Guilt Trip Hot Tips
Guilt trips get us nowhere, and fast.
I’m serving up some leftovers today, friends. Partly because I’m running out of steam this week and partly because I’m hoping that traveling back to the summer of 2024 might conjure a thaw. The cockles of my heart seem to be stiff as starch under the deep freeze of double-whammy dread: a monster snowstorm reportedly barreling straight at me this very moment, plus the relentless heartache and horror of real-time ICE capades.
But if I’m really being honest, there’s another reason. I, like many — maybe like some of you — continue to struggle with feelings of guilt and overwhelm. I regularly doubt I’m doing nearly enough to help stem the escalation of our collective desperation. And I feel what I can only describe as guilt about my white privilege as I see ICE brutally snatching up people based on their less white skin. But while guilt can occasionally be a productive emotion, more often than not, it’s really…not. More often, it’s quicksand that keeps us stuck where we stand, frozen in place.
“I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. “ — Audre Lorde
Well friends, here we are, sweating our way through the dog days of summer. I dare say that seems a bit of an understatement. It’s feeling much more like the fire-breathing dragon days of climate crisis in many parts of North America. Can you even believe that the dog days of summer are not so named because they leave panting pooches powerless to do anything but laze about, snoozing and drooling? Nope. They are so named because this time of year happens to be when Sirius (aka “the Dog Star”) rises at dawn. And the ancients believed that Sirius + sun = HOT.
All these years, and I had absolutely no idea! My late revelation is made all the more stunning by the fact that climate deniers haven’t yet plucked this low hanging fruit. Sirius seems the obvious scapegoat, the perfect justification for the furnace that is this week, don’t you think? Climate crisis, climate schmisis…it’s just Sirius!
I will confess here that *I* have been lazing around, panting and drooling from this heat. And as I’ve lazed, far-flung trains of thought chuffed down the tracks straight at me. I haven’t flinched, dodged, nor otherwise evaded them. Oh no, I have not. I have instead cavalierly climbed aboard, even when the marquis has stated plainly that we’d be passing through dodgy territory and picking up thoughts covered in the soot of guilt and self-blame.
It all began with thoughts of my grandfather, who would have celebrated his 130th birthday on July 9th. I know, friends. It’s hard to believe that a baby-faced chap such as myself had grandparents born in the 19th century. Yet it’s true. And this particular grandfather served as an army medic in WWI . He survived unspeakable horrors, trauma and eventually the entire war that over 16 million did not. I imagine he must have been riddled with incredible survivor guilt.
After the war, he immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, leaving all his near and dear ones behind in Europe (except his sweetheart, who followed him here to become my grandmother). No doubt that heaped on more survivor guilt, as well as some separation guilt.
And before any of that ever happened, religion supplied a steady stream of guilt for both my grandparents. I know this because I was raised in the same religion, which is grounded in that old bugaboo known as original sin. You know, the idea that, thanks to Adam and Eve’s indiscretions, we’re bad to the bone from the get-go and deserve eternal damnation just for getting ourselves born. In fact, the way I learned it, we’re so irretrievably sinful that God had no other choice but to sacrifice his only kid to save our sorry souls. Talk about survivor’s guilt.
Long story short, I suddenly found myself really, really taking in the probability that guilt galore informed my grandparents’ daily existence. Their daily existence never struck me as particularly footloose nor fancy-free, come to think of it. Much more like doom and gloom. Workaholism, isolation and suspicion of outsiders. Needless to say, this was the worldview inherited by my dad, then by me. And with that realization, the connections clicked between deeply-seated generational guilt and some of my own deeply entrenched limiting beliefs.
Then came the bigger revelation: guilt, along with its bosom buddies remorse and shame, might just be the the biggest silent drivers of so much of what most people choose to do or not do.
A little investigation seemed to prove my hypothesis. It also revealed that guilt seems to come in at least as many flavors as Oreos. And the roots of guilt are incredibly complex and deep. That said, I shan’t bore you with a long treatise on the subject (you’re welcome). There’s plenty of research out there, written by people far more qualified than I, should you be inspired to learn more. In the meantime, I offer you a kiddie cone bite. Here goes:
First off, not all guilt is problematic (that holds true for all our emotions, btw). Guilt can sometimes keep us true to our core values. But it shifts from adaptive to malignant when entangled with shame. Hold on though. Aren’t guilt and shame like peanut butter and jelly? Bert and Ernie? Laverne and Shirley? They often are. To keep them straight, let’s turn to shame expert June Tangney’s basic distinction between the two:
Shame makes us feel bad about ourselves, and guilt makes us feel bad about a specific behavior.
Out in the ethers of the guiltiverse, there seem to be different life forms. Broadly speaking, there’s a more global guilt, like what we might feel about contributing to climate crisis or systemic oppression, and interpersonal guilt, which comes from a belief that we’ve directly harmed another individual. This kind of guilt, when shame-free, activates natural empathy for *most* of us, but clearly not all of us.
Interpersonal guilt indeed seems to be where things tend to get most shame-y. Particularly when it comes from a place of excessive, unrealistic, or irrational worry about others. Clinical and evolutionary psychologist Lynn O’Connor, who’s done extensive research on survivor’s guilt, altruism and empathy, notes three sticky kinds of interpersonal guilt that mushroom out of maladaptive beliefs:
Survivor guilt. While this is often associated with literal, physical survival of a tragedy (like my grandfather surviving WWI), it’s often much more subtle and insidious than we realize. Underlying survivor guilt is a belief that by pursuing goals and attaining success or happiness, we’re abandoning them or causing them to suffer shame or humiliation. This is an invisible but high hurdle to clear in attempting any sort of personal growth.
Separation guilt. This comes from a belief that if we separate from or even differ from our loved ones, our religion, or any sort of social group, we causes them harm. This kind of guilt often leads us to mask our authentic self and keep us stuck in kinship groups or systems that don’t align with our truest sense of ourselves.
Omnipotent responsibility guilt. This one’s kind of the classic caretaker guilt. We have an exaggerated sense of responsibility and concern for the well-being of others, so we sacrifice our own well-being in service of theirs (of course some of us have small children or other dependents and really are quite literally responsible for their well-being). Fear of letting others down, or even disappointing them, becomes our kryptonite.
Again, each of these forms of guilt springs from quite a tangle. Some of the origin points have been highly correlated by Dr. O'Connor and colleagues to certain religious beliefs, high levels of empathy and altruism, and cultural orientations.
But regardless of exact origin, problematic forms of interpersonal guilt tend to lead us to the same grim places: shame, depression, anxiety, addiction, low self-esteem, somatic complaints, and oodles of other conditions that our western medical model would call pathological. Most importantly, they often hold us back from living our best lives.
So that’s a quick aerial view of the tip of the iceberg, friends. There’s always so much more beneath the water line. But no need to go Titanic here. Let’s turn to solutions for a moment instead.
A first step might be to run the mucky waters of our thought stream through the strainer of consciousness. Guilt-induced limiting beliefs tend to lurk in the the realm of the subconscious (below that proverbial waterline), so it’s no small feat to dredge them up, then run them through the strainer. In fact, it generally requires slowing down and paying attention in a culture that prioritizes speed and efficiency. It’s in the slow and silent spaces that we’re able to see and hear what we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, about others, and about circumstances. And it’s only in the quiet that we can truly notice where guilt and/or shame come up related to those messages.
I’ll tell you, friends. When I’ve taken a few beats to interview myself about a particular area of life, say money, work, family, or friendship, then recorded my answers in some way, the results have been fairly revolutionary. There’s nothing like seeing or hearing your own beliefs fed back to you to make them really sink in. That space between the ears can be one heck of a hall of mirrors where the wackiest things seem true.
For context, I’ll share just one of my logical fallacies. It’s an amalgam of religious dogma, parental modeling and internalized capitalism. The basic gist is that there’s some sort of cosmic accounting ledger that demands that gains be offset by losses, because to receive without giving is BAD. The thoughts go something like this:
If I get that promotion at work, something else might be taken away. So maybe I don’t want to go for that promotion after all, because I don’t want to see what the other shoe looks like when it drops, as drop it inevitably will.
The good news is that once we’ve pinned down a guilt-spawned limiting belief, we have the opportunity to deconstruct it. But first, we need to acknowledge and accept that it’s probably been there for donkey’s years. We also need to show ourselves a good enough level of empathy for how hard it’s been to live under that kind of internal duress. We might even need to feel some grief about it. And all that can take a while, as processes often do.
In the shorter run, there are some practical things we can pull out to soften the edges of our guilt. The Buddhist practice of compassionate breathing in suffering and breathing out relief and healing (aka Tonglen), can help. So can reframing our success. Instead of seeing our success as an abandonment of others, we might focus on the ways in which it resources us to either give back or pay forward with care. We might even play with the idea that claiming our authenticity isn’t a disloyalty, but a way of honoring those who didn’t have the option of living authentically. Breaking generational cycles is honorable work.
Okay, friends. Thus concludes this exploration of the sticky grief wicket. Speaking of helping, I hope this little exploration been helpful in some way for you. If not, please do NOT feel guilty about it (kidding/not kidding). Stay cool in temperature, warm in heart.
Deeply insightful breakdown of how guilt operat es as quicksand rather than catalyst. The distinction between survivor guilt and separation guilt is particularly sharp, especially how both stem from the same impossible belief that our wellbeing somehow causes harm elsewhere. I've seen this pattern in climate activists who burn out not from the work itself but from that cosmic ledger fallacy where every good thingdemands payment. The Tonglen reframe helps.
Keith- Thank you for this. I feel how much care you bring to naming guilt, not dismissing it, but really trying to understand how it operates in a life, across generations, across bodies and histories. That matters so much just now. What resonates most for me is the way guilt and shame function less as emotions and more as lenses, modifiers of consciousness that pull us out of the present moment. Even when they arise from empathy or moral seriousness, they so often keep us oriented toward imagined ledgers, inherited obligations, or future catastrophes, rather than the actual life that is asking to be lived now. I’ve come to see guilt and shame as profoundly egoic, not in a pejorative sense, but in the literal sense that they center the self as causal agent everywhere: my joy harms, my difference wounds, my survival betrays. That stance can feel ethical, but it often freezes me in place and distorts my capacity for clear, embodied presence. What you’re pointing toward, slowing down, noticing, bringing consciousness to these inner narratives, feels essential to survival in this chaotic age. Not to erase guilt, but to metabolize it, so it doesn’t quietly govern every aspect of life. In times of collective stress and transition, the work of staying present, responsive, and humane may be the most consequential action available. I’m grateful you named this so thoughtfully. Blessings, Sheila