As a general rule, we accept that mistakes will be made. It is how we manage the situation that follows a temporary lapse in good judgement and it is how we pick ourselves back up after dropping a clanger that is important. Feeling guilty is an emotion that we know will accompany us on our journey in life but it is how long we are prepared to let it hang around, once we have looked it in the eye and accepted it had a point. Once the point has been made and you are not in denial of any wrongdoing, you can look to move on and learn your lessons. Well, this all sounds jolly simple!
If the rules are that simple why does Guilt bother us so much? Maybe we are talking about another kind of guilt that is backed up by very little evidence and has absolutely nothing to do with committing a crime; the only crime it is guilty of is incessant attention seeking and should just give it a rest from time to time.
Even talking about ‘feeling guilty’ becomes a habit and the learnt phrase is commonly used in our everyday language. If we stop to think about what it is we really mean, when we say, “I feel guilty…”, we could end up giving ourselves a life sentence for all the imaginary crimes we hold against ourselves! If we continue to be the judge, jury and executioner then we have no hope in breaking any negative forms of behaviour and Guilt will keep reoffending. Let me clarify those last few words: Guilt is simply role-playing over and over. It is overreacting because it doesn’t have a cause, most of the time, for getting so wound up and it pops up all over the place collaborating with other emotions, causing confusion. We have already acknowledged that it may not be supported by any facts whatsoever. And, do you know what the most frustrating thing is about the word? Guilt shows up in our vocabulary like a conjunctive that is over used; Guilt shouldn’t be there half the time and we are completely responsible for allowing it the space!
We even provide Guilt with its own dressing room as it behaves like a right little diva – it is dramatic when it has the chance and it doesn’t stop talking. It is aware that without an audience it has no reason to perform and so if you are willing to play host to it, then it will thrive and put on a display for other people. The issue with putting on the same show for the same people every day is it will become boring and they will lose interest – you may lose friends! New people will engage with your insecurities for a while until they witness a pattern forming. Some will join in so you can saturate your conversations with two helpings of negativity and put the world to rights.
Remember that Guilt is just one of your emotions that can become an obsession to have around and as with many obsessions you begin to think you need it in your life. As we begin to look at the things that we can allow ourselves to feel guilty over, Guilt will start to behave irresponsibly and we can explore a few examples together shortly.
How are you doing so far? Still with me?
Guilt will always have a place in our lives, not because it is needed but because it tends to occur naturally as a result of poor judgement (I am sure we could live without it). Actually, I would go further and say it can exist when we make a good judgement. We can feel guilty about doing the ‘right thing’ because we may be aware it will upset someone else and this is a prime example of when Guilt is surplus to requirements. We simply don’t need it to weigh us down.
Any thoughts about the latter? Do you find it hard to do the right thing sometimes, knowing it could upset someone else? It would be interesting to find out how Guilt associates itself with the word right… Another time, maybe.
When we lack Time, Patience and Trust there are no end of situations that can unfold which provide Guilt with an automatic invitation to get involved and do a sales pitch. Fear and Failure are just as bad – both guilty of allowing Guilt to exploit their vulnerability.
As we explore this character I notice it is quite a good little networker! It rubs shoulders with everything it meets on its travels. No wonder it got on the bus at the beginning, with a box of tricks up its sleeve. It really can be a bad influence and impact on so many aspects of your life. We allow Guilt to lead us unnecessarily at times and whilst we can accept it is going to exist (or wants to exist) we need to set a few limitations and give it a cut-off point should it get out of control.
Can we look to abolish Guilt altogether or is it an emotion that allows us to learn and it is appropriate to experience it when there is evidence to support its existence? To what extent should Guilt linger around in your life in order to meet those learning objectives? I am sure it has to be proportionate. Even the word should is not a word I like to use too often; in this instance, it sounds as though something ‘must’ be present and it is possible that you can still evaluate a mistake without having to assign Guilt.
We cannot assign a value of time to a sentence of ‘guilt’ as it can be assigned to a length of community service, awarded by a court of law. Guilt is either experienced or it isn’t. In keeping with the theme which has naturally evolved around crime in this sandwich, let us consider a criminal who displays no remorse for their criminal act – they may not feel guilty. A judge cannot order a sentence of guilt because this would be letting them off lightly. If on the other hand, a criminal suffered remorse and felt guilty for the consequences of their crime, whilst this may not be a sufficient level of punishment for the victim, friends or families, it will be an emotional punishment that will imprison the accused, possibly for a lifetime.
The type of guilt I would like to focus on now is the guilt that we all know too well exists in our lives. We touched on it earlier when we found it in places it had no business to be. Guilt takes you up your own garden path and, if you remain strong, you can force it into making a declaration that it misled you all along; you have better ways to spend your time than frolic with Guilt on a sunny day!
We mentioned that Guilt can be manipulative but it is people who manipulate, using Guilt as their weapon of mass destruction. For some reason, humans have a crafty ability to send people on a guilt trip so they can focus on their own agenda or achieve something that would not be achievable if they didn’t take advantage of other people’s good nature. I think this is also called taking advantage of other people’s weaknesses. We are not all cut out to be this sly and, no sooner do you send someone on a guilt trip, you may well feel guilty for buying them the ticket on the bus in the first place.
Guilt loves a bit of sympathy but it doesn’t always get it. Let us take a really simple example that anyone working in a group environment will either have been involved in, or overheard, at one point in their working lives. It is 9am and they have already started: the conversations about food!
“I felt really guilty last night because I ate chips,” she said.
“Why did you feel guilty about that?” he said.
She goes on to reveal all her dietary habits from the day before and how the dress won’t fit for her best friend’s wedding, which is in two weeks’ time (although it didn’t fit for her sister’s wedding six months ago either). She feels guilty because she lacks discipline and she hates going to the gym. When it gets to 11am and the day has already taken its toll, the whole team begins to debate what they are going to eat for lunch. Of course, they have already discussed the snacks they have eaten up to then, between 9am and 10.59am, polluting the atmosphere with guilt that even has the oxygen in the air reaching out for a mask to avoid suffocation. The discussions held on calories and nutritional labels, not to mention the portion sizes, have all undergone a journey through a quagmire of contradiction and hypocrisy in less than two hours. Gosh! We know that Guilt travels around in disguise, but in this example it has surely kicked the tour guide off the bus and is narrating the entire guilt trip single-handedly.
If Guilt could write a travel guide on your journey to losing weight at work and call it, How to Lose Weight on a Guilt Trip Before You Reach Retirement, it could be a millionaire. The fact is: Guilt won’t make a penny! The ‘guilty person’ will start off believing that guilt is going to be the answer to shift
ing the next pound of weight, because obsession must in part be responsible for setting yourself limitations. What Guilt hasn’t taken into account is the fact that free will encourages the weaker side of discipline to compete and intervene, if only to justify that it really is OK to eat what you want and burn off the calories during an attempt to think yourself thin! After all, a little bit of what you fancy won’t hurt from time to time… in this case, it would seem to equate to all day long when you should be working!
Don’t worry; if I have encouraged you to feel sorry for Guilt and belittled its hard work thus far, you can be reassured that it will pipe up again after the next act of indulgence has concluded. It will catch you up and get you back to feeling guilty by 3pm when you end the day with a discussion on what you can’t eat for dinner, assuming that you joined in with their discussions about food. Guilt wins you over for a while; it hovers around because you are feeding it throughout the day. It will never be rich but it doesn’t need a penny because you are supporting it and it is living off the state… of your mind.
The travel guide that Guilt wrote will be an interesting read and, in order to learn something too, we need to move on from simply reading to taking the words off the pages and arrange them in a way that we can suitably reapply them within our own lives. This is the part we tend to overlook.
If we want to make a constructive difference to the way we live our lives and form a healthy relationship with Guilt, then we need to consider forming a healthier relationship with all of our limitations and accept that sometimes Guilt isn’t the answer to all of our misgivings. Feeling guilty every time we don’t reach the end goal that we set out to accomplish will only serve to hold us back the next time we try again.
What is it that we actually need to prove or find ourselves needing so much of throughout life? We would be wiser to question if the need is based on a desire or a necessity. Maybe if we recognise what influences us to feel guilty about the things we don’t need to feel guilty about then we could find more of the happiness that Darkness can sometimes overshadow.
So, diners, have a think about this emotion and how it relates to your own lives. I don’t want you to make a meal out of it, as self-reflective interventions can be heavy going. I would like you to put Guilt into perspective and become more aware of how often you use the word and why during everyday conversations. These may be held with other people or in your head!
Oh, and by the way… please stay away from any public transport that has guilt written into its journey destination; it will take you all around the houses and probably back to where you started! You will simply go around in circles and no doubt feel guilty for wasting an hour of your life in the process.
N*E*E*D
Desires and Delusions
Don’t you just love an adventure? We all need a little adventure in our lives – don’t we? Packing the suitcase is one of the hardest jobs because you never know what you’ll need until you get there. Maybe you have been on a similar adventure but invariably your needs change, as what was once needed in your life is no longer required.
Naturally you can plan ahead and do plenty of research, while reading up on someone else’s experience to help you to prepare. But even this is only helpful if you actually know they’ve been to the same place that you are intending to visit or find yourself unintentionally drifting toward. This is also assuming that you do know where you are heading because if you don’t, then all the preparation in the world may not prepare you for a subtle diversion appearing midway. There may be little point in packing the things that someone else required if the path they took to get ‘there’ differed to the one you will end up taking, as a result of a detour.
Need is a character that changes its mind as fashion changes its shape from season to season. As the original design comes back into fashion, you find yourself wondering why you never liked it before. This is a common reaction because you may have suffered a memory lapse in between and undergone a stage of emotional development. This may have caused you to grow up and notice that shades exist in between black and white. You may have forgotten the reason you rejected your previous thought patterns. Now, several years on, you could be correct in thinking that had you been more adventurous, instead of judging how something looked on the hanger without even trying it on, you may well have needed it in your life more than you realised. This is, of course, hypothetical and without a crystal ball you may never know!
An adventure is really just one stage that you embark on and move through… until it comes to an end; you will find yourself going on a series of explorations throughout your life. An adventure will begin as soon as you set off, taking you on a journey to wherever ‘there’ happens to be. So, you will look to cram all the things you think you will need into the luggage space available and have a fair idea of what will be a necessity and what will be useful to have along the way – just in case.
Even if you are simply packing for a holiday, through previous experience you are certain that what you needed during the last trip will be needed again this time. I frequently leave behind what I need and pack what I don’t, wondering what was I thinking of at the time! As a reasonably experienced traveller, I should know better but I blame the airlines for putting pressure on me to pack light or else pay a premium that at the time seems extreme; this is until I land and spend more than double on buying the things that I didn’t bring. Although, I am sure if I took more than one suitcase I would only fill each corner with the things I didn’t need as I frantically tried to rearrange my packing last minute, emptying the entire wardrobe in the process. Anything I did end up buying on arrival, to support my wardrobe malfunction, would either be left for the next tourist or replace the clothes I didn’t need in the first place. Decisions, decisions!
I think there is something about going on holiday that has us hooking up with an alien-possessed mannequin! We seem to lose all sense of perspective and I have even heard an airline attendant say something to this effect: “Tourists: they leave their common sense at home!”
I have only just begun to explore ‘Need’ and I am already feeling like I am using it disrespectfully. I feel like I am making a fool out of it because Need doesn’t know what it wants half the time. I don’t think we always know what we want as we set out to explore new territory, never mind knowing what we really need along the way. It is often through trial and error that we become familiar with what it takes to have our own needs met and how best we can help other people meet theirs.
Incidentally, Need is following me around the page with a coyness that is so endearing I have to assume it is female. It is literally walking in the footprints I am mentally leaving behind as I work out the direction I would like to take this sandwich. It is doing that ‘butter won’t melt in its mouth’ performance; hands are softly clasped together behind its back, rotating its torso from side to side with its head slightly tipped to one side to follow suit. If ever you’ve seen that look, which has been designed to make you feel guilty, then Need has just delivered it between a set of fluttering eyelashes that are saying, “Don’t you want me…?” Talk about feeling guilty!
Need doesn’t miss a trick. Throughout your life it will have been brainwashing you into thinking you needed to do a multitude of things that were probably not a necessity at the time. Need is a fantastic word to use when you want to convince yourself that an end goal is heavily reliant on the fact that you need to do something – or it simply won’t work out. It is also great at stepping in to stop you doing something, as you tell yourself that you need to do something else first.
It is a versatile word that often goes hand in hand with your excuses and we can twist it to suit the context, blaming it quite easily for influencing the way we make a decision. As we have just seen, if we base a decision on the idea that we need to pursue something else first, whilst it could be a legitimate reason, it may only be a desirable course of action to take.
The w
ord need is used in our everyday language to emphasise the fact that something may be missing in our lives. If this is so, then the lack of it may have an impact on something else that will end up being missed out on if the first need is not met. When little ‘Missy’ comes along and starts getting emotional it doesn’t take much to confuse Need who has a soft spot at the best of times. It can mislead our friend Need and have it thinking it is a necessity rather than just desirable.
Need has a strong relationship with ‘expectations’ and it is prone to exaggeration which can get you into trouble. Need has a bad habit of believing that if an expectation isn’t met, then this particular disappointment will be responsible for a wealth of other things not happening; you have created an excuse – how convenient. Need works so hard in order to help you fulfil your expectations that it convinces itself that it is going to be responsible for letting you down if it doesn’t keep coming up with ideas and roping you in to all sorts of thoughts and actions; it is a workaholic. Goodness me; now ‘Need’ is feeling guilty too! You don’t need to take Need literally all the time.
Take your time to understand this perspective; it doesn’t matter if you have to read this section twice. If everything we learned came to us that easily we could miss out on the reflective aspect that accompanies learning. This allows us to stop for a moment and see whether we do in fact agree or if we could improve upon an idea because it makes more sense to us. When you break down any form of reasoning into smaller bites it can seem quite long-winded but that is often because we don’t scrutinise our every thought, as it would be emotionally hard work to do and takes up our time. However, if we did look a little deeper into our motives that drive us to think a certain way, we could trace those small bites of reasoning back to the root of a problem and protect ourselves from further disappointment. We could learn to accept our own limitations if we understood why we set them in the first place and become more accountable rather than making Need our excuse. Need is enthusiastic and leads us into temptation, offering us options which don’t always require pursuing!
Emotional Sandwiches Page 18