Dealing With Guilt... Even When You've Done Nothing Wrong

Guilt is a weighty emotion. And it’s one I’m no stranger to.

Like all the uncomfortable emotions I looked at for a special season of my podcast, guilt exists for a good reason. Feeling guilty can prompt us to take action and rectify a bad situation in our lives – but it’s not always that simple.

“Guilt comes either when we've done something wrong, or when we feel like we've done something wrong,” says life coach Valorie Burton. “Those two things are not the same, even though they can feel the same.”

Let’s assume you’ve actually done something wrong. You may feel guilty because you forgot a friend’s birthday; or left a co-worker to clean up a mistake you made; or because you broke your roommate’s laptop and didn’t tell her.

All these things can gnaw away at your happiness. As Valorie outlines in her book, Let Go Of The Guilt: Stop Beating Yourself Up And Take Back Your Joy, the guilt we feel about doing something wrong can occupy our thoughts and even bring with it negative physical sensations and sleepless nights.

But Valorie also describes six steps – what she calls The Six A’s – to address this kind of guilt.

Facing up to the guilt of wrongdoing certainly isn’t fun… but it can be easier than tackling the other form of guilt Valorie talks about in her book – that guilty feeling we sometimes carry around even when it’s not clear that we’ve done anything bad or harmful.

Valorie calls this feeling ‘false’ guilt.

She had an epiphany about the impact ‘false’ guilt was having on her wellbeing one morning – rushing to drive her young son to school. Valorie was already running late when her son asked if he could eat a breakfast of dry cereal at the dining table – instead of in the car. The boy loved dry cereal, but Valorie felt terrible guilt that – unlike her own mom – she didn’t provide her son with a cooked breakfast.

“And so rather than saying what I knew I needed to say, I let guilt step in and say: ‘Well, we have to do it really fast.’”

Now running very late, Valorie and her son set off on the drive to school.

Valorie had put herself and her son in danger all because of ‘false’ guilt – the sense she wasn’t as good at parenting as her own mother, and that unconscious feeling that combining her busy career as an author with motherhood somehow made her a bad person.

“What happens is we allow [false] guilt to get in the driver's seat,” say Valorie. “It hijacks your decisions and your actions.”

To stop ‘false’ guilt from hijiacking her again, Valorie developed what she calls the PEEL strategy.

Many sources of ‘false’ guilt are buried deep in our upbringing or in the culture around us. They can be triggered by things like our careers, our relationships, or even our fitness levels (or the lack of it). And even with strategies like PEEL, facing up to ‘false’ guilt isn’t always easy.

“But I am amazed at the things that people are able to let go of,” say Valorie.

So next time you feel a pang of guilt - take that first step to dealing with it by separating out the true misdeeds we need atone for, and the false guilt that requires an act of kindness only to ourselves.

Stay safe,

Laurie

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