Psychologists as well as spiritual guides emphasise: one of the foremost ‘fuels’ of unhappiness and mental ill-health is guilt.
Most of us, as children, and young adults, have experienced guilt, and continue to do so. Sometimes it is ‘good guilt’ – for some wrong we have done, or for something that we ought to have done. It may be guilt about not exercising enough, or not spending enough time with our families, or not concentrating on work, etc. This kind of guilt is motivating, and can be ‘fixed’ by whatever is clearly needed to be done: apologizing, making amends, changing some behaviour, fixing a schedule and adhering to it, etc. In such situations, our guilt works constructively.
The more destructive and dangerous, ‘bad guilt’ is the kind we carry around over issues that we wrongly identify as our ‘fault’. Often it is about circumstances over which we have no control, yet we feel guilty. The accumulation of this kind of guilt begins from childhood, even from infancy. It then casts its long shadows on our later lives, not allowing us to self-actualize, to stand up for ourselves, to identify what we want from life, or to simply take pleasure in life.
Parents, anxious to teach their children to learn responsibility, often confuse ‘good’ with ‘bad’ guilt. They end up using guilt or emotional blackmail, to get their children to do things eat, study, earn, make career and marriage choices…
Let’s look at an everyday example. Your child repeatedly forgets to pack her pencil box in her bag. Fed-up of this, you stop reminding her and let her face the consequences. She side-steps the problem by simply borrowing a pencil from someone in school. She does this once too often, and her friend/teacher snaps at her and tells her to get her own pencil. She now feels guilty about her carelessness and about not listening to your reminders, and now makes it a point to take her pencil box. This is good guilt at work.
However, on the other hand, if you were to repeatedly rush after her to school and hand the pencil box to her, and then berate her at home about how you had to waste time and energy for something that she should have done herself, she feels guilty, but her behaviour simply doesn’t change. She keeps forgetting the pencil box, you find ways to get it to her or to nag her in the morning about it, even telling her how frustrating and irritating you find this. She grows up with a vague sense of unease about how she annoys her mother, and has caused her mother all kinds of hardships. The actual pencil box incidents are forgotten, and only a harmful, free-floating guilt takes its place in later years.
Some sources of guilt that parents can watch out for:
‘Bad guilt’ accumulates when lines of communication between parent and child are weak. It is a well-documented fact that many children of divorced parents carry around a burden of guilt, as if somehow it was their fault. Only when the parent can recognize this train of thought, can he or she intervene and set the record straight, freeing the child of his guilt.
Another source of guilt is when children don’t know how to handle strong feelings – anger, sexual attraction, etc. Parents need to communicate to them that it is ok to feel anger, but not ok to act on it (for instance, hitting or shouting at friends). Or that it is ok to feel attracted to a boy, but not ok to act out these feelings.
Sometimes parents live through their children, neglecting their own lives, and keep emphasizing how they have sacrificed their own careers/social life/needs…etc for their kids. This is another tonne of guilt that the child then has to carry, without being able to do anything about it. This kind of guilt leads children to be, at an unconscious level, almost apologetic about living, something that will completely prevent them from realizing their best potential.