Skip the Guilt Trap: Simple steps to help you move on with your life. Gael Lindenfield
problem. He didn’t accept that his drinking was an issue. He spoke defensively about it and said it was just part of his job. He had to drink sometimes, as that was the way you met and started relationships with new customers.
I encouraged Jeff to tell me a little more about his job. It was one that involved quite a bit of travel. We talked about some of the places he had been to. It emerged that one of them was Budapest. In sharing our impressions of this city he recalled having a one-night stand with a Hungarian colleague. He had virtually forgotten the incident. He laughed it off, saying he was young then and they had both been drinking a little too much that evening. At first he couldn’t even remember her name or the year it had taken place, but when we explored it a little more his memory became clearer. As it did, he started to fidget and his hand started covering his mouth. He then recalled that, at the time, his wife had been pregnant with their first child. I noticed that his eyes were looking watery and I quietly asked him how he was feeling. He said, ‘Guilty, I suppose, and a bit fearful.’ The fear that he felt was that he would end up like his dad, who was ‘a true alcoholic and womaniser’, and that he, too, might lose his family. He felt immense guilt about not having been able to help his mother more. She remained depressed and bitter until the present day. Jeff was feeling less and less inclined to spend time with her and so feeling even guiltier.
The good news at the end of this story is that Jeff and his wife did repair their marriage. Jeff found new ways to network for new customers and gained a clearer and more rational perspective on his responsibilities towards his mother.
As we know, many people are unwilling to go to a therapist, especially if their problem doesn’t feel like a big issue to them. Jeff did, but I don’t believe most people need to do so. If the disguised guilt is caught early enough, a partner or close friend who knows the person well may spot it. In Chapter 8 I will outline some guidelines and give some tips on listening in a way that helps people to open up.
Summary: Disguised guilt
• This is guilt that the person is not aware they are currently feeling.
• It can produce emotional and behavioural symptoms that are attributed to other causes.
• The habit of disguising guilt (real or imagined) can often be traced back to childhood.
• The process of outing this kind of guilt needs to be done skilfully and sensitively. A therapeutic professional often does this. Others who know and care for the person can also achieve it.
Childhood guilt
This is a subject that I could easily write a whole book about, and so could most psychotherapists. Childhood guilt is one type that surfaces so frequently. It is one of the main contributing causes of chronic low self-esteem and a host of other common mental-health problems.
As is now common knowledge, our default emotional auto-responses are largely ‘wired in’ during our childhood years. This makes them much more difficult to control. This is especially so if we experienced guilt repeatedly or it arose as a result of a traumatic experience. Even when, as adults, we can see that many of these responses are not rational and are indeed harmful to us, they still have stubborn sticking power.
Additionally, parents, or other significant adults who had power and influence over us when we were children, induce much of this guilt. Here are a few brief examples of these kinds of ‘messages’ that I have come across through words, attitudes or consequences:
And, of course, damage can also be done indirectly through nobody’s fault. I met someone in her eighties recently who, when she found out what I was writing about, said she still feels guilty about her own birth. She was premature and her mother was unable to have any more children afterwards.
Here are some other examples I have known where people feel guilty about being who they were born to be:
And then, of course, there are the guilty secrets that some children felt they had to keep (rightly or wrongly), such as: