What is your reaction to a mistake you have made?
Do you accept yourself, draw conclusions, and calmly look for a way out? Or do you feel guilt, start making excuses, blaming, and judging yourself? Are there cases when you unconsciously shift responsibility onto someone else?
There is a connection between feelings of guilt, grievances against a person, and explanations. We will examine what this connection is in the article, and perhaps it will help you understand yourself.
When grievances are hidden behind guilt
Ken Wilber, author of books on integral psychology, believes that there is not just one inner child, but many. As many traumas as you have inside you, that many inner traumatized children exist.
According to his theory, the projection of guilt is a grievance.
When you experience a feeling of guilt, there is a suppressed part inside you — grievances towards those people or situations towards whom you feel guilty.
That is, the feeling of guilt equals a grievance.
But since they are suppressed, you experience a terrible feeling of guilt that you cannot explain.
Think about it, delve into yourself, and if you are honest with yourself, you will definitely get to the root cause.
Therefore, a person either actually experiences grievances, or suppresses them and experiences a feeling of guilt.
Accordingly, work through the grievances, replace them with the mindset that no one owes you anything, and you do not owe anything, it is impossible to control everything and everyone, no one is obliged to meet your expectations, and so on.
We invite you to the transformation seminar “Dance with the Shadow 3.0”, which will help you realize and release the shadow aspects of consciousness — repressed, alienated feelings, emotions, and personal qualities.
When guilt turns into grievances
It can also be the other way around. You experience grievances that conceal a feeling of guilt.
Guilt is a very strong feeling that a person cannot physically endure for long. It can simply destroy them.
In everyday situations, a person usually represses it from consciousness to avoid pain and projects it onto another person. This is where grievances come from.
For example, a person has a small salary that is not enough to support their family.
A conscious person understands this and decides to do something about it: change jobs, find another one, or start their own business. In general, they try to find a way out and take action.
But another person is not ready or unwilling to do anything, change their life, or step out of their comfort zone. They understand that they are responsible for supporting the family and feel guilty for being unable to take action.
Since enduring guilt for a long time is painful, they repress it and project it onto the state, the employer, wealthy people, blaming them for not allowing them to earn money: “they are to blame, not me,” and eventually onto their wife and children.
Both guilt and grievances are destructive, harmful emotions. If experienced over a long period, they lead to illness. Moreover, problems grow more and more, accumulating like a snowball. And eventually, they will have to be solved anyway.
Read, How to get out of the victim state to take control of your life.
Guilt and responsibility
Many people confuse guilt with responsibility, tormenting themselves over a mistake they made and berating themselves.
But when you blame yourself, you reject a part of yourself. You literally cut off your own arm, your own leg. And from a human being who should live a happy life and experience a thousand and one pleasures, you castrate yourself from all sides, depriving yourself of the ability to move and grow.
There is a difference between guilt and responsibility.
When you feel guilt — it is devastation, hopelessness, a state of victimhood, it is literally paralysis. You won’t find a solution this way.
When you realize responsibility — you understand that you are a creator, that you always have the opportunity to find a way out.
If you have done something wrong, guilt will not help you fix it. From the very beginning, give yourself the right to make a mistake, no matter what happens in the future. This right frees your hands, allowing you to find solutions even in the most dead-end situations.
See also How to find a balance between complaints and awareness of your own worth
The connection between guilt and explanations
Some people perceive explanations as justifications. If a person explains, it means they are guilty and making excuses.
And they themselves, when they need to explain something, do not do it, so that others won’t think they are making excuses and are guilty of something.
On the other hand, there are people who constantly make excuses. This is a typical reaction of a 3D person. The one who makes excuses considers themselves guilty, or wants the person they consider guilty to make excuses.
There is a trauma inside. If you are doing this, it is a signal that there is a trauma inside you; if another person is doing this, it means you have stepped on their trauma.
There is a link between justification and guilt.
When there is no feeling of guilt, you simply want to explain, with the subtext “understand me, share my truth.” If a person thinks differently, that is where resentment and inconsistencies arise.
The tendency to explain is present in people who care about what others think of them, who care about preserving their reputation, a good opinion, and an impression. And most often, there is a trauma there — “how can this be? they think badly of me.”
If you have no traumas, when should you explain? You should explain when you are asked about it and when it is appropriate.
See also: Why it is so difficult to free yourself from the influence of others’ opinions
If you are afraid of judgment, read this material. You will learn how and when dependence on others’ opinions appears and how this fear hinders your development.
Think about in which situations you experience a feeling of guilt, and when claims arise. What areas of life does this concern?
The article is written based on a live broadcast within the rubric #conversation_on_the_couch “Feelings of Guilt and Explanations”