Despite its reputation, guilt — once properly harnessed and leveraged — can be more positive than negative and therefore more tonic than toxic.
I’ve long since rendered the verdict on myself: I’m guilty. Yes, guilty as charged, guilty in the first degree, guilty on all counts. All my life I’ve felt every inch the guilty party. I’ve even managed to feel guilty about feeling guilty.
“We’ve only recently come to understand that guilt - historically perceived strictly as a distressing emotion — can be constructive,” says Will Bynum, an associate professor of family medicine and community health at the Duke University School of Medicine, who has studied guilt as well as its cousin, shame. “We now have a new concept of guilt as a potential source for growth. It can point us toward actions we can take to improve our lives.
In the best case, guilt signals that we’ve come up short of the standards of behavior that we set for ourselves, as well as those of our culture and society.June Tangney, a professor of psychology at George Mason University and author of the bookHer research on guilt is regarded as seminal and is widely cited. “Recognizing your guilt can be healthy for your relationships.
We humans have no difficulty finding satisfactory rationales for our guilt. A 2022 study identified 1,515 reasons that 604 German adults gave for feeling guilty. I felt bad for her. It seemed unjust that I could hear. All through boyhood, guilt also gnawed at me for misbehaving in school, getting poor grades and being insufficiently athletic.
“It has to do with the standards your parents expect you to meet as a child, and how they then respond to your missing the mark,” Lewis said. “If they encourage you to take responsibility for your failures, you’re given an opportunity to learn from the experience and improve.”Of what, exactly, do I, at age 72, still feel guilty today? Much. But if I’ve learned anything , it’s that feeling bad can occasionally be good for you.
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