Guilt or guilty

Guilt and feeling guilty are extremely common. Guilt describes a condition or state of being, while feeling guilty describes, well, a feeling. Why do we experience the two and is it important to ask the question?

Let me begin by reminding you that there are four basic emotions: fear, anger, happy and sad. So, it seems that guilt is not a basic emotion. In fact, it's not an emotion at all. Although it is a psychological condition with an associated feeling, it is quite different than an emotion.

Emotions are primal, deeply rooted, natural human expressions. Feelings are related to a sense of evaluation and personality. So, guilt and feeling guilty are not emotions but evaluations, but what's being evaluated?

Situations, actions, reactions and so forth are being evaluated. For example, you might be filled with anger over something that occurred and you kick the dog. What follows and what you experience as you evaluate kicking the dog could easily be guilt and feeling guilty. It's important to note that guilt follows the action, reaction or situation.

If you think about a guilt state and the associated guilty feeling, you'll see that both always follow an action, situation or reaction. Neither one ever leads us to an action or reaction, unless we've already committed an action, feel guilty about it and attempt to cover-up or rectify the situation due to our guilt. Such an attempt, however, will likely fail and only result in more complex problems or issues.

So, we can see that guilt and guilty feelings follow a situation or action, but more importantly, are basically useless. If we attempt to react due to our guilt, it can lead us to greater problems. If we simply live with our guilty feelings, there is no benefit to be gained. We wallow in the guilt. That's about it!

The point is that before we live-out a situation or action, it is important to consider where it can lead. In other words, it is critical to be conscious (aware) of what we are doing and realize the potential consequences. Should we then perform an action and unwanted consequences do occur, we must simply accept the consequences that we knew were possible and avoid making a mess of life with useless feelings of guilt.

This might sound contradictory to everything you grew up hearing or contradictory to your beliefs about guilt. If so, I suggest you spend some time with this view, especially if you're feeling guilty and see if it doesn't have some value.