really long time, we may not even realize that this is what we're doing. It becomes involuntary,

it becomes automatic, it's second nature. And the problem with being a people pleaser is that at some stage you are going to need to set a boundary or say no. You might have to disappoint someone. You're going to have to put yourself first, or maybe even accept that people are taking advantage of your kindness or your generosity. When we do this, it feels so unnatural to set those boundaries, and that is how we begin to experience guilt, especially

when it comes to our relationships. We have learnt to feel guilty when we don't prioritize other people's feelings above our own, when we roll over for them, when we

kind of take their feelings into account. And these people around us, who are used to us constantly being this very passive pleasing agent, they're kind of shocked when we no longer give them that permission, and that shock, perhaps even that anger, that frustration that comes from them, that's going to make us feel equally guilty and perhaps selfish, because once again we are highly attuned to their emotions

and we feel responsible for them. But the thing is is that you cannot live your life for others because you will lose yourself. And you'll soon realize that a lot of people who you've constantly been trying to accommodate, who you've constantly been trying to win their favor, be kind to them, make them like you. As soon as you put up that boundary and say no, I'm sorry, like I don't want to do that, they suddenly disappear from your life. And it's a really big wake up

call when we think about where this originates, this chronic guilt. Yes, it comes from people pleasing, but it also comes from a lot of the childhood wounds that we carry from when we were children. We know that how we were raised, the experiences we had in our very early formative years. They are incredibly influential to the adult that we become.

So the childhood guilt wound is really important to understand here, and it typically emerges in children who were raised by parents or caregivers who projected a lot of their frustrations or anger onto their children. They got upset at them really quickly, they had emotional outbursts, or they used guilt as a form of discipline, so they induced feelings of wrongdoing as a way of scolding their children as a way of making them feel ashamed of their behavior and

bringing them back into line. So this may have included times or situations when you had no reason to feel guilt at all, when it was just an accident, like you forgot your school bag, or you spilt something or you lost a mistakes that children make. But because you are made to feel guilty for something minor, this leaves an impact. This leaves an emotional wound, an emotional scar. These kinds of children often grow up to be really, really sensitive to the needs and emotions of others because

they've had to adopt that role with their parents. They evolve into empaths. They go to extra lengths to help anybody else, even when it's unfeasible, and they also criticize themselves for the smallest mistakes. A failure to make someone else happy leaves them feeling guilty because it is replicating why and how they were made to feel guilty as a child. So we grow into adults who are still

trying day after day to meet unreasonable expectations. We are still those children who want to make everybody happy, and that is an impossible task, and that is what leaves us feeling guilty a lot of times when we don't even need to. The final big contributor is perfectionism our age, old arch nemesis. We talk about this on the show all the time because it really is the string that

ties so much together. So there's kind of two types of perfectionists, but it's particularly self orientated perfectionists in these moments that are impacted by this. So self orientated perfectionists they are the people amongst us who set high standards for themselves that are unattainable, and they're particularly concerned with

doing things the right way. I think perfectionism differs from the other contributing factors here because it has less to do with the social side of guilt and more to do with the feeling of guilt that you aren't living up to expectations, that you aren't working hard enough, that you aren't deserving of what you've achieved. This is a

generation of perfectionists. We are seeing studies consistently that are showing a very linear and increasing rates of perfectionists in this generation, possibly because of what they suggest is an increasing emphasis on competitive individualism. Now that is an emphasis on being successful and focused on your own goals rather than the goals of the group. So that basically means that you feel a lot of pressure and expectation to be the best, to prove your self deserving of opportunities,

prove yourself deserving of achievement. When we can't do that, our social instinct is to feel guilt as if we've done something wrong because we're not fitting into that competitive, constantly succeeding, progressing mold, especially in the cases where our parents have worked really hard for our opportunities, or in the cases where you are kind of the golden child,

the one who everyone is putting expectations on. We're also facing a lot of worsening social and economic conditions compared to our parents, and that, paired with an increasing emphasis on being carefree and having options and having different paths, keeps us in a place of feeling really stuck and feeling like there is something that we should do, but something that we would like to do. These pathways in life, right,

there's so many different ones. Go to UNI, don't go to UNI, travel the world, don't travel the world, Get a corporate job, get an internship, go and be a creative. There are so many pathways that feel mutually exclusive, so

choosing a pathway is difficult. It brings up a lot of cognitive dissonance, and with that comes either this pressure of not living up to your potential or this pressure of not making yourself happy, and with that guilt of not living up to your potential, or guilt for wasting your years, wasting your young years, wasting what you know would make you feel fulfilled. Like we spoke about before, it's that sense that you're doing something wrong that leads

to feelings of guilt. And it's not always a social feeling. Sometimes it's that you're doing something wrong in comparison to what you feel like you should be doing. The thing that we need to remember is that Your only duty at the end of the day is to live a life that you find fulfilling, that you find deeply inspiring and nourishing and joy inducing, even if it's not what others expect from you. You don't need to feel guilty for taking your time, for taking it slow, for changing

your mind at any point. So all of these explanations focus on that guilt, complex guilt with no apparent reason or justified explanation. But we also have reactive guilt, which is when we have done you know, we've done something wrong, we've hurt somebody, we've acted against what we knew was right, our moral code, and we are left with a deep sense of regret and remorse and maybe even struggling to

see ourselves beyond our actions. We are this one bad thing that we did and nothing will ever change that. That is kind of the cognitive distortion that we buy into. We believe that just because we acted against our better judgment once that makes us an evil person. I think if you grew up in a very religious family or even had some religious education, this is going to influence

you more than you know. Additionally, that you know those broader themes of good and bad and being a good person are everywhere in society, and we often feel like our worst moments are therefore what defines us, and that they kind of outshine the million other things that we do, the millions of other moments of empathy and kindness. I think guilt in this moment is hard because you know that you've done something wrong, and it's not meant to become maladaptive. It's not meant to keep you in a

dark place of self pity and regret. It is meant to serve as a teachable moment, a moment for accountability. This wouldn't feel as bad if you weren't actually a good person. If you were a bad person who lacks empathy and kindness and sincerity, you wouldn't be feeling this way. So your guilt is in itself a reminder of the fact that you are a good person who has done a bad thing. Whether you've heard a friend, you've said something that you shouldn't have, you've let someone down, you've cheated,

you've let yourself down. The easiest way to ensure that you don't learn from this experience is to avoid this emotion. So what I want to talk about next is how to integrate it, how to overcome our chronic feelings of guilt, our guilt complex, how to stop making guilt as staple of who you are. All of that and more after this short break. So we've talked about two different guilt experiences here, reactive guilt actually doing something that has hurt

someone or damaged some part of your life. And then the guilt complex, chronic feelings of guilt that have no specific or real source. So I really want to focus on the second experience here. I think overcoming reactive guilt is a much more simple equation. Maybe that is a bit deluded of me, but I do believe it is more based on making amends, apologizing sincerely, making a commitment

to grow and learn from your mistakes. We have an equation, a solution for dealing with reactive guilt, But the issue with a guilt complex is that the source of it is a lot more unidentifiable. It's very mental. We're searching for things to feel guilty about before they even emerge, rather than feeling guilt naturally in response to some experience or event. We've explained why that is because obviously we're instinctual people pleases, we carry a childhood guilt wound. We're perfectionists.

Maybe we also struggle with anxiety or obsessive and intrusive thoughts. I know it all too well. Guilt for resting, guilt for not resting, guilt for all of those things. It's very never ending. But here are some ways that I've challenged that recently, and a lot of it is based in behavior theory, so that is also known as CBT for short. It's this idea that when we deliberately change our attitude or our perception of our emotions, we also

change our behavioral tendencies that are attached to them. We stop searching, we stop ruminating. And one way I did this was by telling myself that guilt was boring. I've spoken about this when it comes to fear, but it's boring to be thinking about the same emotion repetitively, day in and day out. Guilt is a waste of my energy, especially when it comes to a guilt complex. It's counterproductive. When I think of my guilt as boring rather than

as useful, it becomes a lot easier to discredit. It's so easy to reinforce this belief as well. When you think your friend is mad at you for needing to spend a day by yourself, for canceling plans. When you're anxious that you're disappointing someone, that you're falling behind, that you're failing yourself, literally say to yourself, speak these words in your mind. This is boring. This guilt i'm feeling is boring. I am bored by this emotion. I'm gonna

think about something else now. You stop treating the emotion as a fact, You stop putting it on a pedestal, you stop treating it like a truth about yourself rather than as just a feeling, and you're choosing not to engage with it. Also, it's really important to name your guilt, examine the source and whether it should be believed. Some good prompts are like, straight off the bat, what is it that I actually feel guilty about right now? Has someone actually been hurt by my actions? Have I been

hurt by my actions? Or is this just a feeling that I have? Is it me trying to like is it my hypervigilance? Is it me trying to identify something before it's occurred? Is that justified? Can I actually identify a specific choice, action, behavior that I could have changed to be feeling differently right now. Remember that you are just one person right now, you know, and this feeling of guilt is often coming from a place of caring more about the feelings of others than caring about your

own feelings, especially that unspecified guilt. You cannot do it all. You cannot make everybody happy, and a sad reality I think for a lot of us who are people pleasers, is that sometimes people are going to just be disappointed in you. You might hurt their feelings, you might annoy

them even without realizing it. But unless they say something to you, unless they that you know that you've screwed up, unless they are explicit, it is none of your business what they choose to think privately and how they choose to manage their emotions. You're not a mind reader, and I think even if you were, you would find that a lot of people aren't thinking about it that deeply. No one is mad at you, no one is holding

your grudge. You've not let them down. And if you believe that you have, challenge that belief or ask them, just be vulnerable and ask them, say hey, I kind of need some reassurance right now, I'm feeling guilty for this thing. Can you tell me whether that is like a rational feeling to be had? And I would say ninety nine percent of the time, they'll be honest with you. They'll understand because I think this is a universal experience. They'll understand that you are coming from a place of

genuinely caring about them and wanting to do them right. Also, if you are struggling with chronic underlying guilt for whatever it may be, it might actually be a symptom of actually just being quite burnt out and overwhelmed. When we are burnt out, when we are at the end of our teather, you don't have the same cognitive defenses to

keep the negative beliefs and feelings at bay. That is where rest is so important, but it's often neglected because a lot of us, particularly perfectionists, feel guilty for resting. We feel lazy, We feel like we haven't worked hard enough, and so rest often makes us feel more guilty. It's this cycle. But it is not true that you need

to earn rest. Rest is so important for your body but also for your mind, and it means prioritizing mental, physical, emotional, and social time out and social breaks, give yourself a day to just be with yourself, to do what you want to, not be responsible to any other people, to any work commitments, to any study commitments, whether that is laying in bed all day, taking yourself for a hike,

just not seeing other people. This really has a lot of benefits to In particular, a it allows us to deprioritize other people's needs and concentrate on our own, so really reducing our sense that we need to make them happy and feeling guilty when we can't and be It ensures that you are filling up your cup when it is getting depleted, and that you can handle bad thoughts or hard situations because you are mentally sharp and healthy. Finally,

we have to talk about self forgiveness and radical self compassion. Here. Sometimes we become stuck in our negative beliefs because we feel like we deserve to be there. We use guilt as a way to self punish, as a way to almost feel like we're repenting and making up for some

past mistake by making ourselves feel bad. We have seen studies and research about this a lot more recently, and there was one in particular that showed that when you magnify your mistakes or possible faults, or where your guilt is coming from. When you magnify the things that you believe you've done wrong and the emotions that come with that, it is so self destructive, but it also as a

form of self punishment. You know, you probably feel like you deserve to feel this way, that it's going to make you a better person to keep yourself in this state for a bit longer, to keep yourself in pain, to justify your actions, but really what it's doing is actually keeping you operating from a place of intense sensitivity

and needing to adhere to doing everything right. More often than not, the belief that you are bad actually contributes to more bad behavior because it is a self fulfilling prophecy. There is this incredible book called The will Power Instinct, and it talks about this so succinctly. It is forgiveness, not guilt, that makes you a better person, And there's

been research into this. A study in twenty seventeen found that taking a self compassionate point of view on personal failure, on hurting other people and I'm upsetting other people, it actually means that you are more likely to grow from that experience. You become more willing to receive feedback advice from others, You're more likely to learn and take responsibility. That is something really important to think about. In those moments where your guilt is very present, you can choose

to stay there. That is totally your choice. You can choose to feel guilty because it feels good to feel bad, or you can choose to practice radical self compassion and just show yourself so much forgiveness and love for the mistakes you knew you shouldn't have made, but you also didn't know any better at the time. Think about what you were feeling guilty about, whatever it is, even if

it's small. If that was your best friend, or your sister, or your partner or your mom, and the roles were reversed, would you forgive them? Their answer is that you probably would. You would forgive them. So what is holding you back from forgiving yourself? Why are you personally undeserving of self forgiveness? We so often treat others better than we treat ourselves. We are more likely to show them love and compassion.

But when we reverse the roles, we have a better perspective on what we're really feeling, whether we are really deserving to live this way. And I think when we examine whether we would put someone we love through the emotional experience we're having, the answer is no. You're a good person, You're a kind person. You wouldn't be feeling

guilt otherwise. So please remember save some of that compassion that you always have for others, some of that forgiveness that you always have for others, for yourself, not just for those around you. I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you're someone who is experiencing chronic guilt, I hope this informed you, inspired you, enlightened you. Whatever you were looking to get out of this episode, I really hope that you've received it. You are not alone

in this feeling. I say that at the end of almost every episode because when we do start to break down the psychology some of these emotional experiences, you begin to realize how universal they are, especially in our twenties. So if you are someone who has experienced chronic guilt at disappointing others, guilt it not living up to your expectations, Yeah, I just hope this helped, and you can always message me at that Psychology podcast to share your thoughts. Feelings,

questions about this episode. If you enjoyed it, or if you think there is someone else who might need to hear who might need to hear this, please feel free to send them a link and share on the Love. Also leave a five star review wherever you're listening right now, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. It helps the show to grow and reach new people, and as always, we will be back next week with another episode