August 7, 2011

• Guilt: Both Shield and Sword

  Despite my obvious awesomeness I am in fact not perfect….no no don’t all disagree at once

  there are many things in my life and mind that i’m not happy with and currently the one most obvious would be Guilt, but as is so often the case it’s the side effects that are perhaps the most harmful.

  So with hopes of some blogging therapy allow me to unload some of my observations on the subject of Guilt and it’s effects here.

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  On it’s own Guilt is bad enough, it’s persistent and hard to entirely let go of, since we are always our harshes critics. But as i’ve tried to figure out various solutions (by analysing my motives and whats going on in my mind and emotions) i’ve noticed the real harm we can cause if we let this emotion run free in us.

  First we hurt ourselves by constantly berating either our failure (that caused the original guilt) or our lack of action or ability to change it. Then since we feel angry at ourselves and often ashamed we start to wall ourselves off, from others and even our own attempts to fix the problem. 

  This only serves to further compound the effects and we can end up beginning a kind of spiral of self criticism that adds to the distraction and lack of self confidence that guilt can cause in the first place.

  But thats only half of it, because then (if say you feel guilty for something involving other people close to you) you end up closing yourself off from them as well, thus stopping anyone helping and making you feel isolated and stressed.

  Then of course our ever cunning minds start to get angry, angry at not only ourselves and the situation but also at the other people, and since your angry with yourself and ‘they‘ arn’t helping (because you’ve closed off) you end up getting short tempered and missing out on or actively destroying perfectly nice times and interactions basically because you don’t feel you deserve them.

  It was quite facinating to see as i examined how i was feeling, that so many negative things and thoughts had sprung from just one source. The problem is we are fantastic pattern recognition devices and it really dosen’t take much for our minds to run wild with a thought or emotion quite on automatic, and often by the time we start to think there’s something seriously wrong it can be tricky to find our way back to where it all began.

  How exactly this sort of self analysis helps, i’m still unsure of. Luckily that dosen’t stop it from helping I suppose the moral of the tale would be don’t let your mind run off with you and over complicate things, more often than not it’s the simple answer and we’ve just added all the extra stuff in there to make it interesting.

  And also it’s your responsibility, thats not to say your on your own but rather it’s your responsibility how your going to react to what your given and experiance, puching people who could help away is as much an interaction as letting them help. What we have responsibility over is how we do things, and how we let it effect us and others through us.

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  Kind of like when you’ve got a song stuck in your head and then you listen to it and suddenly it’s gone, somehow sharing stuff like this helps in the same way. I’d love to know the psychology behind it….but for now i’m just hoping it works.

  Thanks for taking the time to read this, Hope everyone has a wonderful day

  • 8:30 pm
  • 4 Comments