Do you feel guilty? 3 lists that will help you free yourself

Don’t accuse yourself anymore! Our worst enemy is ourselves, in a continuous fight between what we are and what we think we should be. If the inner judge appears, he accepts instead of fighting.

Words are not needed to define guilt. Any of us knows the internal discomfort we feel when that feeling invades us.

Guilt is a “fighting state” between the person we are and the idea we have of how we should be and act.

and although can sometimes seem useful to avoid or rectify attitudes with which we have hurt someone, if we get stuck in it it becomes an unpleasant feeling of fighting against oneself.

Let’s accept ourselves as we are

But it’s about a fight lost in advance that consumes our energy and leads us to bitterness. Lovingly accepting that we are who we are is an essential requirement so that guilt does not invade us.

Accepting ourselves as is does not mean that we cannot change and improve or that we cannot grow as people, but surely we will not achieve it by the path of guilt and reproach.

Where does the guilt come from?

The seeds of guilt arise from our childhood and grow throughout our lives.

1. The paternal judges

When our parents do not validate us as we are, we build the idea that it is wrong to be what we are and pretend to be othersto get closer to that model that our parents say we should be.

A simple and well-known example is when the child is warned: “Men do not cry.” Unconsciously, that child draws the first conclusions from him: “It is wrong to cry, what I feel is wrong.” From there, every time you cry you will feel guilty.

The ideas that we acquire from our parents are strengthened by what society indicates to us as good and due

It is not that it is wrong to have ideas of what we want to be or do, but that what do we do when our life does not match our ideas.

We may like the situation we are in or not, but it’s reality and we can only build from it.

What we are is always much more solid than any idea, however brilliant, of what we should be.

2. The internal judge

The effects of guilt are endless. It is as if we had an internal judge who whispered his accusations in our ears every time we strayed from the model.

It would suffice to become observers of ourselves to discover that this internal judge does not guide us on the right pathAnd it hurts us too.

An alcoholic will not stop drinking out of guilt. He will only do it when he accepts himself as he is and still feels that he deserves to be loved, that he is worthy of receiving help and asking for it.

The external judge (reinforced by the internal)

Many times we recriminate someone, the other, who “makes us feel guilty.” But this is impossible. Unless we ourselves share that “accusation.”

My own case comes to mind. Before having my children, I trained as a therapist in the United States. Then I interrupted my training until my youngest son was four years old.

When I went back to travel to attend courses, my mother “innocently” asked me if it was really “necessary”, pointing out arguments such as “if the plane crashes your children would be left without a mother”.

Then the guilt began to do its job and no course seemed good and justified enough. Little by little I realized that it was my own ideas—not my mother’s—about what to do that were getting in the way and they did not let me appreciate what each course had to give me.

The work to dissolve the guilt was to observe the thoughts, the ideas, the phrases that invaded me when it overwhelmed me: “You should be at home”, “a good mother does not leave her children like this”.

Later I observed that they were only ideas, not realities. If I had been forced to conform to them, I would have lost things that were very important to me, and the situation would not have been ideal.

accept to change

Although I must admit that It’s hard to get rid of those acquired thoughts, it is possible to disidentify and observe that it is just about that, ideas and not realities. Then they lose their strength and can’t get in our way.

The idea, the judgment, is set aside and we can recover our way. And beyond what we think, we always do what we can, which may be the maximum within our possibilities.

But the drive that makes us the way we are is stronger than any idea. We can accept it or feel guilty, but we will always be as we are.

Psychologist John Welwood says that the basis of human suffering is judgment.

Therefore, when a problem invades us, let’s work to soften the judgment we issue about ourselves.

If we accept that we are imperfect and that this is neither good nor bad, which simply is what there is, we will be able to build from this acceptance, of what there is. When we accept ourselves in all our imperfection and don’t fight to change, love and compassion grow in us. And then the change occurs.

The 3 lists to live away from guilt

Do you want to acknowledge your guilty feelings and free yourself from them? This simple exercise is very effective.

In a notebook you must make three lists in three parallel columns, each headed by the words “I must”, “I want” and “I can”.

1. The “Must” List

Connect with everything you think you should change and write down the sentences with which you explain it to yourself. This is the column of “what should be”, that is, the arguments of the internal judge. Example: “I must eat only healthy and well-prepared foods.”

2. The “I want” list

In correspondence with each “I must”, see what you feel compelled to do and write it down next to it, at the same level, in the “I want” list. For example, corresponding to the previous sentence about how you should eat, it would be something like this: “I want to eat buns and chocolate.”

3. The “I Can” List

In this third column, write down what you can really do and what you do in each case. For example: “I can eat buns and chocolate once a week and in moderation.”

accept reality

Although the “I can” column is not the one you like the most, it is the only real one. Let’s discard the “I must” column, and after knowing the “I want”, let’s accept each of the “I can” that does allow us to start a new story.

Disarm your judge

The judgments are ideas and not realities. Through these judgments, we must observe and know the mechanisms that generate the feeling of guilt instead of pleasure, joy or security.

Change judgments for objective and kind questions, for example, “What a fool I have been!”, for “What could have led me to behave that way?”. So we will discover how it is activated.