Guilt is an ocean to drown in

Don’t waste your energy on guilt; it’s the most pointless emotion.

Every time I say that, people are a little shocked. Almost as if they had not lost sleep and energy and mental health to guilt. Almost as if they had never been paralysed by guilt, unable to act and sinking further. Almost as if guilt hadn’t ever driven them to put their needs before those of the party they think they’ve wronged.

I don’t think guilt is, in itself, a bad thing. Much like shame, it has an important role to play. The problem is, between social conditioning and the idiosyncrasies of human emotion, it becomes a monster.

Take that ocean in the title. The ocean is a wondrous thing! There is much good that comes from floating, splashing or swimming around in it, for short periods of time. And then you get out, rinse off the salt and go on with your life. But if you stay in the ocean, you will drown. It might take you more or less time than someone else, you might surrender or struggle, but you will drown. Guilt is just like that.

What is guilt? Telling yourself you did something bad. Ok then what? Acknowledge it? Apologize? Fix it? Great.

But so many of us never get past step 1: tell yourself you did something bad. We sit there, in the ocean, and we don’t try to emerge. We don’t towel off, rinse the salt from our skins and race off to eat dinner with a healthy appetite. We just stay there, in the water, telling ourselves that we’re doing the virtuous thing, we’re swimming, it’s good for you. And then we drown.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, while guilt is useful to prod you into noticing you might have hurt someone or done something bad, it’s only useful if you then act on the guilt. You made amends. You try to change something about yourself. You hold space for someone’s pain. Guilt is of no use to you, or anyone, if you just sit there and feel guilty.

Two things make this worse. First, in our need to be ideal people and refuse to admit our flaws, we are really uncomfortable with admitting we are wrong. So feeling guilty is a lovely shortcut to not actually taking steps to correct what you’ve done, because you can tell yourself that the guilt is evidence that you know you make a mistake and this you are a bad person. (Most people aren’t doing this consciously — we aren’t that evil heh.) And it just stops there. Which is not helpful either to your own growth and relationships, or to other people’s.

Second, and far worse, most of the time guilt has nothing to do with what you want or believe but to do with what social conditioning tells you you should want or believe. And other people use that to manipulate and emotionally abuse you. “You didn’t have dinner at home.” “Why do you need to see your friends, am I not enough?” “You took a day off last week, you should work harder to make it up.” These are benign examples because I have had the fortune to never really been given this treatment, but I’ve seen it done to other people and I’ve seen how it destroys them.

There’s a corollary to this. Guilt can be so deeply entrenched in us and we can have such a visceral need to clear it that act from that instead of doing what is best for the other person involved. A classic example I’m going to steal from Dan Savage is telling a partner you cheated on them when it was completely unexpected and is never going to be repeated. Social conditioning says this is a terrible betrayal, and you must do penance by telling your partner and risking losing them, even though you don’t want to lose them and they don’t want to lose you. By telling them you are destroying their world, for a blip. But your guilt will be assuaged because you will be “punished” for your wrong.* Often a partner will say “Why did you tell me, I didn’t need to know?!” upon receiving this revelation, and the problem is neatly dumped on their lap.

So yeah, TL;DR: Guilt can be useful, but mainly we use it as an excuse to not fix things, or as a way to manipulate people, or to let ourselves feel virtuous while dumping the problem on someone else. If we, as a society, stopped seeing feeling guilty as a virtue, maybe it would recede enough to be only useful and no longer damaging.

*Like Dan I also think strict monogamy is weird and generally bad for mental health and the health of society as a whole, since abuse is far worse than sexual infidelity but we as a society encourage abused people to try to make it work while we advocate for immediate breakups when there’s cheating..