(no subject)

random thing from therapy: I realized it's possible that what I label as "feeling guilty" might largely be just feeling *bad* from over-empathizing. Like, guilt should involve some element of fault -- me doing X led to Y, which is bad, therefore I feel guilty -- but my brain extrapolates that to someone else doing X leads to Y, which is bad, therefore I feel gui???+++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR REDO FROM START +++

So I'm trying to disentangle, and wow is it hard. Logically I know that e.g. if a friend tells me their partner just broke up with them, since I am not responsible I can label my feeling-bad-ness as "empathy with suck", but it's harder when I maybe could have done something, e.g. my mom forgets to go to a concert, which is not directly my fault but I could have reminded her the day of.

How do y'all describe "feeling guilty"? How does it feel physically, and how do you separate guilt from just ... feeling bad?