October 22, 2024-
When it is right to feel bad about your behaviors
For those of you who know me or have followed my podcasts and writings over the years, you will know I strongly am opposed to persons having inappropriate guilt in the sense that it totally destroys a person’s ability to live effectively in the present, and thus there is no future. On the other hand, I strongly believe that if a person has behaved poorly to someone or a group, then it is the right thing to have legitimate
guilt, to accept responsibility, feel badly and make amends as best we can. If someone has done wrong, then feeling bad is appropriate. In this age of of what I call “feel gooditis”,people too often do not want to accept responsibility and would prefer to just overlook inappropriate behaviors,minimize them and let them go. It is important to deal with our feelings after we recognize that we behaved inappropriately and work this out in our mind that we are not going to do it again. it is often overlooked that when we do something inappropriate that we ought to feel bad about it and even more important than that, we must try to resolve the problem and let the person or group know we feel bad about what we did. it also is very important to not endlessly ruminate about these behaviors and cause ongoing negative guilt and even depression and poor self-esteem. The purpose is not to allow our inner critic to beat us up every day and ruin it. No,the goal is to honestly reflect on our inappropriate behaviors and try to understand why we did them and determine to not do them again. Obvious examples would be hurting someone’s feelings, lying , stealing, cheating others, slandering persons and their reputations, being dishonest and dishonorable in a relationship, putting people down with the goal of helping yourself or making yourself feel more powerful, and slowing down the progress of others for fear they will compete with us or we enjoy them in a subservient position. Something important not to overlook when we try to make things right is not to end up gaslighting the person and not being totally honest about how inappropriate our behaviors were when admitting that our intentions were not good. To be honest with yourself and the other person is critical to our making changes to self as we improve our character. It also is true that we may have hurt someone inappropriately but had no intention of doing it. Then it is worthwhile to indicate we feel bad for what happened, but had no intentions of doing it. When we do this, we do run the risk of the person not being willing to accept our honest apology. That is a risk we must take and something that needs to be done to in effect right the ship of our sense of right and wrong. Advice succinctly stated would be when making right when we have behaved inappropriately would include accepting the behavior was inappropriate,having appropriate guilt, determining not to do it again and making amends for what was done as best as possible. This is how to deal with appropriate guilt.