Guilt: The Unintentional Crime of Christmas

I was recently asked to speak about a topic that I’ve never given a lot of thought to prior to this request. The subject is guilt.

Here is the definition of guilt according to Wikipedia: Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes — accurately or not — that they have violated a moral standard, and is responsible for that violation.

Within the world of archery, the term “sin” means to be off-target.   I think that we feel the emotion of guilt when we believe in our own minds, hearts and souls that we’re “off-target” for how we believe we should be acting in our every day lives.

Our internal idea of our moral standards has 3 stages…

Stage 1: We’re born with an internal sense of all that is good.

Stage 2: We learn many dos and don’ts and rights and wrongs from our caregivers – parents, grandparents, coaches, teachers, clergy, etc. These may or may not be the ultimate truths but, when we’re young we frequently take these words from our elders as gospel.

Stage 3: I believe that we begin to create for ourselves our true sense of on-target or off-target by combining our internal morality compass with what we’ve learned from our caregivers with information that we’ve learned as adults. When we’re young and impressionable, we’re overloaded with opinions, beliefs and doctrine that are thrown at us by well-meaning individuals. As adults, it’s our responsibility to acquire enough wisdom and knowledge to accurately determine how we choose to run our lives.

Guilt manifests itself when we’re off-target for how we believe we should be running our lives. It also manifests itself when others attempt to make us feel guilty for not complying with their requests.

Let’s deal with the first situation: In this instance, we’re violating our own idea of what’s good enough. One of my suggestions for us to have happy, balanced and guilt-free lives is for us to have goals for every major area of our life: social, spiritual, financial, career, family, education, health, etc.

When we go through the work of deciding what our ideal life would look like if we lived up to our potential in each area, we begin developing an internal vision of a newer, better self. Smiles usually appear on our faces and in our minds when we start thinking about our potential.

In order for us to improve and begin working toward our vision, we will set-up daily activities that will cause improvement in each area. Examples of daily activities that we might develop to help us realize our goals are exercise, prayer, meditation, reading with our children, daily conversation with our significant other and reading.  Once we set the goal for ourselves and tell ourself how often we’d like to participate in this activity, we’re setting up a plan for how we’re choosing to spend out time in the future.  An example might be that we’d like to exercise for 30-minutes per day 5 days per week.   If it’s our goal, as opposed to someone else’s goal being pushed upon us, we should go after the activity with gusto and use language like love to, choose to and want to when describing this idea to ourselves.  Those word choices reinforce the concept that this activity is my idea.  Many of us use language like I have to exercise.  The improved language would be I love exercising! When we tell ourselves that we have to do something, we trying to coerce ourselves into doing something that we really do not want to do.  If you do not want to do something, stop bullying yourself into doing it.

Guilt may rear it’s lovely head when we’ve made a commitment to ourselves to do something and then do not do it.  I refer to that as self-inflicted guilt which is a result of making a commitment to ourselves and then not keeping it.  Another word for this is disappointment.  We had an appointment with ourselves which we did not keep. In this case, guilt can be a very good thing and be a motivator for change because it will cause us to decide whether or not we’d really like to be the type of person that we had in mind when we set the goal.  If so, we can develop our resolve and continue our pursuit of this vision.  If not, we can take the pressure off ourselves because there are very few have-to’s in this life.  Once we understand that there are very few have-to’s and that there are consequences for every one of our actions and non-actions, we get to choose how we’d like to live our lives – guilt-free.  You’re worthy of an ideal life.  You get to decide what ideal means to you.

Are we more likely to make and keep commitments to ourselves or to others?  When I ask this question in front of a group, the majority of people admit that they are more likely to make and keep commitments to others than to themselves.  Does that mean that we love others more than we love ourselves?  Please give that question careful consideration.

The affirmation that I developed for myself that you’re welcome to borrow is, “I make commitments to myself and keep them because I love myself as much as I love others.”  I chose to develop that affirmation because I was guilty of keeping commitments made to others but, would break commitments that I had made to myself.

Once you’ve set goals for your life, you’ll find that your calendar becomes very full of activities that are related to your ideal life.  When your calendar is genuinely full of activities related to your goals and others ask you to do something in a time slot that you’ve already committed, it makes it very easy to politely say, “I’m sorry that I cannot attend (or help or assist or volunteer) because I have another commitment on that date and time.”  There is no guilt because you DO have another commitment!

It’s very easy to say no to another person when we have another commitment. I’ve noticed that guilt sometimes comes from saying no to a request from another when we don’t have anything else that we’re supposed to be doing.  In those cases, guilt surfaces because of a fabrication (sometimes called a lie). That is another good reason for self-inflicted guilt.

Guilt may also surface because of our feelings of being over responsible. Although you and I contribute greatly to the happiness of others, it is not our responsibility to make others happy. Happiness is the responsibility of each person. Anyone who has ever tried to make someone else happy knows that this is an impossible task. Happiness is a choice. Because we cannot physically be in two places at the same time, we’re required to choose.

Sometimes others try to cause us to feel guilty when a task is not done by us the right way. Maturation allows us to know that there are many right ways of doing something and there is no one right way. You realize that you’re a smart and creative person who may have figured out another right way of accomplishing a goal with the same or better end-result.

Around the holiday season, we sometimes feel guilty for our inability to purchase everything that our children would like to receive.  Holy Days are not about material gifts.  Gift-giving is a secular concept that has somehow replaced the original Holy Day with a secular holiday.  As an example, Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ  and is reminder of His birth and His promise to return to earth again. It’s that reminder that  is supposed to cause us to conduct a self-assessment of how we’re living our lives versus how we’ve been called to live them.  It’s a wonderful time for loving, serving, praying, worshiping and renewing our relationship with God and others.  We can really show our love for others in ways that have much more meaning than material gift giving.

In Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, he tells us that we can spell and live the word love, t-i-m-e.   If we want to communicate our love to the people that we truly do love, we can give them our most precious gift – time.

When we give others the gift of our time, love and conversation, we’re giving them a gift that always fits and will never have to be returned.

When guilt is self-inflicted, we understand that we’re off-target based upon our idea of how good we’d like to be.  This is a great time to reset our internal compasses.

When guilt is thrown at us from others, you can gracefully reject the feelings and emotions that are being thrown your way. No one can make you feel guilty without your consent.

You and I either have a purpose, plan or cause or we become part of someone else’s.

Live life with intention and absence of guilt.