Guilty
I do a lot of radio interviews. I check out the station website before the call and I sometimes see bios of the radio personalities. Many of them fill out a questionnaire which gives you some insight into their likes and dislikes – favorite movie, favorite TV show, who would you like to play you in a movie?, etc. One of the questions I often see is: What is your guilty pleasure? What an oxymoron that term is.
Guilt is guilt and pleasure is pleasure and those two trains run on different tracks.
Guilt is always a thought after the fact. It rarely has a purpose, other than to beat you up.
You weren’t feeling guilty when you were eating the ice cream sundae with the extra sprinkles. It tasted wonderful and it was pleasurable. Where did the guilt come in? – Always after the fact. That should tell you how reactionary and conditioned the mind is.
There is no benefit to a self-inflicted beating. This is not to say that you can’t learn from reflection but wearing sack cloth helps no one and it only scratches you. It’s our mind’s conditioning that makes us think that entertaining hurtful thoughts about ourselves will be the course of action necessary to make us a better person. That trail always leads to a dead end.
Guilt always was and always will be a self destructive emotion. It’s not the guilt that helps you change the way you may do things differently in the future. Recognition is the only catalyst necessary for future change. If you recognize that your past actions may have been hurtful to you or to others, that is all that is necessary for you to arrive at the doorstep for future decisions. If your next step is to put yourself in a self-imposed pillory, you have taken one step too many – a step that cannot bring you the mental relief you seek – a step that keeps you stuck.
Recognizing behavior and interrupting it while it is happening is the quickest way to new behavior. But even if you get the gift of awareness after the fact, that is foundation enough to build a different set of actions in the future.
Yes, there are consequences for actions that we all must pay and guilt is not one of them. Guilt isn’t a cause, it’s a reaction. Guilt doesn’t get you to issue an apology or make acts of atonement – recognition does. Guilt just keeps you steeped in no man’s land and delays the necessary action for change. Guilt slows up the process of self-healing.
Many years ago when I took NLP training, they used an expression called “elegance.” Basically it meant the shortest number of steps or route to reach an outcome. Guilt always acts as a sideways tractor-trailer spread across the highway.
Apologies and atonements are necessary elements to open the doors to forgiveness but guilt keeps the door nailed shut.
Many times when you take the unnecessary plunge into “Guiltville,” you were pushed there by someone else’s rule – one that you absorbed unconsciously from social, cultural and parental conditioning – one that prevented you for deciding for yourself if eating that pleasurable sundae was indeed the perfect thing to do or not.
This blog post is not suggesting that you get a free pass for past actions that may need course correction. My sole purpose is to point out is you can get to where you need to go quicker and without unnecessary bruising if you leave guilt behind.
All the best,
John
http://CDBaby.com/CD/JohnMorgan
Be Sociable, Share!