Here’s a Top-Ten List of how we try to deal with our guilt. See which sound a bit too familiar to you.
10. Deny it. Pretend we never stumbled. Concoct a plan to cover up the bad choice. One lie leads to another until we can no longer prolong the charade.
9. Minimize it. We didn’t sin; we just lost our way, got caught up in the moment, or experienced a lapse in judgment.
8. Bury it. Suppress the guilt beneath a mound of work and a calendar of appointments. The busier we stay, the less time we spend with the people we have come to dislike most: ourselves.
7. Punish it. Beat ourselves up. Cut ourselves. Hurt ourselves. Priests used to flog themselves with whips. We’ve exchanged the whips for rules. More rules. Pray more! Study more! Give more! Show up earlier; stay up later.
6. Numb it. With a bottle of Grey Goose. With an hour of Internet pornography. With a joint of marijuana, a rendezvous at the motel. Guilt disappears during happy hour, right? Funny how it reappears when we get home.
5. Avoid the mention of it. Just don’t bring it up. Don’t tell the family, the preacher, the buddies. Keep everything on the surface, and hope the Loch Ness monster of guilt lingers in the deep.
4. Redirect it. Lash out at the kids. Take it out on the spouse. Yell at the employees or the driver in the next lane.
3. Offset it. Never make another mistake. Seek perfection and expect it in others. Build the perfect family. The perfect career. Score perfect grades. Be the perfect Christian. And be absolutely intolerant of slipups or foul-ups by self or others.
2. Normalize it. Really, it’s not that bad. Everyone else is doing the same . . . or worse. And after all, it helps us make it through the day.
1. Embody it. We didn’t get drunk; we are drunks. We didn’t screw up; we are screwups. We didn’t just do bad; we are bad. Bad to the bone. We might even take pride in our badness. It’s only a matter of time until we do something bad again.