This week I was confronted with a new question: What’s the difference between guilt and feeling sorry for yourself? I know guilt is more about how we hurt others while feeling sorry for ourselves is about focusing on ourselves, but where’s the line between them? Guilt is something I’ve understood for a long time, but this question threw me a curve. My four year old daughter can be very attitude driven when she’s corrected (she’s practicing for being a teenager), but at a certain point she’ll switch from rude to burying her head in a blanket and sobbing. What’s confusing is I’m not sure if she feels guilt and the attitude is a self protection thing until she can’t cover her guilt anymore or if the sobbing is her feeling sorry for herself because she got in trouble and/or she’s being forced to stop what she wants to do. I’ve also run into the same issue with some adults where I was left wondering: Do you care you upset the other person or is this just about how this makes you feel, which is more self serving?
Like all of our emotions, guilt is a gift from God (a statement that can be really fun to say to someone plagued by it). If we didn’t have guilt, we’d be emotionally handicapped. We need it. Without it bad things can happen. Just like anger and sadness. They may not “feel” good, but we need to be experiencing all of three from time to time or there’s something broken in us. Emotions give us a more well-rounded life experience. They’re not the enemy. Guilt, specifically, is a tool for making us better people… if we treat it properly. A lot of good people use guilt as a weapon to beat themselves up, which makes it one of the more hated emotions we experience. Guilt, however, is not meant to be a weapon to hurt ourselves or others (sorry guilt trippers). In its purest form, guilt is meant to teach a lesson and motivate us to do something like apologize or be different in the future.
The other week I was with the in-laws at the family cottage and I made a comment that was meant to be teasing, but later during my prayer/reflection time I realized it could’ve come across as a jab. This is the benefit of quiet time at night – it can point things out to us that happened in the day. I didn’t feel “bad” for it. I didn’t “feel” anything about it, but I didn’t want to leave anyone hurt, so I knew I needed to apologize. In some cases, this is exactly how guilt’s supposed to work; it’s more a thought than a feeling. Since the person I needed to talk to was sleeping, this was not the right time to apologize: (me) “Hey, wake up… I need to say I’m sorry.” (groggy person) “For waking me up?” (me) “No, for something not nearly as annoying.” The next day I apologized to my sister-in-law and she had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t even hear the comment – that’s awkward. Either way, this was a great example of healthy guilt: There was a lesson (i.e. I said something that may have been interpreted as not very nice) and I did something about it (i.e. I apologized and tried to be smarter with my teasing), and I never gave it much thought before or after. That’s it. It was a pretty ideal situation. Years ago I would’ve felt so terrible I would’ve had trouble sleeping, which would only make it worst. Instead, I recognized my flaw, made a plan, distracted myself until I could do the plan, did the plan, and then let it go.
One of the important things I’ve learned about guilt is it’s more of a secondary emotion, which is like green, purple, or orange being the secondary colours. They come out of the primaries. The primary emotions are mad, sad, glad, fear, and disgust, and since guilt is a secondary that means at least one of the primary emotions will be felt when we feel guilt. When I realized my comment needed an apology, I was annoyed with the situation, which falls under the mad category. I didn’t want to have to apologize for saying something dumb, but I knew I needed to. Other times people feel guilt and blow it up with fear with a question like “What if…?” which is a very dangerous way to start thinking about something. Some people feel sad because of their guilt or in extreme cases you can feel disgusted with yourself.
What’s interesting is being mad in your guilt, but being mad at the wrong thing. Last winter I was tying up my shoe with one knee on the ground. I suddenly realized I needed something from the closet, and as I reached in to get it my wife not seeing me closed the door on my arm. It was pretty low on the pain scale (I’m that tough), but what threw me was being scolded: (wife) “Why’d you put your arm there!” As I always teach in communication, especially confusing situations like this, I asked a question with two options: “Is that really what you want to say to me or do you mean ‘I’m sorry’?” I mentioned this story to one woman and she thought I was being very passive aggressive and condescending. It would’ve been if I just asked the first part: “Is that really what you want to say?” but the second option makes it a healthy question. I wanted to give my wife the benefit of the doubt that she expressed herself wrong rather than assuming she was being mean after hurting me. The only two real options in this situation were she believed I was at fault for putting my arm there or she was reacting out of fear and guilt. When I asked my two option question, my wife simply looked at me for a moment, sighed, and said, “I’m sorry.” She appreciated that I gave her a second chance rather than attacking her for attacking me (how most fights start). What also would’ve made me passive aggressive is if after my wife said sorry I replied, “Yeah, you better be.” Instead, I accepted what she said with a nod and carried on getting what I needed. My wife didn’t intend to close the door on me. In fact, she was trying to be helpful. It just didn’t work out timing wise because she didn’t expect me to reach for something. My question was very direct, so it was borderline aggressive since I did it in the moment instead of waiting until later when my wife was calmer, but my wife is strong and can handle it. What would’ve been worse would be to say nothing and hold onto it to use later in a fight: “Let’s just stuff this down with the other things I’m not dealing with, so I can justify being mean to you later.” As I’ve come to learn, it’s better to be direct with a good question (never with a statement) than allow hurt to fester.
The problem with my earlier question of the difference between guilt and feeling sorry for yourself is how can I as an outsider know if someone feels guilt or just feels sorry for themselves? It can look very similar. Both can have sadness and even tears. Both can have the “guilty” party angry at something including themselves. The simple answer is guilt should have remorse, but even that can be difficult to understand. When I apologized for my comment to my sister-in-law, I had this sense I did something wrong and needed to do something to make it better, but I didn’t feel remorse. One of the main problems people have with guilt is they think it should involve feeling bad in some way. In fact, if there are too many bad feelings or fear of repercussion, you’re going beyond the guilt to being mean to yourself. Guilt doesn’t have to hurt. It’s simply recognizing there are a lesson and a motivation to do something about it.
Trying to judge whether someone else is feeling guilt or sorry for themselves can be a dangerous path to go down since we can start using it against them: “It doesn’t feel like you have any remorse, so I don’t believe your apology.” This would make us passive aggressive (aka a jerk). If someone makes the effort to apologize, even if it’s not a great apology, we should be considering their efforts. If the apology is “I’m sorry, but you suck!” sure, that’s not an apology. That’s an insult with a sorry thrown in as a distraction or for the speaker to feel better about themselves: “What? I apologized.” If someone gives us a weak apology we can help them form a better one: “When you said (quote their weak apology), did you mean you’re sorry I was hurt or was that more of a brush off?” or “To double check, did you say (thing) to show you care about me or was it something else?” Ultimately, we should never reject someone’s effort to apologize, but we are allowed to help them say what they’re actually trying to say if they start out on the wrong path like I did with my wife closing the door on me moment. After all, a good apology is often just a way to say you care and not an admittance of doing anything wrong.
As far as feeling guilt versus feeling sorry for yourself, that’s a question we can ask ourselves to keep us in check, but it should be very carefully used when looking at others because how can I really know what they’re thinking and feeling?
This week may you consider how it’s good to feel sorry, but not to feel sorry for yourself when there are others to think about.
Rev. Chad David, ChadDavid.ca, learning to love dumb people (like me)