The Effect of Guilt on Your Personality

Guilt comes in many forms, but when all is said and done. Guilt is, first and foremost, an emotion. You may think of guilt as a good way to get someone to do something for you out of a sense of obligation, but it's more accurate to think of guilt as an internal state. In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states. It’s one of the “sad” emotions, which also include agony, grief, and loneliness. We often underestimate the rather significant role it plays in our daily lives.

• Guilt resides under the veneer of our behavior. we build defense mechanisms to protect us from the guilt we would experience if we knew just how awful our awful desires really were.
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  Guilt is an emotion that people experience because they’re convinced they’ve caused harm. The thoughts cause emotions. The emotion of guilt follows directly from the thought that you are responsible for someone else’s misfortune, whether or not this is the case. People who experience guilt on a chronic basis, mistakenly suffer under the illusion that they have caused other people harm. Their negative emotion follows from their tendency to misinterpret what happens to them and not to question the logic of their conclusions. People constantly plagued by guilt are also taught to recognize their “dysfunctional attitudes” so that they recognize when they’re going through such mental processes.
• Unresolved guilt is like having a snooze alarm in your head that won't shut off. If you had a snooze alarm that never shut off it would be hard to concentrate, as your attention would be constantly hogged by bursts of guilty feelings. Indeed, it is not uncommon for guilt to persist over lengthy periods of time.

The most obvious reason to feel guilty is that you actually did something wrong. This type of guilt may involve harm to others, such as causing someone physical or psychological pain. You may also feel guilty because you violated you are own ethical or moral code, such as cheating, lying or stealing.

Guilt over your own behavior can also be caused by doing something you swore you would never do again (such as smoking, drinking, or overeating). In each of these cases, there’s no doubt that the behavior occurred.

• Thinking about committing an act in which you deviate from your own moral code or engage in behavior that is dishonest, unfaithful, or illegal. Like, someone may have mentally lusted after someone other than your spouse or long-term partner. This is a tough type of guilt to handle. It’s true that you didn’t actually commit the act, and so you’re still sitting on the moral high ground.
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  You’ve given hours of your free time to help that person, but now you have other obligations that you absolutely must fulfill. Or perhaps your friend’s family suffered a tragic loss such as the death of a relative or fire that destroyed their home. You’ve offered days and weeks of your free time but, again, you find you can’t continue to do so. The guilt now starts to get to you and you try desperately to figure out ways to help them despite the toll it’s taking on you.
• Guilt occurs primarily in interpersonal contexts and is considered a pro-social emotion because it helps you maintain good relations with others. In essence, guilt is like a signal that keeps going off in your head until you take the appropriate action. Guilt makes us reluctant to enjoy life.
• Even mild guilt can make you hesitant to embrace the joys of life. For some people, guilt can do even worse damage.
• Survivor guilt also occurs when people who lose families, friends, or neighbors in disasters themselves remain untouched or, at least, alive. Applying not only to people who live when others in the same situation have died, though, this kind of guilt also characterizes those who make a better life for themselves than do their family or friends.
• Self-punishment to ward off feelings of guilt. people who were made to feel guilty by depriving another person of lottery tickets were actually willing to give themselves electric shocks to signal their remorse.
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  One is that guilt is a specific emotion that is different from just feeling bad about an action, feeling guilty the dinner scenario only included the need to add money to the dinner bill. Participants who felt guilty added more money to the bill than those who cheated. The guilt also affected the real decisions of participants.
• There’s no doubt that guilt is a complex and interesting emotion. It can even cause you to spend more than you want. You can’t live a completely guilt-free life but you can keep it within manageable bounds. Guilt can also help you gain greater self-understanding by helping you to recognize when, in fact, you've done someone else harm. Guilt, in and of itself, isn't a destructive emotion. If you let it become all-consuming, however, guilt can get the best or the worst of you.