Guilt...that deep feeling of remorse or negatively judging yourself for things you either did or did not do in the past, which you believe had a negative effect on someone or something else.
As vast as life is, filled with different circumstances, experiences, and people of unique divergent personality make-ups, it only becomes a mission impossible to deal with daily issues without accumulating guilt...guilty either about your behaviour towards that child, or there's this thing you said to someone and you saw the look of hurt on their face, or you kept something that wasn't yours, but you didn't have the courage to return it.
According to Albert Ellis, a Psychologist and the proponent of (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy) suggests that what disturbs men's mind is not the event, but their judgements on events, therefore all that matters is your perception of the events that created your feelings of guilt and the harmful effect it is or will have on your well-being.
I am not of the opinion what so ever that we should go through life without care about the effect of our behaviour on others. If we never felt remorse or guilty, how could we care about how our actions may have affected other people and possibly given birth to other mal-adaptive behaviours.
In my discovery, I found out that the feeling of guilt as much as it makes us feel bad, it keeps us stuck in the past and doesn't help our growth process. Feeling guilty about something will neither change the circumstance nor alter the cause of events, rather it will weigh you down, physically, emotionally, and spiritually; it also has the tendency of pushing people into illicit behaviours like suicide because they have accumulated an overwhelming negative feeling.
It will surprise you how the other party involved in the issue in focus gets to deal with same thing that has given you sleepless nights...in reality, they are not affected near as much as you are...they get off it as quickly as possible and
move on.
As we adopt this strategy, let us ask for wisdom in our dealings with people to reduce our involvement that will probably lead to guilt-feelings and guilt tricks.
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