You know how sometimes when you wake up you have a crystal clear thought; something that you don’t know where that came from but “Wow!” Well I had one of those this morning. The thought was actually a stream of thoughts that went like this:
- Guilt is transformative – if it’s real guilt it is the catalyst for change.
- Guilt that doesn’t lead to change isn’t really guilt, it is self-pity disguised as change. And the underlying self-pity is fueled by resentments. These resentments are arising from the ego and therefore there can be no change.
- When we are not accepting of our feelings, without judgment, they become disguised.
So what did all of these thoughts mean to me? I have a very hard time identifying and accepting that I have feelings. This is the one area that I have been paying very close attention to in the recent past. But the one feeling that I know I rarely feel is guilt. That is because I don’t disguise resentments into guilt, I love having resentments when they come! Anger is my place of choice! But for others, they feel anger is wrong, so they can’t accept that they are angry. The anger may get transmuted into self-pity/resentment and then they disguise it by saying ‘I feel guilty’ because it seems like a situation for guilt. Really they are feeling angry and sorry for themselves, but none of that fits with their image of themselves. Feeling guilt must mean you are a good person – right!?!
In my life I can think of two occasions where I truly felt guilt. In both cases, they seem to have been turning points in my life. One occurred back in the 80’s when I worked at Growth Companies. I got very angry over something small and unimportant and I had an employee tell me that my anger hurt everyone, even when it wasn’t directed at a particular person, and they said that I wasn’t a very nice person. That moment was profound, because I realized that while I did not want to hurt other people, I was irresponsible enough that I let it happen anyway, and I felt guilt. That guilt launched me on my path to understand, control and defeat anger in my life.
The second time I felt guilt was over my daughter’s wedding. She decided to follow a personal path related to her marriage that really hurt me because I was excluded from something that I felt I should be included in. That hurt and disappointment consumed me and rage took over for many weeks. Jon eventually snapped me out of my rage enough that I looked back upon the carnage that my rage had created and I was appalled and felt guilty. I was still hurt but I felt guilty that I had lashed out and hurt others, particularly my daughter. I was devastated that my anger almost murdered a relationship with Anya. Luckily for me, Anya is a healthier person than me, Jon snapped me out of it, and I felt guilty, and transformed that into acceptance of a sort, because now I am very happy that I have a relationship with her that transcends anything I could have imagined!
The fundamental point in my musings is that when we don’t accept the feeling that we are feeling at the moment, we disguise them to make them more palatable or “acceptable” to our self-image. Once those feelings have gone underground, disguised, there is no way we can move beyond them, learn from them, and let go. There is no recovery. Feelings are what they are. They should be exposed in their pure form, without judgment. We are humans and we feel. It is neither right nor wrong. It just IS. Once the feeling gets to express itself, we can experience it, evaluate it, realize it is just a feeling and move on. Accepting that a feeling is what it is and that it does not say anything about us other than we had a feeling is that nonjudgmental awareness of us as human.
I think I get it! Now all I have to learn how to do is to feel them to begin with! :)
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