Feeling guilty?

G.U.I.L.T your way back home—there is always a deeper story in need of a rewrite by Love

CARE check*: Notice what comes up just by reading this week’s title.

Any tightening anywhere? Does your breath quickens or shallows?

Does Guilt feel like an emotion that you know intimately or are you so emmeshed with it that you don’t even notice it anymore?

REMEMBER: if your body immediately goes into fight or flight when hearing about guilt, that is not a sign that you did something wrong, that is a sign that there is a wound there in need of CARE.

So please put a gentle hand on your heart and remind yourself that you are okay and that you ARE a good person.

Guilt is a feeling, not a verdict.

I hope this week’s letter will provide a supportive bridge for you and Guilt to get reacquainted within the embrace of Love and to understand each other better. I hope also that the steps offered at the end of the letter will feel helpful and invinting!

Let me know ++

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In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

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Hi CARE friend,

What are you exploring right now? Is there an emotion you’re learning about? Is there a new idea that just won’t let you sleep at night? Are you just trying to keep your head out of water and need a moment to celebrate how good you’re doing—even if, especially if, it doesn’t feel like it?

I see you. And I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m exploring Guilt at the moment…

I’m exploring Guilt at the moment—what a fun subject, right?

I have studied shame before and I understand why so many say that guilt is helpful while shame is not… but I’m not sure I agree.

Binaries are so rarely useful when applied to the human experience.

Because it depends on the context!

And even more importantly it depends on our capacity to first identify our emotions and then to tend to it.

Differentiating Shame and Guilt

Many say that the main difference is that Shame says “I am bad” and Guilt says “I did something wrong”.

That makes sense to me. I can feel that nuance. I agree that feeling that we did something bad is better than feeling that we are something wrong. Obviously. But I’m not sure they are that clear cut… and, in any case, they fuel each other.

Sure, okay, feeling guilt only feels a bit less gut wrenching than feeling shame only, but can we pause and ponder how frequent it is to feel them together?

When stuck in shame, we feel guilty about everything. And when we feel guilty, it’s easy to spiral into shame.

Personally I believe that, as always, if we can meet each of those emotions anchored into soul energy, they serve.

Shame showered with Love turns into the fiercest Compassion. Guilt, alchemized through an open heart, shows us where we’ve stepped out of integrity—thereby giving us a great opportunity to fix it!

But there are two caveats I want to highlight.

First of all, most of us struggle with a partly conscious underlying sense of Shame… it is a frightening feature of a culture in which perfectionism, self-sacrifice and the worship of productivity have been elevated to the level of religion—and that is before touching on how shaming our educational systems can be or on any kind of childhood trauma.

Personally, when I feel guilty, and if I am not acutely aware of how much presence and self-love I need at that moment, I will most probably spiral into shame in the hour that follows… and if the hours of coaching I’ve led are any indication, I’m even less alone in the Shame department than I once thought.

Even more importantly, there are many factors that can not only widely impact your idea of what constitutes a forgivable misstep and what is an irreparable offense, and that can ALSO make you think that everything you do or say is an inconvenience

(Quick CARE check: how many times did you say “I’m sorry” reflexively in the last… hour? I thought so.)

Breathe my darling, you are loved more than you could ever know

Guilty until proven innocent…

Motherhood is a striking example of how pervasive guilt can become in a culture that doesn’t value or understand your needs and role.

The same can be said for anyone belonging to an oppressed so-called minority for whom the world was not designed by default (which is, ironically enough, most of us).

And of course trauma is another major driver of the Guilty-Until-Proven-Innocent Program embodiment.

In the case of childhood trauma especially, that is compounded by the fact that in abusive families the punishment rarely fits “the crime”, and the body remembers the impact, not the circumstances. So learning that you made ANY kind of mistake (which includes email types of course) can send your entire body into the most intense emotional flashback—a fact made even worse if you criticize yourself for your so-called irrational reaction.

Why is Guilt such a trigger?

It took me a while to understand why guilt is such a trigger for me and why I can’t do guilt “casually”: I’m either guilt free or deserving of the death penalty.

But even though I still judge myself for it harshly when I’m triggered, I can see why it makes sense… why I make sense. Why my reactions, if not always rational indeed and at times unwise, are VALID. And why I need to give myself the Love I didn’t receive in those moments and not the belittling I have learned to expect and justify.

It always comes back to the blueprint of our minds… To what I call our SWAN: the Story of Who we Are Not. Only by reconnecting with it can we rewrite it into a tale of empowerment.

Only through undoing our SWAN can we show our inner ugly duckling that she (or he, they!) was a beautiful swan all along.

Becoming Guilt: story 1

My mother once slapped me so forcefully it left a mark on my face for an hour because the bottle of coke in the fridge had not been put back the right way in the fridge. I had just walked in the kitchen to have dinner and was not at all prepared for the burgeoning storm. I have never cared for coke and had not touched that bottle, but at that moment that was apparently irrelevant. I was guilty… if only for not having checked before my mother came home that absolutely everything in the house was in perfect order!

And my inner ugly duckling registered that if anything goes wrong in the fridge… it’s my fault. To this day, my entire body tenses up if something complains that a container was not sealed the right way, whether I came within a mile of that container or not. I’ll even wonder if it’s my fault if you’re telling me about that unsealed container from another country over the phone.

Becoming Guilt: story 2

I also never got any explanation of why my mother shut the car door on my left hand one evening, when we were coming home from dinner. Everything seemed fine until I felt that indescribable pressure on my left hand.

A second later, everything within me went numb… I looked up silently and watched my mother’s face, noticing that she looked very shocked herself. And after a few moments of silence, she slowly reopened the door, quickly checked my thankfully unsevered fingers, and just said that she was in a bad mood and “she didn’t mean to”.

She also told me not to tell my father—which was a waste of time not only because I of course told my father over the phone an hour later (he was on a business trip in Cameroun that week) but ALSO because he didn’t make any comment.

I understood that night if my mother was in a bad mood I was GUILTY and deserved any punishment coming my way.

And that made mornings extra scary going forward because everyday without exception she would take one look at me when I came out of my bedroom and complained “oh of course there you are again in such a bad mood and already ruining everybody’s day”.

It took me thirty years to question the fact that I was not a morning person even though I adore mornings and have never had any bad comment from anyone else on my waking vibes.

Becoming Guilt: story 3

Finally, when I was 8 or so, we went to the grocery store together and my mother asked me to push the shopping cart, which was no small feat since the cart and I were basically the same height, it was heavy and the wheels were rusty.

At one point she stopped abruptly in front of me and I just couldn’t brake fast enough. It hit her in the ankle and she started screaming at me, telling me how stupid, cruel and dangerous I was.

I think about that moment daily. I could draw every inch of that floor after staring at it so intensely. I felt the blood leaving every vein I owned and wondered if that was what disappearing felt like. Oh how I hoped it did… I hoped I would die and finally be free. I remember the background noise, including the humming of the nearby escalator, I remember how the store smelled, I remember in front of each alley I was standing.

My bones are trembling while I write this and my throat is dry. That’s the power of an emotional flashback.

At the time, I couldn’t muster the strength to look around me and it felt like everyone was watching in horror the sadistic little girl that I was… A girl so evil she had just viciously assaulted her own mother.

It might have been a maximum of ten people but of course it felt like a raging crowd of a thousand. A very good example of how quickly Guilt invites Shame to join it on stage.

Many have told me since that people were probably staring at my mother and not me… Many have mirrored how obvious it was that I didn’t mean to do that and that no guilt was warranted! But I still feel guilty.

And, as my mother replied when I sobbed that I didn’t mean to hurt her: “you should have meant NOT to hurt me, and words do not matter, only actions do”. What can you reply to that?

How we heal

Interestingly this is the first time that I spot the double standard between story 2 and 3! I will never stop marveling at the healing effect of writing our stories…

And obviously I’m not sharing that to weigh down everybody’s mood (little 10 yo me DEEPLY needs you to believe that) but to show that when dealing with emotions, it makes little sense to label them as good or bad.

What matters is to use them as potent gateways for us to understand the shape of our inner world and learn how to morph it into a sanctuary of Peace and an inner temple of Love.

For many of us, Guilt is nothing more than a learned behavior. It’s not a message anymore, it’s our default. And the most beautiful news is that we get to change that now. Together. One rewritten SWAN at a time.

The gift in the Guilt

I like the saying that “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical”—meaning that our intense reactions show us the way to our deepest wounds.

Guilt, just like Shame and Fear, is a call for attention and LOVE.

And feeling guilty doesn’t mean that we ARE guilty.

Just like Fear doesn’t mean danger!

Just like shame doesn’t mean that we’re shameful.

Those emotions are just here to tell us that there is a leak beneath our skin and a place within us that the warmth of Love cannot reach… yet.

Now of course sometimes we feel Fear because there is danger and Guilt because we did something that is outside the embrace of our values, and to this I will answer: GOOD. TO. KNOW. Thank you, Fear! Thank you, Guilt! Now we can adapt, respond and move on.

But, more often than not, those emotions are invitations for us to redefine what danger means, and to realize that right or wrong are fluid and constantly evolving concepts that need to be reassessed every day, depending on our current circumstances—and not according to dogmas that so often wound and, in the end, quite rarely serve.

An invitation for you

And so, practically, here is my invitation dear CARE friend: learn to know intimately what guilt feels in your body, and create for yourself a CARE check plan to follow in case of doubt.

Here’s the one I tattooed on my heart:

When I feel guilty, I will follow the G.U.I.L.T path back into Love.

I will:

GROUND: first and foremost and before trying to fix, compensate, apologize to the world, fustigate myself, I will GROUND. I will do what it takes for me to come back into my body and to anchor back into my ability to love.

Understand: second I will review what happened today and what happened to me in the past. I will separate the facts from the story I am being told and from the story I am telling myself. I will give myself the time and space to UNDERSTAND. I will make sure that there is a reason to feel guilty and, if so, that this guilt belongs to me.

INQUIRE: third, I will review all that can be done in response—not reaction—to what happened.

LOVE: fourth, I will check with LOVE what I need to do. That can be done thanks to prayer, journaling, discussing it with a trusted soulmate (which can be your partner, best friend, a family member, a pet, a tree, the moon, the ocean or any soulmate of YOURS) or through

Elizabeth Gilbert

’s liberating practice of the Letters from Love. I will not blindly trust my bully brain’s guilty plea—I will recruit an inner and outer jury to help me see clearly what is happening within and around me.

TRUST: fifth, if there is guilt to be felt, I will TRUST that nothing has gone wrong here because in the grand scheme of things what needed to happen needed to happen. I will trust in my ability to repair, apologize, show up and figure things out if I did do something that I wish I could undo. I will trust other people to find it in their hearts to forgive me if I did do something that hurt them, and I will apologize and do what I can to make amends. I will trust the Universe to show me the way to make this “right” and to rebuild an even better world thanks to the crack that I might have caused. And I will also trust that if it was not mine to fix, it will get better on its own—because Life is creativity and creation and we are not alone, we are loved and we are held. Life knows best.

Guilt’s usefulness

And one last thing I will add is that Guilt, even when “warranted”, is only useful for as long as it is.

What I mean by that is that feeling guilty can help us grow our value, strengthen our spine and open our heart! BUT there comes a time where we can apologize before even feeling guilty. (Just like we can learn to face some everyday hazards, without needing fear anymore, to both remember to keep ourselves safe and tend to the fire that needs to be watered.)

Let me know what came for you reading this and what are your own healing ways to cuddle guilt back into wholeness.

I do hope this felt helpful, and that it will help you remember that:

There is ALWAYS a deeper story, a deeper need, and a more loving answer to uncover when we feel triggered, unsure, unloved, unlovable… GUILTY or unmoored.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—all three born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo