How To Use Guilt and Anger for Personal Change
On the first day of the Warriors’ Quest I work with disempowering emotions like anger, sadness, fear and guilt. This is critical in order to move foreword free of the weight these emotions carry.
Guilt as a Force for Change
Guilt is anger directed toward ourselves, and anger is the energy for change.
Sadly, few of us were trained to use anger for change (except, perhaps, in athletics). Mostly, we use anger for blame and feeling bad. As I will explore later, the gift of anger is the physical, mental, and emotional strength to make change.
When we feel guilty or shame and want to use the anger for change (for a change), we have two options:
- We can either change our actions
- Or change our beliefs about those actions
If we feel guilty about something that hasn’t yet happened (that twinge of guilt we feel when premeditating a “wicked” action), we can use the anger in the guilt to not do it (or, if it’s an act of omission, to do it).
If we feel guilty about something that’s already taken place, we can use the anger to make amends, to clean things up. (Atonement leads to at-one-ment.)
If there’s nothing we can do, then we can use the energy of guilt to change the belief about how bad, wicked, terrible, immoral, despicable, disgusting, and downright slug-like our action was.
Most people use guilt:
- To make half-hearted (but often heated) promises to “never do it again,” which they don’t really believe any more than any of their close acquaintances do, and/or
- To feel bad.
Feeling bad is an important part in the misuse of guilt. Part of the “contract” for violating our beliefs is that we must feel bad. We tell ourselves, “Good people are __________ (fill in the perfect human behavior violated by the guilt-producing action), and when they’re not, they feel guilty.”
In this limiting system, feeling guilty proves our goodness. Good people feel bad when they do something bad. (After all, bad people feel good when they do something bad.) So, guilt allows us to maintain a mistaken (but admirable-sounding) belief about ourselves while acting in a way that violates the belief.
A more productive use of guilt’s energy is to change the belief. Once the belief is changed, the self-judgments stop – the energy is no longer directed toward feeling bad when doing (or failing to do) certain activities.
“When such as I cast out remorse: So great a sweetness flows into the breast: We must laugh and we must sing: We are blest by everything: Everything we look upon is blest.” W.B Yeats
I’m not saying change your belief about yourself from “I am a good person . . .” to “I am a bad person…” I’m suggesting, add a qualifier to the too-rigid (“perfect”) beliefs you have about yourself. “Good people are kind to others…and sometimes they’re not.” “Good people stick to their diet…and sometimes they don’t.” “Good people don’t yell in public…and sometimes they do.”
Making these changes is not easy. The habit of using the energy of guilt in a limiting rather than expansive way is deep-seated. As B. F. Skinner pointed out, “Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.” It takes enormous energy and perseverance to change our response to guilt.
Fortunately, there’s a lot of energy available in the anger of guilt. It’s a matter of remembering to redirect it from blame to change–over and over.
You may be wondering, “When do I use the energy to change the action, and when do I use it to change the belief about the action?”
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It’s an important question and here are some thoughts:
- If you change the belief first, changing the action is easier. Taking the pressure off by changing the belief allows for the freedom of movement necessary to change the action.
- Realize you’re not going to change all the actions about which you currently feel guilty. – We’re not perfect, we’re human. Nonetheless, in our childhood we are given a seemingly infinite number of perfect images to live up to. We add to these the perfect images we have as adults. I’ll discuss this perfection syndrome later, but for now realize that you can change anything you want, but you can’t change everything you want.
- Change first the actions that physically harm others. I’m not talking about hurting someone’s feelings; I’m talking about activities such as hitting people, stealing, child abuse, drunk driving, in which another is or is very likely to be physically harmed by your actions.
- Change next the actions that physically harm you – smoking, extreme overeating, high-risk sexual activities, drug or alcohol abuse, and so on. Again, these are not the things that might emotionally harm you (that’s quite often the comfort zone), but things that do significant physical harm. – “The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling. “ – Paula Poundstone
- Make a list of your wants, desires, and dreams, then to prioritize them in such a way that you’ll know which you have time to pursue, and which you (for now) do not. Work next on changing the actions that go against your primary goals.
- If you’ve handled all those and are still looking for more, well, you’re a far better person than I am, Gunga Din :-)!
When used to produce guilt, the statement, “I could have done better!” is false. If we knew better, we’d do better. I don’t just mean intellectually knowing better. I’m talking about knowing in the full sense of the word – the way you know to walk, speak, and breathe.
A more accurate statement when we intellectually know better (and do it anyway) is to say, “This will remind me to do better next time – I’m still learning.”
Because, of course, we are.
If you’d like to start to change your relationship with guilt and transformation this energy to live a life of power, passion and purpose request your Introductory Consultation now.
