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How often do you struggle with feelings of guilt in your life?
Have you ever taken a day off solely to rest, relax, and be lazy and then felt a nagging sense of guilt about it?
Have you thought about going part time at work so you could spend some more time exploring your passions? But then immediately dismissed the idea as entirely too self-indulgent?
Or maybe you “feel bad” saying NO. You think you should make yourself available to anyone and everyone who asks for your time and attention. The result is you wear yourself out endlessly people-pleasing.
You are not alone. This is such a common struggle.
Many of us feel guilty for wanting more for ourselves.
Whether that is wanting more time and space for ourselves, or wanting more enjoyment and fulfillment in our career. Usually the very idea of wanting more for ourselves is enough to fill us with guilt and shame.
We worry that taking time out for self care is too self-indulgent. That quitting a lucrative, soul-sucking career and taking a pay cut to pursue your dream job is absurdly selfish.
We have been trained that our lives are not our own. That the purpose of our lives is to make everyone else around us happy, no matter the personal cost.
We feel guilty for prioritizing ourselves and our happiness. We put such a premium on being selfless that we can lose track of ourselves entirely.
How this shows up for me
I always know that I am taking myself on a guilt trip when the phrase “I feel bad” comes up.
“I feel bad that I don’t want to go to his birthday.”
“I feel bad for telling her I don’t want to hang out.”
“I feel bad for raising my prices.“
Another way I recognize my guilt is pattern recognition of the triggering situations. Some of the biggest guilt triggers for me involve saying no and worrying about being selfish.
I feel like I am not entitled to a gracious no. I have this mistaken idea that anytime someone asks me to do something, if I don’t have a really good excuse, reason or prior commitment, I have to say yes. I always feel the need to justify my NO’s with a strong because. I can’t just say NO thank you.
I also tend to worry that it is selfish for me to care about concepts like my own personal happiness and fulfillment.
I mean why does it matter if I love my job when so many people would kill just to have a job? Who am I to want an awesome life when there is so much suffering and unfairness in the world?
It’s like I am making myself feel guilty for having good things in my life and prioritizing myself and my needs.
What about you? What words do you use when you are feeling guilty? How does guilt feel in your body? What situations or people trigger feelings of guilt for you?
By recognizing how guilt shows up for you, you can begin to unravel it’s power over you.
What is guilt?
Guilt is an emotion, and a fairly uncomfortable one. As someone who has been avoidant of painful emotions in the past, I want to give you a new way to conceptualize these ‘negative’ emotions.
In his book “Awaken the Giant Within”, Tony Robbins offers a novel way of looking at emotions. Basically he encourages us to make peace with our emotions and to see them as an ally instead of an enemy.
He believes that “negative emotions” aren’t actually negative at all, but are “calls to action, messengers trying to guide you to a higher quality of life.”
He says that all emotions are “action signals trying to support you in taking action to change the way you think, your perceptions, or change your procedures for communicating or behaving.”
Instead of fearing or running from the more painful emotions, if we can learn to embrace them and get curious about them, we can use each emotion to learn and grow.
So if each emotion is a messenger trying to provide you guidance, than what is the message of guilt?
Robbins says that usually the message of guilt is that “you have violated a standard and you must do something immediately to ensure you aren’t going to violate that standard again.”
What are standards?
I think of a standard as an expectation of behavior. It can be either what you expect of your own behavior, or what you expect of someone else’s behavior. But usually guilt comes up when we violate a standard for our own behavior.
This makes sense. If you stole a car, and also held the standard that it is wrong to steal, then you would feel guilty afterwards. You violated your own standards of behavior by taking what doesn’t belong to you.
The purpose of guilt then is to hold you accountable to what you consider acceptable behavior. It can act as a moral compass for you to keep you on track.
This is great, right?
But the problem is, many of us have unconsciously adopted standards from outside sources such as our parents, other authority figures while growing up, advertising messages, peer groups, society as a whole, etc.
We may not actually agree with these standards. They may be old, outdated, and may not serve the person we are trying to become.
This means it is important to evaluate our standards. By bringing them to the light we can consciously decide if we want to continue to live in accordance with these standards or if it’s time to rewrite the script for ourselves.
3 Questions to Evaluate Our Standards
Here are three steps we can take the next time we are feeling guilty to evaluate and rewrite our standards.
#1 Identify the standard
To start with we must first identify the standard. So whenever you are feeling guilty about something it is important to first ask yourself, “What standard am I violating that is causing these feelings of guilt?”
For example, let’s say you are feeling guilty for taking a whole day off to rest and relax. Ask yourself “what standard am I violating here?” or “what behavior do I expect of myself in this situation?”
Maybe the standard of behavior is something like…
I must constantly be productive and working hard to prove my worth.
Or that resting and relaxing is lazy and I expect myself to be a hard worker.
#2 Evaluate the standard
Once you’ve brought the standard to the light, it’s time to evaluate if the standard is serving you. Ask yourself “Is this a standard I want to continue to uphold for my life?” and “What are the negative consequences of continuing to live according to this standard?”
Using the example above you can ask, do I want to continue believing that I must constantly be productive to prove my worth? Doesn’t that seem like a rather exhausting way to live?
#3 Set a new standard
Once you have decided that you no longer wish to uphold that old standard of behavior, it is time to fill the vacuum by creating a new standard for yourself.
Ask yourself “What is the new standard I would like to set for myself that will serve me and is in alignment with my highest good?”
Again, using the example above, your new standard could look something like:
I expect myself to take time off to rest and recharge. Productivity is not the highest goal for my life. I do not need to hustle for my worth.
Feels so much better right? It’s important that this new standard is internally set and aligned with what you truly believe is important. It’s about how YOU expect yourself to show up in the world, and not about what anyone else expects of you.
Adjusting to your new standard
Once you have defined your new standard, it’s time to start applying it to your life.
But here is the thing, guilt is still going to creep in, because you have been living based on those old standards for so long.
This is not an activity you do once and then never feel guilty again. Your feelings of guilt won’t be completely transformed overnight. It’s a process of unlearning the old standards and redefining yourself by your new standards.
It’s completely normal and ok that you continue to feel guilty, but now you have a tool to manage it.
So next time you start feeling guilty about taking time off you can apply this process.
Check your actions to your new standards and make sure your behavior is on par with what you expect of yourself. Remind yourself that you no longer live by those old standards anymore. Reassure yourself that you are in fact a good person because you are fully living up to your own standards for yourself. Then simply let the guilt go and move forward with your life.
The more you keep practicing this approach over time, the more your guilt will diminish. You can stop demonizing yourself for prioritizing your own needs and happiness and allow yourself to enjoy the beautiful things in life. Because you freaking deserve it!
Do you struggle with feeling guilty? What types of situations or people trigger guilt for you? Do you think it’s because you are living by old standards and if so, how can you redefine what you expect of yourself?
I’d love to connect with you about this! Comment below and share your experiences with guilt.
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