Guilt is something that can come to you even when you are hardly doing anything. Most people develop the idea of guilt even as a child because of the rules and the boundaries that we have.
This causes us to know that we have done something wrong and to take responsibility of our faults and helps us to be more aware of who we are.
Guilt will cause you to look at how you are acting and how you are behaving and will cause you to make changes so that you don’t mess up again/
Learning to deal with guilt can be hard but you have to learn to let it go and accept what has happened in your life.
Here are some ways to know when you need to let go of guilt that you should no longer hold on to:
Guilt and Purpose
Guilt helps you to grow and to become more mature in your life. When someone hurts your feelings or you hurt others, you will feel guilt because of how you acted. If you are someone that focuses strictly on your job and you leave your friends and family out, you will feel guilt for choosing things over people. You can either ignore your guilt or you can learn to accept your guilt and change your behavior.
The problem comes when you don’t need to change how you are acting but that you might need to just change your thought process. Maybe if you are feeling guilty about your job or if you feel guilty about not spending time with your children, this guilt is something that you have to let go of. You might be someone that has to work, and you have to let that guilt go so that you aren’t upset with yourself.
If you feel bad for eating a bag of chips, you have your brain that is there to give you a message so that you can learn not to pick up self-destructive behaviors. This is so that you can be healthy and strong. This kind of guilt is purposeful guilt because it is your way of changing the behavior that you are doing.
Changes and Guilt
If you are having rational or purposeful guilt, you need to take action to fix the problem. Most people that have some kind of wrongdoing in their life will punish themselves because of their guilt instead of learning to change and move forward.
You might want to apologize to someone that you hurt and sometimes you don’t see how your habits are affecting people around you, but you have to understand that healthy guilt is there to help you to live a better life. Having unhealthy guilt, on the other hand, is there just to make you feel bad about who you are.
When you learn a lesson that guilt teaches you, you might learn to move on but if you choose to keep making the same mistakes over and over again, your guilt is not teaching you a lesson. When you learn your lesson and you back off of behavior that you feel bad about, you will be successful in what you are reaching and doing in your life.
Accept It Was Wrong
Maybe you did something that hurt someone, and you cannot go back and change it and you can only move forward. You need to apologize and allow your actions to make up for your behavior that was uncalled for. Then, you have to learn to move on.
Guilt is there to help you to understand when your situation is inappropriate and make you feel bad so that you will see the problem with your behavior and fix it.
Do not obsess about this and learn to stop apologizing over and over. Acknowledge that you messed up and do what you can to fix it and then move forward.
Learning Lesson
Guilt can be a learning lesson in your life. If you pay attention to what you have done wrong and you feel guilty, chances are that you will change your behavior and you will not have to feel guilty again. If you say something that hurts someone, your guilt will show up so that you can make it right with that person and apologize.
If you have guilt, it will help you to correct your mistakes and you will learn to change your behavior that is causing you to feel guilty.
You Aren’t Perfect
No one in your life is perfect and you aren’t perfect either. Everyone feels guilty for what they do wrong, and we all want to be perfect, but we will never be.
Everyone makes mistakes and when you mess up, guilt is there to help you to move forward. You are human and you should not blame yourself over and over again once you apologize and try to move on. Life is just that way and you have to learn to deal with the emotion of guilt.
Guilt tells you that what you are feeling is a strong emotion and that you need to focus on being better and focus on what you did that was painful to someone else. Guilt is trying to teach you that you were irrational and that you acted poorly in a situation.
Guilt will help you so that you can better yourself and do better in the future.