Guilt Is the Energy for Personal Change

Guilt is anger directed toward ourselves, and anger is the energy for change.

Alas, few of us were trained to use anger for change (except, perhaps, in athletics). Mostly, we use anger for blame and feeling bad. The gift of anger, however, is the physical, mental and emotional strength to make change.

When we feel guilty, and want to use, the anger for change (for a change), we have two options; we can either change our actions, or change our about those actions.

As the old saying goes, "When you get sick and tired of being tired and sick, you'll change." When angry, people often say, "I'm sick and tired of this!" The question is, how sick and how tired do we need to get before we change?

When we feel guilty about something, sometimes we can change the action, sometimes we can't. If we feel guilty about something that hasn't yet happened (that twinge of guilt we feel when premeditating a wicked action), we can use the anger to not do it (or, if it's a guilt of omission, to do it).

If we feel guilty about something that's already take place, we can use the anger to make amends to clean things up (atonement, which leads to at-ong-ment).

If there's nothing we can do, then we can use the energy of guilt to change the belief about how bad, wicked, terrible, immoral, despicable, disgusting and downright slug-like our action was.

Most people use guilt to (A) make half-hearted (but often heated) promises to "never do it again," which they don't really believe any more than anyone else who has known them for any length of time, and/or (B) feel bad.

Feeling bad is a very important part in the misuse of guilt. Part of the "contract" for violating our beliefs is that we feel bad. The sentence we tell ourselves is something like, "Good people are              (fill in the perfect human behavior violated by the contrary action), and when they're not, they feel guilty."

In this limiting system, feeling guilty proves goodness. Good people feel bad when they do something bad. (After all, bad people feel good when they do something bad.) So, guilt allows us to maintain a mistaken (but good-sounding) belief about ourselves while acting in such a way that violates that belief.

The more productive use of the energy is to change the belief. Once the belief is changed (and it may take many repetitions to do so), the self-judgements stop — the energy is no longer directed toward feeling bad when doing (or failing to do) certain activities.

We're not saying change your belief about yourself from "I am a good person..." to "I am a bad person..." We're saying, add a modifier to whatever belief you have about yourself, "...and sometimes they're not (don't, do, etc.)." "Good people are always kind to others... and sometimes they're not." "Good people always stick to their diet... and sometimes they don't." "Good people never yell in public... and sometimes they do."

As B. F. Skinner pointed out, "Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless."

The habit of feeling guilty over certain things — and the habit of feeling guilty period — is deep seated, instilled before we can understand language, much less understand. It takes great energy and perseverance to change it.

Fortunately, there's a lot of energy available in the anger of guilt. It's a matter of remembering to redirect it from blame to change — over and over.

The question arises, "When do we use the energy to change the action, and when do we use it to change the belief about the action?"

That's an important question. Here are some thoughts on it.

1. If you change the belief first, changing the action is easier. So, even if you want to change the action, taking the pressure off by changing the belief might allow for the freedom of movement necessary to change the action.

2. Realize you're not going to change all the actions about which you currently; feel guilty. We're not perfect, we're human. Nonetheless, in our childhood we are given images of perfection to live up to. We add to these the perfect images we have as adults. We'll discuss this "perfection syndrome" later, but for now realize that, to paraphrase ourselves, "You can change anything you want, but you can't change everything you want."

3. Change first the things that physically harm others. We're not talking about hurting someone's feelings; we're talking about activities such as hitting people, stealing, child abuse, drunk driving, etc., in which another is physically harmed by your actions.

4. Change next the actions that physically harm you. Smoking, extreme overeating, high-risk sexual activities, drug or alcohol abuse, and so on. Again, these are not the things that might emotionally harm you (that's quite often the comfort zone popping up and saying, "Let's take care of ourselves and not change this!"), but things that physically do you harm.

5. Later in the book, you'll have the opportunity to make a list of your wants, desires and dreams, then to prioritize them in such a way that you'll know which you have time to pursue, and which you (for now) do not. Work next on changing the actions that go against your primary goals.

6. If you've handled all those and are still looking for more, well, you're a better person than we are, Gunga Din!

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When used to produce guilt, the statement, "I could have done better!" is false. If we knew better we'd do better.

We don't just mean intellectually knowing better — our perfectionism is an intellectual process. In our mind, we often "know" better — or think we do. Alas, as you've probably noticed, something happens (or fails to happen) when the perfection gets from "in here" to "out there."

We're talking about knowing in the full sense of the word — the way you know to walk, talk and breathe. Yes, we sometimes have trouble with those, but, for the most part, people demonstrate their knowledge of these things through action.

A more accurate statement when we intellectually knew better (and did it anyway) is to say, "This will remind me to do better next time — I'm still learning." Because, of course, we are.

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