Discharging Guilt

Discharging Guilt

Floods, fire, famine, earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor strikes; natural disasters causing all sorts of bad stuff. There is one more that should be on the list, and that’s guilt.

I’m not talking about the guilt we feel about not calling our moms, or sneaking out of work early, or hanging onto the extra change the clerk gives us, the stuff we can easily correct.

I’m not even talking about fooling around with your neighbors wife, or stealing, or even murder. Those are actions with consequences, ways we can atone, pay that debt to society for a lapse, however serious, in our good judgment.

I’m talking about that deep rooted guilt we feel for being alive.

The professionals call it Existential Guilt, I tend to think of it as  “the Universal I’m sorry,” and boy oh boy does it make trouble. I started getting called on saying “I’m sorry” all the time when I was twelve.

When we feel guilty for being born, for being alive, for breathing, or taking up room, our thoughts are going to cause us trouble, our feelings are going to make us suffer, and our behavior will often just make things worse.

It can go several ways. We might try really hard to prove that we aren’t guilty, striving to do good works, going into helping professions, tons of volunteer work, and still feel like it’s not enough, we can’t make good, and we are still guilty.

So, then what happens might be that we get crabby, or perfectionistic, go to negative emotional judgments, thinking on some level that if I’m guilty, so are you, and you should try harder, and you are bad and sinful, and we spew it around like puke off a tilt-a-whirl.

Was that too gross? It is pretty gross.

Another possibility is that we withdraw. We may try to numb the guilt with drugs or alcohol or pain or food or exercise or sex or working too much. We pretty much disconnect from our loved ones, hiding away how bad we are and how bad we feel about being so bad.

Or we might decide that, since we are sinners, we may as well sin. I don’t have to give you examples, you just have to turn on your TV to see this one playing out; dramas, sitcoms, the news. Oh, yeah, the news. How much of the awful stuff you see on the news happens because someone feels guilty for taking up air.

How do I know I am pure? Why am I clean? How do I feel when I feel like a good person?

The mis-learning of existential guilt is one of the worst ones we get. We may pick up intra-utero that our mom doesn’t want to be pregnant with us. Yes, we are conscious and learning, even in the womb. We may feel that we have caused her pain or ruined her life, or that we are somehow evil in our mere existence, and down we go. And the thought burrows deep into our unconscious mind until it seems like it is simply part of who we are; personality DNA.

Yeah, that’s hooey. At our core, we are perfection, spotless, clear and divine. Existential guilt is just another bad habit, even if it is one of our earliest bad habits, and we can change it with Creative Questions, and practice. I just have to choose.

How have I change from feeling guilty to feeling my innocence?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10192013