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Of all the emotions that people don’t like to feel, at the top you’ll find guilt. While guilt can be a very necessary and healthy emotion that helps us to grow, guilt can be an emotion that easily grows until it turns into the lovely little monster called a ‘Guilt complex‘.

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Usually when we feel guilty about something, there’s a good reason. Sometimes we’ve done something wrong, made a mistake, taken part in something we’re not proud of, shared something we weren’t supposed to. There are various other reasons that can cause this uncomfortable emotion to appear.

Can you have too much guilt?

If we live in a space of incredible amounts of guilt, it can create a myriad of problems that are hard to address in a simple manner.

Living with the low state of guilt can cause health problems and distract us from living our daily lives in a healthy manner. Those of us that are stuck with the feelings of guilt will have a hard time functioning. Especially if it has taken over our perception of everyday life. The guilt will seep its way into us and color our experience so that we’re not able to let go, forgive, or find the strength to cultivate our own well being.

Guilt is one of those emotions that easily grows by feeding on itself. It turns into a pair of goggles we wear every single day. Each experience that comes our way after we put on these goggles will be uncomfortable to manage. That’s the powerful filter of guilt.

Identify the guilty culprit

Trying to function normally while you’re operating within a Guilt complex takes away the joy from life and excitement at new opportunities. It dis-empowers you and the ability to find your own unique personal power. Excessive amounts of guilt have a very low vibrational frequency that replicates from the moment you first interact with a person in your day. You will instantly ask yourself a whole heap of questions about how you’re interacting and if you’ve done something wrong.

Worse yet, the feelings of anxiety, fear, worry, and distrust accompany strong feelings of guilt. If we’re not able to release the guilt or find a healthy way to deal with it, we can eventually find ourselves over exaggerating circumstances in life, or worse – developing a victim mentality in order to deny the pain of our own guilt from doing something wrong.

Recognizing that guilt is a normal emotion is very important. To work through life’s challenges guilt has been presented to us to teach us a lesson of inner growth.

While it is an uncomfortable way of addressing ourselves, guilt will help us in the long run if we learn to temper it’s hold on us. Often we hear people talking about getting rid of guilt, but in order for the guilt to be a healthy emotion that we interact with we have to first understand why it became excessive in the first place. If guilt has turned into a constant strain on your daily life it must be addressed. 

Why do you feel this way?

Firstly, it’s normal to do something wrong. We’re not perfect beings.  We will make mistakes in life (more than once) and this guilt will teach us how to learn from these mistakes if we use it in a healthy manner on our own healing path. Simply realizing that our responsibility lies within ourselves is one of the most important steps to overcoming unnecessary guilt levels.

For those of us that are operating within a capacity of excessive guilt, we suffer because we often think that others are being hurt by us or we take on their suffering into our own psyche.

Taking on someone else’s suffering as your own or thinking that you’re to blame keeps you in a state of fear, anxiety, and blame. It turns into a game of trying to figure out whether or not you’re to blame for someone else’s state of being. Truly, we are only responsible for our own well-being.

If guilt has become a regular part of your life, it’s time to take a step back and fight it with one of the most powerful tools you have: Understanding. 

Chase guilt away with joy

You are a constant evolving being with many lessons for growth in this life. In many ways you have to experience the feelings of guilt to learn about how to live healthily and find your own personal joy.  With the power of understanding we can learn a lot. Namely that we all have character flaws, make mistakes, hurt other people, and have been hurt by others. Everyone makes mistakes, admitting that is the first key to addressing a crippling sense of guilt.

There are many pieces to the puzzles that are “us”. This just happens to be one of the more complicated ones. We have to start realizing that everyone is responsible for their own happiness.

No one on this planet is completely blameless or hasn’t felt the sense of shame that comes along with guilt. But before you find yourself irrationally blaming yourself, learn to accept these thoughts and emotions as a natural part of life. These emotions are a necessary component to our sense of self. It promotes healing, growing, and thriving. Moving through them and learning how to rationally identify when you’re going too far is paramount.

Take a step back, look at the situation, and ask yourself:

But…are you really to blame for this?

Take the time today to recognize just how incredibly destructive and counter productive guilt can be if left unchecked. Learn to understand your flaws and strengths so that guilt becomes a healthy part of your exploration in this life instead of a chain that holds you down to a negative experience you’d rather avoid. There’s so much more to life!