Guilt and shame are insidous feelings, hard to spot and sometimes also hard to stop. First, it helps to understand why we feel guilt – what we unconsciously hope to get from it and why we won’t ever get that. For me, understanding that felt like permission to treat myself with more kindness. If you struggle with guilt or shame, perhaps this article can be your permission to let go.

Guilt and shame are related, but there are differences. Guilt says: “You’ve done something bad and must be punished.” Shame says: “You are bad and no punishment will ever be enough for you.” Professionals would say that guilt is linked to behaviour and shame is linked to our sense of who we are.

These two emotions often arise together, and we humans spend a lot of time and energy trying to work out what experiences mean. So if you think: “I did something that hurt someone,” it doesn’t take long to get to: “…and it means I am unkind, bad, wrong, a horrible person.” And the more often you feel guilty, the more you are likely to have that feeling of being generally not good enough (shame.)

But, you may be thinking, isn’t it right to feel guilty if I’ve done something wrong? If a person repeatedly does bad things, shouldn’t they feel ashamed? Well, yes and no. In Healing the Shame That Binds You, psychologist, John Bradshaw writes about different kinds of shame––healthy and toxic. He describes healthy shame as our humanness: knowing that we aren’t perfect and that that’s okay. It is also what lets us know it’s okay to need help and gives us the sense of there being something greater than ourselves. (This could be god, but just as easily it could be feeling part of the universe.) In an attempt to escape from unhealthy (or toxic) shame we will either try to be more than human or less than human. Instead of explaining more, I’ll let Bradshaw speak for himself in this video below where he explains why it is so important not to shame children. (Note for parents: if as you watch it, you realise you have said things to your children that can create shame, remember you are human and go easy on yourself. Shaming or guilt tripping yourself for shaming your child won’t create change. Being compassionate with yourself just might.)

Let’s return to guilt. By its very definition: “I’ve done something bad and must be punished,” guilt is about the past. It has nothing to do with right now. This is so important to remember because when we hold onto guilt what we are trying to do is change the past. Say we did something we regret, such as yell at our toddler. So now we mentally yell at ourselves for it, over and over and over, in the hope it will stop us doing it to our kids again.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t work! Instead, we feel so awful that we need somewhere to vent the pain that’s building up inside of us. So what do we do? We yell at our kids again. It took me years to realise this, and even after I’d seen that punishment doesn’t work, it was as if I was afraid to trust that. It was almost as if part of my mind said, “Okay so this doesn’t work, but until I can figure out what does I’m going to go on punishing myself, just in case.”

Then I stopped (mostly) and learned to treat myself compassionately when I reacted in ways that disappointed me. And guess what? I hardly ever yell these days. Not only that, but I’ve noticed that in our family in general the volume is so much lower, and the tone is so much kinder.

It’s not just when we’ve done something we think is wrong that we feel guilty. Often we don’t even know what it was we did, so we want to figure that out in the hope that, even if we can’t undo what we did, we can at least stop ourselves ever doing it again. This is what I did after our second daughter was born prematurely. I would go over and over everything I’d done towards the end of my pregnancy trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I read an article about chemicals in hair dye and because I had dyed my hair about 6 weeks before the baby was born, I asked our hairdresser if that could have been the cause. He said no, and I was briefly reassured, until I read some other article about something else and flew into a panic again. Even if it had been the chemicals, beating myself up could not change that she was born when she was. Since I had no plans for more children it couldn’t even stop me making the same mistakes – if I ever worked out what they were! All it did was keep me stuck with guilt, ruminating over the past.

Besides, to presume that what we did was wrong is often playing God. For instance, going back to the example of yelling at your kids: you might feel terrified you’ve damaged them for life. But a sincere expression of anger may serve a child better than faked niceness. I feel sure children can recognise insincerity and sometimes unconsciously goad the parent into honesty – even if that honesty is anger. I’ve seen that happen with myself and with other parents. (And of course, I’m not suggesting we should all go round yelling.)

Guilt comes from a belief in blame. When we look at life from the perspective of blame, then when “bad” things happen we either have to blame others or ourselves. It hurts either way. When, instead, we realise that given our emotional and mental make-up at the time, we made the only choice that was open to us, we empathise with ourselves and with others. Ironically, letting go of blaming yourself also makes you less likely to blame others.

Blaming is not the same at taking responsibility. If we do something that we regret and someone else suffers, then we can both forgive ourselves and take action to make amends. That’s being responsible. If you’ve yelled at your child that action could be saying, “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was feeling tense because we were rushing to go out. It’s not your fault; you’ve done nothing wrong and I love you.” Or the action could be learning ways to help yourself cope under pressure. It could mean learning more about child development so you know what to expect at any given age. It could be doing all those things.

Blame and guilt keep us stuck ruminating on the past; self-forgiveness and responsibility enable us to let go and empower us to make new choices. This takes time, as our brains form neural pathways based on our habitual thoughts, to be patient with yourself as you start to change—don’t feel guilty for feeling guilty!

We’ve covered the why of waving goodbye to guilt, so let’s more on to how. Here I’ll talk about the two main practices that helped me most to let go of guilt: The Sedona Method and self-compassion.

photo by pat138241 via FreeDigitalPhotos

It was while reading what Hale Dwoskin of the Sedona Method has to say about shame and guilt. that I first began to feel it was okay to let go of guilt. Much of what I’ve written in this article is my understanding of Dwoskin’s words. He has written some great articles on the subject, including The 3 Lies that Bind Us to Guilt and Shame.

Hale suggests that, having realised that guilt and punishment don’t actually work, you ask yourself: “Could I decide I’ve been punished enough?”

It’s even okay to say no! It’s far better to be honest with yourself than to falsely pretend to let go. If it takes time, just allow it to take time as best you can. (In other words: don’t feel guilty for feeling guilty.)

At its simplest, the Sedona Method is a way of allowing whatever you are feeling in any given moment.

So, if for example you feel anger, instead of squashing it, you would ask yourself, “Can I welcome this feeling?”

There’s no need to express this anger or do anything with it — just feel it, and notice that if you don’t try to justify it, it will pass through. Often that’s all we need to do, but if there’s more of the emotion, you can ask: “Could I let it go? Would I? When?”

The can be applied to any emotion, including guilt. At first, when doing this it’s normal to have times when you remember and times when you revert to old ways. When you notice that happening all you need to do is treat yourself with compassion.

That brings me to the book Self Compassion by Kristin Neff. Neff, a professor at the University of Texas, has spent many years researching the effects of having or lacking compassion for oneself. In Self Compassion she draws on her studies and those of others to show how trying to punish and force yourself into becoming a better person doesn’t work, but self-compassion does.

Sounds obvious when you see it written like that, doesn’t it? Yet, so many of us can see why we should be kind to others but not why we should be kind to ourselves. “I’ll be lazy, big-headed, mean to others if I like myself,” we think and go on beating ourselves up. Neff’s findings are that self-compassion motivates us more than fear does, and it makes us kinder. This is certainly my experience. Since I have actively been forgiving myself for making mistakes or snapping at my husband or kids, I do it far less. Little things that used to irritate me don’t so much any more.

Neff has developed a mantra to use whenever you are struggling with the desire to beat yourself up. It consists of four parts, and she suggests not necessarily using her mantra but developing your own that has meaning for you. Mine is:

This feels really hard for me right now.

Everybody feels this way sometimes; it’s just part of being human.

May I be kind to myself right now.

May I give myself the compassion (or love) that I need.

Nowadays, when the need arises, I generally use the self-compassion mantra to empathise with myself and then I allow my feelings to pass through.

Because it’s easy when we read of new techniques to think they should work instantly, I want to end by saying that neither of these processes is a magic bullet. However, with practice it is possible to let go of guilt and to be kind to yourself and others – most of the time.

Top photo by FrameAngel via FreeDigitalPhotos

This article contains affilate links to some books I’ve found helpful. If you make a purchase via these links I receive a small commission. Thank you.