Everyone wants to feel good about themselves. Someone who feels guilty often feels bad about themselves. What is guilt? Is feeling guilty justified? Is feeling guilty a useful feeling? Can you learn from feelings of guilt? Does powerlessness play a role in the development of feelings of guilt in children?
What is it?
What is guilt? A feeling of guilt is a feeling, a nagging feeling, an unpleasant feeling, about something you did not do, but did promise. Or you have done something that you deeply regret. Guilt and feelings of guilt are a state of mind common in Western culture.
Wrong
Is feeling guilty justified? Feelings of guilt, the feeling that you are guilty, are often justified: you know what you did wrong. Because you know what you did wrong, it’s a nagging feeling, it’s an unpleasant feeling.
Useful
Is it a useful feeling, guilt? If you know what you did wrong, feeling guilty is a useful feeling. You have the chance to correct the error. You have a chance to fix what you did wrong. Sometimes you cannot correct the mistake you made, in that case you can learn from your mistakes.
Guilty
Isn’t it striking that the guiltier people are, the less guilty they feel? The more mistakes they make without correcting them, the less guilt they feel. Or even worse: someone who repeatedly plays bad tricks and constantly blames someone else, without experiencing any feelings of guilt. Such a person will not be able to learn from the mistakes made. These are people with an inability to put themselves in the shoes of others and usually leave a trail of misery behind them.
Debt
You could say that as long as you feel guilty you are human: you are able to ask for an apology and correct the mistake you made. Feeling guilty is a fairly simple phenomenon that is also quite easy to fix: fix the mistake or learn from the mistake!
Guilt
Now there are feelings of guilt and guilt. You feel guilty because you did something wrong. But what about a child who feels guilty because his parents are divorcing? Or the doctor who feels guilty because he couldn’t save a patient? Aren’t those also feelings of guilt? Feelings of guilt without having done anything wrong?
Powerlessness
The feelings of guilt that a child creates when his parents divorce arise from powerlessness. The feelings of guilt that a doctor feels when he is unable to save a patient arise from powerlessness. This form of guilt arises from a powerless: I couldn’t do anything about it, feeling.
These are feelings of guilt that the child and the doctor must learn to let go of these feelings. You have to realize that you cannot control life and that events in our lives largely happen outside our control. If letting go of guilt is so difficult for adults, how difficult must it be for a child whose parents are divorcing?
Old-fashioned
We live in a society where everything should be possible, and where there is no longer any room for guilt. Feeling guilty is, it seems, an old-fashioned problem. But how do you explain to a child that his feelings of guilt are an old-fashioned problem because the child lives in a world where anything is possible? That the child lives in a world where parents divorce?
Children
An important lesson we can learn from this is: never incite feelings of guilt in children! Adults have such a hard time dealing with feelings of guilt, let alone children!