Guilt is a complex emotion that can significantly impact mental health and relationships. While often viewed as purely a negative emotion, guilt can serve various purposes when experienced in moderation. However, excessive or misplaced guilt can be 
harmful to your overall mental health. Understanding the nuances between healthy and unhealthy guilt is important for maintaining emotional balance and maintaining positive relationships with others.
The Purpose of Guilt
Guilt can help to guide your moral behavior and create social connections. When experienced in healthy doses, feelings of guilt can show you where you’ve perhaps caused pain or hurt to someone else, or strayed from your moral compass. It can motivate you to repair mistakes, adhere to personal values, and maintain positive relationships. In this sense, guilt can act as a self-regulatory mechanism, prompting you to reflect on your actions and their consequences.
However, it’s important to recognize that guilt’s purpose is not to burden you indefinitely. If guilt seems to be constant, deeply painful, or leading to rumination, there’s likely more going on.
Unhealthy Guilt
Guilt can be a destructive force when misplaced or excessive. Unhealthy guilt often stems from irrational thoughts or unrealistic expectations, which can lead to excessive self-blame and emotional distress. This type of guilt can be paralyzing and hinder personal development and relationships. It often can result in taking on the burdens of another as your own, when you may be powerless to fix the other’s burden. This can often lead to defeat, feelings of failure, self-blame, feelings of inadequacy, and more self-destructive tendencies.
Childhood
Many people who struggle with unhealthy guilt have brought this with them from childhood. For example, a child who sees a parent suffering from depression or illness, and felt as a child that they were unable to make them better. Or, a child whose parents got divorced and felt it was their own “badness” that may have caused it. And more.
As children, what we see in the world around us is often experienced as something caused by us. For example, “My mom is sad, what did I do? Let me try to cheer her up.” And, “I’m trying to cheer her up but she’s still sad. Why can’t I make her happy?”
The Parentified Child
Excessive guilt in adulthood can also stem from having been in the position of a parentified child. When a parent leans emotionally on a child in ways that can cause you to feel like you have to be the emotional parent to your own parent, this can lead to the feeling that your parent needs you to take care of them. It may make it difficult to develop your own sense of identity, or follow your own path in life out of fear and guilt of what will happen to your parent who needs you to take care of them. This is a common cause of excessive guilt in adulthood.
When this mechanism of guilt isn’t appropriately aligned through development, it can be tempting to feel excessive guilt for burdens that aren’t yours, and things you may not have much power to change.
The Impact of Unhealthy Guilt
Unhealthy guilt can have a significant impact on your mental and emotional wellbeing. When guilt becomes excessive or irrational, it can lead to a cycle of negative self-talk and self-punishment. This persistent feeling of shame and helplessness may contribute to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. You might find yourself constantly ruminating over past mistakes, unable to forgive yourself or others, or move forward.
Unhealthy guilt can also strain relationships and cause overall social anxiety, as you may become overly apologetic or withdraw from social interactions. It can also lead to self-destructive behaviors or even suicidal thoughts.
Working Through Unhealthy Guilt
The first step in moving forward from unhealthy guilt is beginning to become aware of how you experience guilt — when guilt emerges to serve you in a positive way, and when guilt is showing up to in some way harm you or drag you down. People often do this in therapy where a professional can help you recognize the differences, or when something old from the past may be contributing to a self-destructive response pattern in the present. It is possible to be liberated from the shackles of guilt.
If you struggle with excessive guilt, therapy is a good place to learn what is happening underneath it and work through it. Contact me if you wish to discuss your situation.
