I’ve experienced just about every emotion that exists over the past months, and one of them is guilt. I’m pretty sure guilt is something that just about everyone struggles with from time to time. But I was just thinking — we often think of guilt in an unfavorable way. Claire used to speak of “Catholic guilt” from time to time.
And I guess, if you think about it, guilt is not always a bad thing. According to Charles Darwin, emotions evolved to help us respond to out environments. Guilt, like other human emotions, serves important functions in our lives and is often helpful.
Psychologists say that guilt is the feeling of regret for something we have done. There are various kinds of guilt, or at least various degrees of guilt. If you gave up drinking for lent and you had a drink, that’s a relatively minor guilt. If you said something bad about one of your best friends, that’s a more serious kind of guilt. And if you do something like cheat on your wife, that’s a much more serious, or deep-seated kind of grief.
Usually, when I feel guilty, I have the urge to do something to “fix” whatever made me feel guilty. If it’s something like taking a drink during lent, just saying, “I won’t do that again” is usually enough. If I’m feeling guilty about something that had an impact on someone else, probably at least an apology is in order and maybe some work to repair a relationship, or something like that. Really bad guilt is much harder — that’s something that just eats on you and we feel miserable about whatever wrong we’ve done.
Guilt is the result of two related processes — the standards we hold for ourselves and our interpretation of our behavior against those standards. When it comes to evaluating guilt in todays world, it’s the underlying beliefs that matter.
So what about a person who experiences no guilt? I’m pretty sure that that’s at least part of the definition of a psychopath — someone with no sense of guilt. People like that exist…. people that practice human trafficking, unethical business practices, bombings, terrorism, drug pushers, serial killers…. maybe even future “leaders” of our country.
So maybe guilt can be a good thing sometimes for good people… for bad people, it’s probably not even a “thing.”
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