When Feeling Guilty is Your Natural State

How does this happen?

Some people are raised in homes where they are perpetually blamed for whatever goes wrong, whether or not they had a part in it. Usually, for a time, they fight back and continue to know themselves as innocent. They feel the injustice of the wrongful accusations. But as time goes on and the blaming continues, but the knowing of their innocence remains irrelevant or worse, an exacerbating factor, two things happen. First, these people learn to accept the blame for what they haven’t done, even when they know they’re innocent — because it actually feels helpful to take the blame and it often pleases those they need to keep happy, even if at the cost of their own rightness. But eventually, sadly, they come to experience themselves as guilty; the knowing of their innocence actually gets buried and the blame projected onto them becomes their truth. They become the bad one on the inside as well as the outside.

How to Heal?

So, how do we stop the cycle and heal the core belief that we are to blame? Can we free ourselves from the deep sense of fundamental guilt? How do we remove the Velcro inside ourselves to which any wrongness seeking a home will stick?

In my experience as a therapist and also as someone who has struggled with guilt, and who was trained early to look to myself for the cause of my own or another’s suffering, I can offer a few thoughts, which I hope are helpful.

We also, in this process, need to separate outcome from intention. That is, we need to look through our lives and notice where we blamed ourselves or were blamed by others for an unwanted result, but without considering what we were trying to make happen — our intentions. Most of the time we’re doing our very best to make something good happen, but it doesn’t always work out that way. We can’t control outcomes, only intentions. Most of the time, blame is about having created a wrong outcome and yet it utterly ignores the intention that was mother to the process. In turning the light from results to our intentions, we re-train ourselves to connect with our goodness (which lives in intention). We befriend the part of ourselves that’s ignored when we’re being blamed or self-blaming.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, breaking free from the assumption of blame relies upon having a different experience of ourselves in the world. When we put ourselves in the company of people who are kind and reliably on our side, who start (and end) from the belief that we’re good and our intentions are positive, who are willing to listen and care about how we are, even when it might not be what they want to hear… then, we learn to see ourselves through the lens of kindness and support we see in their eyes when they look at us. Miraculously, we come to know ourselves as innocent. When we consistently put ourselves in an environment of acceptance and love — the opposite of blame — surround ourselves with people who are fundamentally for and not against us, we then awaken to our truth, the one we knew a very long time ago, before it had to go away. We awaken and discover that our acceptance of guilt, of badness, is inherently unkind and unfair — to ourselves. We see ourselves, at last, as good.

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