How To Stop Feeling Guilty About Things That Aren’t Your Fault

Challenge your emotion, don't just accept it. Be brave enough to look a little deeper.

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To be guilty and to feel guilty are two entirely separable states of being.

To be guilty implies an action of ill intent; to feel guilty is a reaction to an event or situation. Past or present.

Understanding the semantics behind this term is the first step to removing unnecessary blame from your life. Feeling guilt in your life where it doesn’t apply is self-sabotaging and destructive to your own mental health.

Guilt is such a powerful feeling, an emotion that is coercive in its reasoning. A multi faceted emotion that can assume a multitude of identities to inject the negativity only self serving emotions carry.

Feeling guilty is more than a reaction to a situation, it’s a masked emotion based on the expectations we place on ourselves—expectations we carry based on who we are or where we once were.

If you’ve felt starved of love, you may feel guilty of not giving enough. If you’ve felt abandoned by people in your life, you may feel guilty for not being there for everyone all the time. If you’ve suffered poor finances, you may feel guilty for spending. The list goes on.

What happened before impacts what you feel you deserve now.

Buried underneath the unnecessary blame we place on ourselves are the wounds we need to heal. Healing requires compassion and patience, neither of which are provided by negative emotion.

To remove the guilt, you have to understand the source. Don’t suffer what you don’t understand.

Challenge your emotion, don’t just accept it. Be brave enough to look a little deeper. We all live with scars, but its the wounds which you don’t allow to heal that will leave their mark on your life.

Guilt is an emotion triggered from our perception of how we act. How we judge ourselves is dependent on the value we place on ourselves. Change your perception and you will directly change how you feel. Raise your self-worth and raise your life to the next level.

Learn to understand your emotions, as opposed to simply suffering them. Thought Catalog Logo Mark