(no subject)

[ysobel]

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?

Comments

[tielan]

'Feeling guilty' to me implies some kind of culpability, responsibility, or active wrongdoing on my part.

I do not feel guilty about Gaza. Or about my mother forgetting her appointment. Or my sister not getting up early enough for her gym membership. I feel bad about them, but not guilty - it's not my responsibility.

I no longer feel guilty about things I could have done but didn't and for which I can't make any reparations. In part because 'feeling guilty' serves no purpose except to mire me, and so there's no point in it. I can do better going forward, but I can't change what I did in the past.

I feel guilty about the rather confronting question I asked in the church meeting on Sunday. I feel guilty about eating the last of the leftovers in the fridge (although I did let the sister know so she wasn't counting on it). I feel guilty about one of my recurring fantasies. But, again, I'm not going to let that guilt mire me.

My sister has what I'd call "an elevated sense of guilt" in that she takes on emotional responsibility for things that are outside of her sphere of responsibility. eg. she writes reports for clients to submit to a government organisation for review of their financial aid; she agonises about getting it "just right" when she's writing the report, to the point where she puts more hours into it than she charges. And when her clients get knocked back, she feels guilty for not being able to persuade the person reading her report that the client needed the funding. It's almost nothing to do with her report. Many requests are kicked back or offered less funding than they asked for, but somehow she's responsible for not singlehandedly defeating the bureaucracy!

I hope this is helpful for you.

[vass]

That's a really good question, and also a mood.

How guilt feels physically for me: centred around my heart, feels 'crumpled', like I'm hunched around it, and 'tangled', like there is something tight and wrong that needs to be untied. Also it comes bundled pretty tightly with self-hatred for me, so if self-hatred isn't part of the bad-feeling then what I'm feeling probably isn't guilt.

A couple of different definitions of guilt that might or might not be useful, both of them focusing on disambiguating guilt and shame:

- the one where guilt is about what you've done, versus shame, which is about who you are. By this definition, guilt would drive you to do something differently or to fix what you're doing, whereas shame would drive you to... just not exist, or to find a way not to be that person.

- the one where guilt is internal, what you know about how you've behaved; whereas shame (like embarrassment) is social, about other people's judgements about your behaviour.

[elwinfortuna]

Ooh, this is an interesting question. I have the same problem with over-empathising, I think. My immediate, irrational reaction to anything going wrong for anybody I'm close to tends to be feeling guilty if there's anything at all I could have done to prevent it or mitigate it, no matter how much it would have involved being able to tell the future or literally do impossible things.

For me guilt physically feels like a lump in my throat or constriction in my chest, which is also pretty much what just feeling bad or depressed feels like too, but I guess with guilt it feels harder to swallow, whereas if it's just depression or badness it feels like a weight on my chest.

I think I feel guilt in a lot of situations where it isn't necessarily warranted. One thing is that I feel guilty when I'm not well enough to get the things done that I said I would do, particularly if it involves cancelling plans or inconveniencing others (even in the smallest ways). My more rational adult brain (plus my husband and my counsellor) tells me that I am not at fault for being afflicted with a multitude of disabilities, and while I might try my hardest to do what I can, sometimes I can't do what I wanted to do, and I'm not putting people out for trivial reasons or even on purpose.

Likewise, my brain does the same thing yours does, which is try and take responsibility for others around me. Say my husband forgets to set his alarm and is late for work, meanwhile I'm awake but busy working on something myself. Could I go wake him up? Yes, and if I noticed the time and realised he didn't get up, of course I would. But should I feel guilty if I didn't notice the time because I was absorbed in a task? Irrational brain says yes, rational brain says no. Him waking up on time is not my responsibility, it's his. Going and waking him would be helpful and a nice thing to do but it's not something I have an obligation to do, any more than you have an obligation to remind your mother about a concert she's attending.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, guilt for me has a directly-my-fault component.

I'm not sure I can describe any physical components of either feeling, but when I just 'feel bad' it has more of a physical drag to it, like I don' wanna do anything.

Where guilt has no effect on my energy level. It just makes me upset and kinda crazy until it fades again.

I am really pondering your description of it for you -- it makes sense that it's kind of "mission creep of the SHOULDS."

[azurelunatic]

Classic guilt: I did a thing which I knew at the time was bad, and bad things happened, and now I feel terrible about it and probably would not have done it if I'd thought about it. This is the worst.

*facepalm* guilt: I did a thing and bad things happened because of it, and I probably could have figured it out if I'd thought about it. I feel terrible and I'm not entirely sure how I could avoid it in the future; I'll avoid it in this specific case if it ever happens again but I know I will make stupid errors like this, there's no way to avoid it.

"oh shit" guilt: I did a thing and due to things I couldn't have known about beforehand, bad things happened. If I'd known about it I wouldn't have done it, but I didn't know about it and maybe I should have been able to guess. I feel terrible because I caused someone pain.

Inaction guilt: I saw a thing about to happen and I didn't stop it from happening and I feel terrible. (Either the thing may have been your responsibility formally or informally, or the consequences are so dire that any reasonable person might have assumed responsibility in the moment.)

Inaction-by-freezing guilt: I saw a thing about to happen and I was too stunned in the moment to actually take action. I feel terrible. (The solution to this one is sometimes roleplaying responses, adopting disaster plans, and taking courses in regular-person emergency response.)

Out-of-my-lane inaction guilt: I could have predicted that this thing would happen because I know the people involved, but it's ultimately someone else's responsibility and the consequences are not life-shattering. Sometimes this happens because of past emotional abuse due to other people blaming me for their own problems.

Severely out-of-my-lane guilt: There are starving children in Africa. Eat your dinner.

[azurelunatic]

inaction guilt: the funny short video I would use to describe this one is "What do you have there?" "A knife!" "NO!!!" because the adult voice is not the child's parent, it's just a random friend-or-family-or-neighbor who asked the kid a question while filming what should have been a cute moment, and who then assumed responsibility because the consequences were sufficiently dire.

[arctowardthesun]

I do have an overly-developed sense that things are my fault. Autism plus emotional abuse will do that to a person.

I do often have to talk myself out of feeling guilty for the larger geo-political sphere stuff, climate change, etc. I vote, the people I voted for are doing generally what I would want them to do in this situation, I recycle, I drive a fuel efficient car.