Guilt-tripping is an ancient, and often highly profitable, art. In every culture, there are people and institutions that actively work to instill guilt, because people who feel guilty are easier to dominate, manipulate, and exploit.
To understand how guilt-tripping works, it helps to have a good understanding of just what guilt is. Every experience of guilt is both an idea and a feeling. The idea, which arises first, is that something I’ve done or failed to do has hurt someone else. We’re capable of guilt because we’re social animals, hard-wired to feel concern and empathy for other people, and to feel pain if we think we’ve harmed them. The feeling element is a kind of depressive anxiety, which is so painful that most people will do almost anything to avoid it.
Because guilt begins with ideas, it can be taught, and is all-too-easily learned, especially by the young and the naïve. The most basic method for making people susceptible to guilt is to get them to believe that pursuing their legitimate self-interests causes harm to others, or to the “greater good.” The easiest way to do this is to conflate “self-care” with “sefish.”
If you can con others into thinking that acting on their legitimate rights, or pursuing reasonable personal goals, is selfish, then it becomes easier to get them to relinquish their goals and serve your ends instead. Parents who use their children to meet their own needs, for instance, often use the “selfish” speech to make them feel ashamed for having independent desires. Maybe you’ve heard it: “You’re so selfish! All you ever think about is yourself. It’s just me, me, me…” and so on.
Many people who were subjected to this kind of treatment as children harbor, as adults, a deep dark secret that if anyone really knew them, they’d find out just how shamelessly selfish they really are. When people learn, early in life, to associate any interest in their own welfare with selfishness, they can spend the rest of their lives being at the mercy of every unscrupulous person who crosses their path, all the while living with debilitating guilt.
Another effective method for instilling guilt is to get people to feel ashamed of their pain, and by getting them to see it as an annoyance and a drag on others. Those who are suffering are naturally inclined to take action to relieve it, unless they’ve been taught to believe that it’s something to be ashamed of. If you’re seriously depressed, for instance, you’re going to be far less inclined to seek relief if you believe that you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, that you’re a whiner, that you’re weak and full of self-pity, and that you should just get over yourself. Those who have learned not to respect their own suffering don’t act to relieve it.
Another effective guilt-inducing strategy is the “people are starving, so shut up” argument. The irrational idea in this argument is that since somebody somewhere always has it worse, you have no right to try to make anything better for yourself. Those who tell you to “count your blessings” often really mean to “ignore your needs.”
A variant of this argument in the “you’ve already got more than your fair share” idea.” Parents who berate their children for being “spoiled” encourage vulnerability to this form of guilt-tripping. The irrational idea here is that, since you already have more than your “fair share” of the goodies, you’re over-privileged and have no right to strive for anything more.
A related idea is that success is always gained at someone else’s expense, and that you have therefore done something wrong if you are successful in achieving your goals. If you’re financially secure, for instance, it must be because you had some unfair advantage, or because you exploited others (“all profit is theft”), never because you earned it legitimately through your own efforts. Unfortunately, some people will feel jealous of anything valuable you have—whether it’s good looks, social confidence, personal happiness, or job success—and will rationalize their jealousy by telling themselves, and you, that all your advantages are ill-gotten gains.
Recovery from vulnerability to irrational guilt involves learning to discriminate between doing actual harm to others and bogus claims of it. It involves getting clear that you have an inherent right to do all in your power to live and thrive, such that you reject false accusations that pursuing legitimate life goals automatically hurts or deprives others.
Tom Moon is a psychotherapist in San Francisco. His website is tommoon.net
Recent Comments