Shakespeare wrote that some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness cast upon them.
I don’t know about greatness but I am sure that all those who are chronically guilty were not born guilty; they all had it, “thrust upon them.”
As a very small child, guilt kept them in line. Like a flower, it was planted in their soul at tender age and tended with liberal doses of admonitions not to do it again, because mum, dad, teacher, God or all of them, “are very disappointed in you.” There is a strong link between guilt and an unspecified withdrawal of acceptance that chills your soul. A feeling which, for the rest of your life, you make strenuous efforts to avoid.
Happiness for the guilt ridden isn’t found so much in joy as in the relief of avoiding being the cause of disappointment.
Imagine if you can a wooden doll with a number of invisible eyes screwed into its tummy; the sort you find in the ends of curtain wire.
Guilty people are like such dolls. Their persecutors can hook into these invisible eyes with unswerving accuracy , give it a little tweak, and suddenly there’s that hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach, and that cold awful feeling that you’ve failed again.
Children can be locked into this game when the parent who originated it is 90 years old, or even dead.
The rules are firmly embedded in your head in such a vague way, that you always feel vaguely guilty.
It follows that religious sects which impose quite rigid guidelines on their members have quite a lot of guilty members and a good number of ex-members. Perhaps that’s why so many Irish Catholics are into guilt in a big way. With all their religious and cultural rules and mores, they have a lot to be guilty about.
Although there are whole families where the children are manipulated by guilt, it is more common to find one guilt ridden child who carries the can for the others for the rest of their life. It is usually the daughter and rarely the youngest, unless she’s the only daughter.
In essence, guilt is not so much a feeling, as a rather vicious game, which starts when a child’s freedom is restricted to meet someone else’s needs.
Helping someone to work out in whose interest the game was first started, may be the first step in finding themselves, “not guilty,” and setting themselves free.
