Healthy Vs. Unhealthy Guilt (Pt. 2)
How can you know whether the guilt you are experiencing is healthy or not?
First, check your bodily experience with reference to the physical sings described below. Next, look for the psychological characteristics of what you're experiecing (also included below). Finally, check yourself: have you done something wrong? Together, these self-assessments should give you a clearer sense of what you're experiencing.
Physical signs of healthy or unhealthy guilt:
Healthy guilt: An experience of healthy guilt includes a specific kind of bodily arousal. Psychiatrist and researcher Allan Abbass describes the symptoms of this way:
“Guilt manifests somatically as upper chest and neck pain with intense sobbing and strong ideas of remorse... Guilt passes in distinct, solid waves that come and go. When guilt is present, the person finds it difficult to speak…between the waves, the person is able to speak…” (Abbass, 2015, p. 42)
The physical experience being described here is painful and difficult to bear. Psychologist Patricia Coughlin says something similar:
“…Guilt, an exquisitely painful and often misunderstood emotion, is often described as gut wrenching. To face one’s own destructiveness, and the pain of having harmed someone we love, is a highly aversive state. It is not uncommon to hear people say, “I feel sick about it. I can’t believe I did that.” Guilt is tied to love, and prompts us to want to re-engage and repair broken relationships." (Coughlin, 2017, pp. 111 - 112)
Unhealthy guilt: Physiologically, unhealthy guilt often correlates with an increase in anxiety and/or depression symptoms in the body. You can read about the physical symptoms of anxiety in Jon Frederickson’s book, Co-Creating Change or watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzhT6KDUmlE
Basically, the self-punishment, self-criticism, self-loathing, and other defenses associated with neurotic guilt keep our nervous system in a fear/anxiety state. Depending on our psychological organization these defenses can also often lead to a state of depressive collapse which manifests as lack of muscle tension, low energy/fatigue, low motivation, inexhaustible sadness (e.g., hopeless crying), and a loss of normal excitement responses.
Psychological characteristics and causes of healthy and/or unhealthy guilt?
There are a lot of reasons we feel some form of guilt.
Healthy guilt is typically caused by something we did or didn't do. It's limited and concrete. It's attached to thoughts of remorse and repair. The sin is accessible to our conscious experience. A vital part of us knows we've acted against our conscience. And when we really let the feeling in, we've got motivation to work at repair.
Unhealthy guilt can happen for a number of reasons. In many cases we have it because we're unconsciously trying to avoid the real guilt and other feelings associated with taking responsibility for our actions. But even as we deny or defend against what we did we still go on punishing ourselves with self-criticism, self-sabotage, and feelings of worthlessness.
Jon Frederickson (2013) clarifies the issue pointing out that neurotic guilt often involves displacement and self-punishment. For example, we feel inordinately and inappropriately bad about something minor (e.g., interrupting someone) while ignoring something major (e.g., we have unresolved rage towards the person). We displace our guilt and "punish (ourselves) for the lesser crime." (p. 343)
What's confusing here is that unhealthy guilt can also be caused by unprocessed but appropriate feelings. This is particularly the case with unconscious anger towards people we also love. In therapy, we often find that initial angry feelings were generated by trauma occurring early in our development at a time when we genuinely confused feeling with action.
In these cases, a primitive part of our minds believes that because we felt something murderous we may as well have done it. In this way the angry feeling produces an authentic feeling of guilt. But because we love the object of our anger, our guilt over our rage gets buried or split off from our consciousness. In this way, guilt over rage becomes an inexaustible nuclear generator fueling lifelong self-punishment and unrealistic neurotic guilt-- a dynamic that led Psychiatrist Habib Davanloo call guilt "the perpetrator of the unconscious."
Is your guilt feeling finite, concrete, specific, and appropriate? Or is it endless, self-punishing, inexhaustible, and inappropriate? If the latter is true, consider whether there is something you should in fact feel guilty about-- something most people would recognize as wrong. If you're not having any luck there, perhaps its time to see a therapist who can work with you to get a better sense of what unprocessed feelings could be fueling endless self-punishment.