Guilt. What a heavy word... We all know what guilt feels like, and we all feel it often. How do we deal with these feelings?
Meet your Teacher
Jamao al Norte, Dominican Republic
Transcript
And now, Life, Lessons, And Laughter with your host, Glen Ambrose of Life Enhancement Services of Rhode Island. Hello everybody. This is Glen Ambrose. And today we are going to talk about guilt. Guilt. So, We are going to talk about that big heavy word, Guilt. The first angle that I am going to come at it at is letting the past control your future actions. So basically, That is just getting some guilt, Feeling some guilt about what you have done in the past, And letting it control what happens in the future. So obviously we don't want to do that. One of the things that we do is we beat ourselves up a lot. And that doesn't get us anywhere. So I think that once we find that we respond better to positive reinforcement instead of the negative reinforcement, That is the first step. We tend to beat ourselves up and we think that if we feel bad enough about ourselves, Then that will motivate us into doing something different. And generally all that does is make us feel bad about ourselves. And when you feel bad about yourself, You don't have that motivation to pick yourself up and go do something different or something better. So if you think about a past situation and you are just feeling down and you are telling yourself how much you screwed up and how wrong you were and how stupid it was to do that, Just talking about it, I don't feel this big get up and go to go do something positive and exciting. Guilt is like a vicious cycle. Do you think that guilt leads to depression? Absolutely. I mean depression is kind of like a long string of guilt. It's that you feel bad about yourself, You beat yourself up. Then you feel bad about yourself because you beat yourself up. So then you feel bad about yourself and you continue beating yourself up over it. And it is that self-perpetuating cycle that we fall in and you get into that rhythm and then the hope starts to dwindle and the fun and the positive directions start seeming further and further away and it's hard to get there. So yeah, Absolutely beating yourself up, It really does absolutely nothing. It does no good whatsoever. We can learn from our past, Looking back on something that you didn't handle well and seeing what you can do differently in a constructive way, In a teaching way, In a learning way, That is constructive. But there's no emotional beating up that's going on to do that. If I can look back at something I did, Back to a situation that I didn't handle well and I can say, Okay well, I didn't handle that well, How could I handle it differently? How can I handle it better in the future? If I do that, Then I'm learning from it. If I sit there and go, Oh my God, I can't believe I did that, I shouldn't have done that, What an idiot I am. This is completely screwed now, How am I going to get out of this? All that negative self-talk, It doesn't do anything except help keep you stuck in that negative train of thought. Is there any way that a little bit of guilt can be healthy? No. No really, It's a very poor motivator. Can some people use it to motivate them? Yeah. I mean, You can if you're really careful and you're really gentle with it and you use it as a motivator. But I mean, You can, I'm trying to think of another bad thing that we use. You could learn to not touch something hot by burning yourself, But that's a poor way to learn that lesson. Why hurt? There's other ways to learn that. So that's what it's like. It's like, Can you use it? Yeah, You can, But why would you? It has way too many drawbacks and it's really like playing with fire because it can and will burn you and you don't necessarily know when or how because it's got a very strong pull to it. Once you start it, Once you start falling into that guilt, It can pull you right into it and before you know it, You're all caught up in it. So, It's more dangerous to play around with it than it is helpful. I think that it's such a big deal because I think that guilt is probably the number one thing or at least near the top of the list of things that are detractors for people. As you were saying, I think the idea of, Well, I didn't do this yesterday, Crap. So now I'm already behind on this. Now it's going to be harder to catch up. I should have done that. I should have done that. I should have done that. Then you worry all your time about what you should have done instead of moving forward. There are just so many different ways that guilt can affect you. So speaking in one thing, We were talking earlier today about eating habits, Healthy eating habits. How is guilt associated within healthy eating habits? Just to get into some specifics. With the eating habits, You can see how guilt is guilt because I'm going to talk about how it plays in with the eating habits, But at the same time, It's how it spills into everything that we do. Basically one of the things that we can do is start our days over whenever we want. Just start your day over. You can start your day over 30 times throughout a 24 hour period if you need to. If something isn't going well and you want to beat yourself up over it, You can just stop and say, Okay, That's done. It happened. It's behind me. It's in the past. Two seconds is the past. It is. It's done. Two seconds after it happens, It's done. So it's in the past. I'm just going to start fresh right here. Now this is my starting point, I'm starting my day over. What can I do next that's going to be good? What's the next right thing that I can do? That's a big thing that we can use in any area of our lives, But when it comes to eating, It's one of the big things like we were talking about. It was breakfast. It's the first meal of the day and lots of people skip it. I used to skip it. When I woke up in the morning, One, I wasn't hungry because I wasn't feeding my body in the morning so it stopped sending me the signal. And two, I was stressed out. When I was younger, I was very stressed out. So when I woke up in the morning, My stomach was nauseous. I didn't feel like eating. So what happens is we'll wake up, Skip that morning meal, And then be like, Oh, I was supposed to eat breakfast. I know I'm supposed to eat breakfast. And I screwed that up. Well, So many people fall into the trap that that's it for the day. That whole day is ruined because they skipped one meal. And it could be people will wreck their whole weeks because of that. If that's a Monday morning and they were planning to start something fresh on a Monday morning, They'll wipe out a whole week and then tell themselves they need to start fresh Monday. Like really? I mean, That's a huge loss. You just blew away six and nine tenths days because of an hour. That's the drawback of guilt. That's what it can do to us if we let it control us. So just to start fresh and say, OK, What can I do here? That's the key to it. Start wherever you are. Most of life is living in awareness. So if you feel yourself getting caught up into the guilt feelings, Just stop where you are. You can look back at why you're feeling guilty and see if there's anything you need to learn from that. You know, I skipped that. I skipped a meal. OK, Well, What can I do to not skip a meal in the future? Preparation. You know, That's one of the best things for eating healthy and lots of other areas in life. Like I said, A lot of this, If you take the ideas behind the eating and you implement it, You see how you can implement the same idea behind it in other areas of life. It's the same thing. Preparation. So if you're if we're talking about the eating, Figure out ahead of time what's something small and easy that you can have right there with you when you wake up that you can have? Or if it's a snack during the day that you've missed? You know, What can you you know, People say, Well, I can't eat at work. Well, I mean, You know, I don't think they actually lock people down to their desks anymore. You know, I think that's they did that. Oh, Very often. Yeah. When I was a kid. Are you sure you're not just talking about a school desk that was connected? I'm actually 98 years old and it was very, Very traumatic when I was a child. The child labor laws weren't the same. But no, I mean, We can go to the bathroom. If you can go to a bathroom, You can eat, You know, Even if you can't have food at your desk, You can have a granola bar in your pocket. Go to the bathroom and have a granola bar when you're in there in three minutes. No. So you're suggesting that people go eat in the bathroom. I'm suggesting they sneak food in any way they can. And if their job is is that structured, Which usually it's not usually that's just people making an excuse. And yeah, You know, But if it is that structured, I've had jobs where they you know, You were at a desk and you couldn't eat at your desk and you couldn't you had to keep food in a certain area. It was difficult, But you find a way. You know, That's that's really what it is. You find a way but that takes that takes preparation when you're trapped in the guilt. You don't find the solution. You stay stuck in the problem. That's what guilt does. You know, I can't Oh my god, I blew it and you stay in that. But if you get away from the guilt and you see how you can learn from it, Then you can change the future. You know, So all right. So I think that that that that the dealing with guilt as we just talked about for like eating healthy. And I think that that also applies to go into the gym and just any sort of exercise. I think that those two everything that you explained kind of goes hand in hand with that of preparation. And yeah, You know, Beating yourself up for what you did yesterday or not throwing everything away because you slipped up. But escalating a little bit more of the guilt spectrum. If there is a moving on to the emotional side, Not that, You know, All of guilt is emotional. For example, There was an incident that happened recently to me that where I allowed one of my friends to get into a situation where he got hurt. Now I naturally have guilt about that situation, About putting my friend in a situation to get hurt. He's OK. It wasn't a huge deal, But how do you like that kind of guilt, The kind of guilt of, Oh, I shouldn't have done something, You know, Where it's not it's not it affects other people. Right. You know, Your guilt is to is for other people. Well, There's that's like two parts. One you have to be honest with yourself. You know, You really need to be able to be honest with yourself, And that's that's a tool that is very important in living a happy life. People don't they don't take the time to really find out how to be truly honest with themselves. So in this situation, You have to look back at that and you say, OK, When when I was getting this incident set in motion, Did I think that he was going to get hurt? Did I did I do it? Was this some sort of malicious part of me that wanted him to get hurt? And quite honestly, Even if the answer were yes, It's not the end of the world. I mean, We all have dark sides within us. I mean, Obviously, We don't want to act on them. And, You know, You use that as a learning experience to go, Holy crap, That was a little negativity that was coming out in a very unconscious wrong way. And I can't do that again. But again, It's only a learning experience. You don't judge yourself for for having a dark side. Most often, Though, It's the answer is no, I had no intention of hurting him. Then what are you guilty about? You know, I mean, If you didn't, You know, What we do, Part of our guilt is that we play God. We think we're supposed to know everything. We're so hard on ourselves that we're supposed to be able to see into the future and prevent bad things from happening. And it's just impossible. You know, We can't if you had no malice in your intention, Setting this situation up. And then something happened the way you didn't plan on it happening. That's that happens. So you know, You need to forgive yourself for that. Look at it realistically and and and love yourself enough to be like, Well, I know that it was wasn't intentional. So I can't beat myself up for something that was unintentional. You know, And then the other aspect of it is you never know how the other person's going to feel. So when it when it involves another person, Speak to them about it. Openness and honesty is huge. It's huge because one of the reasons why it's huge is because people don't use it that often. So when people do use it, It blows other people away. You know, I don't know how many times that I've just walked up to somebody and been like, You know, Hey, I was feeling bad about this. And I just want to clear the air. And they're like, They're blown away that I even brought it up. You know, And they respected me more and felt closer to me. A lot of people in my inner circle share things with me that are very personal because they trust me because I'm open with them. That gives them the comfort level of safety to be open with me. You know, And and that's because I do I try to do this type of stuff as much as I can. So when it involves another person, Go up and say, You know what, I felt bad that that happened. You know, And I want to apologize if, You know, Just bring it up in the air and discuss it and then they can get their feelings out. You get their feelings, Your feelings out and it clears the air and then you can move on from there. OK, So as I said, We're going to continue escalating. And this is scary. This is the peak. This is what I would like to consider. Maybe I'm wrong, But the ultimate guilt, Which is someone has someone has passed away in the situation when someone passes away and there's always the guilt. Someone always has guilt when someone dies of, Oh, The last thing that I said to them or I never, You know, I didn't go to visit grandma, The nursing home or I should have told them I loved them more or, You know, Or or even worse than that, A situation where you inadvertently caused, You know, A situation like a car accident. You know, How does someone deal with that kind of grief that comes with the finality of not being able to clear the air with that person? Right. Yeah. And it's, You know, It's important where you just said at the end, Too, Is deal with that sort of grief that comes along with that. You know, One important thing is to know that that's two separate things. The guilt you have and the grief you're going through are two different things and you need to separate those because people, You know, Bad feelings feel like bad feelings. So people will keep them all together and one will feed the other one. You know, So you'll be like, Oh, My God, They're gone. I feel so horrible that they're gone and I didn't do this to them and I never told them that I love them. And now they're gone forever. And it's just a tennis match and it goes back and forth and you just beat yourself up over and over and over. You know, So that's that's, You know, One thing you need to do is separate the two. I mean, You feel guilty about not telling them you love them, For instance. And you're also sad that they're no longer with you. Those are two separate things. You know, Don't tie them together. And you know, There's two aspects of dealing with the guilt with somebody that's past. One is what you can do about it. The other one is more faith based. You know, There's a large percentage of our community believes in something. It could be God, It could be a higher power, It could be whatever you want to call it. But they believe that there's something out there. And most people believe that there's something after death. And most people believe it's good. You know, So if you're sitting there going, You know, That that's the thing about death is, For me, It's an ongoing process, As my spirituality grows on how I view death, I get better and better at it. So it's not like a light switch. Also now you can deal with death good. I was at my grandmother's funeral, And I had a very healthy what I consider a very healthy view of death. But during a funeral is very difficult for me. And it's because of that, I wanted her to still be here. Just simple as that. It wasn't because of anything, Any guilt I felt or anything, I just was sad that she wasn't going to be in front of me anymore. So there's an aspect of that, That that that is real. And we need to work through that and accept that that person isn't with us in that way anymore. The other aspect of it is, If you know, Most people are thinking of their loved ones in heaven, Why are we so sad and worried about them? If we believe in some sort of happy, Peaceful, Loving afterlife? Why do you like you think they're up in heaven pacing back and forth and going that sob never said they loved me? Probably not. They're finally at peace. They're finally feeling good. They're finally, You know, Feeling the love. And they're looking down on us with a lot larger perspective. They completely understand if we didn't say a particular thing, They know that we love them. You know, So there's that's the faith based aspect of it. The other aspect of it is whether somebody's past or here, There's always something that we can do to take action and kind of clear the air with them. With people that have passed a lot of times we can write a write a letter to them, Write a letter to them, You know, Expressing all our feelings and apologizing for anything we want to apologize for and go you can go to their grave if that's what you believe in. You can do it at your home. You can do whatever you want. But sit there read that letter with with feeling, You know, And and knowing that they're hearing you and release it. You know, Sometimes people don't do that type of thing because they think it sounds silly. Oh, That's not going to do anything. Well, If you actually put some intention behind it, It's going to do a lot for you because at the end of the day, Forgiveness is all self forgiveness. It's just about forgiving yourself. So if you can just because we can never make anybody forgive us. We can't make them whether they're living or whether they're dead, We can't make them forgive us. So we have no control and honestly, We don't even really know what's going on inside of them. Somebody can look as dead in the eye and go, No problem, I forgive you and they can walk away just as pissed as they were two seconds prior. You know, So we don't know when we when we make amends and when we forgive that's taking taking it off of our plate. It's doing what we can, Whatever we can to say, Hey, I did this, I'm sorry. And when you take that action, It removes the guilt if you allow it. You know, If you want to hang on to the guilt is that you can take all the action in the world, It's not going to do anything. But if you do take the action with the intention that when I am done this, I am going to be free of the guilt and I'm going to forgive myself and I know in my heart that I did everything I could to straighten this situation out and move forward with my life. That's what you do. Awesome. All right. Well, Now it is the portion of the show where we get to a question that was sent in. And while I pull that up, Why don't you let people know where they can send these questions to a ride to send the questions to you can private message me on Facebook. My Facebook page is life enhancement services. You can look me up personally, Glen Ambrose on Facebook. And also my website is life dash enhancement dash services dot com. And you can you can message me through that website. And my email address is G Ambrose dot L E S at Gmail dot com. All right. And as always, Your questions will be 100 percent anonymous. Oh, Yeah. When we read them over the podcast. All right. Today's question. Dear Glenn, That's me. That is you. Yes. I often have feelings of guilt about the things that I have done wrong as regards to my healthy choice living style. Is there any way to deal with them immediately when they come up or to stop having the feelings of guilt altogether? The dealing with the guilt that comes up, It's a lot of it really is. I touched on it a little bit before, But it's really just putting it behind you is a big trick is to look at the larger picture. We need to look at the larger picture. Like often I'll tell my personal training clients, If you if you treat your body one way 350 days out of the year and another way 15 days out of the year, You're going to have a really healthy body. So we have to take each moment at a time and be able to just drop it, Drop the negativity and move past it and make healthier choices that as we move forward, The trap that we get into is the guilt. The guilt feeds the guilt. So if you feel guilty and you hang on to that, Then you just keep feeling worse. If you drop it, Draw a line in the sand and say, Okay, I'm starting fresh here, What can I do? Then if even if you have to start your day over three different times, So what? You've got the opportunity to have probably 75% of a good day instead of 100% of a bad day. That's what it is. It's not falling into it and hanging there. It's just learning from it, Putting it down without judging yourself. That's I think the biggest key is we're so judgmental. We judge ourselves over every little thing that we don't do perfectly. We're our own worst enemies. We have to stop judging ourselves and just stop, Okay, How can I do better? And just keep moving forward. And if we stay focused on doing things better and doing things healthier, Eventually we're going to get there. So you could completely screw up an entire day. You could start your day over 20 times and not do one good thing right. And that's still progress because at least you stopped yourself, Drew a line in the sand and you got a little bit better at not hanging on to the negativity and starting over. So maybe the next day you only start over 15 times instead of 20. You make one good choice. But at least if you're staying in the solution, Staying focused on the positive and doing better instead of staying stuck in the problem, Then eventually little by little you'll chip your way around out of it. And then what happens is it could be a month later you're standing there and you're doing all these good things and you're like, Oh my God, How did I get here? What happened? We always think that the big things that we, To get somewhere we have to take these huge steps and it's not, We just need to stay focused on doing the right thing and keep heading in that direction. Yeah, That was one of the first things that you ever talked to me about was just always look for the next right thing and to not beat yourself up about it and to just, If you're always consciously trying to move forward, You will. And it's a lot better than beating yourself up and feeling guilty about all of the stuff that's come before. Acknowledging that that was bad and that that's why you're trying to make the right choices I think is healthy, Right? Right, Yeah. I mean, The difference is intellectual compared to emotional. We can look back on things intellectually and say, I shouldn't have done that. How can I do better? That's in your mind. When it comes into our emotional being and we start going, Oh my God, I shouldn't have done that. That's when it's useless. We can learn from the past. We just don't want to relive it and just feel it over and over. I think that's, From your personal experience, I think that you've seen it work. Yeah, Definitely. If you just keep looking forward, Looking towards the positive, Then all of a sudden you stop finding yourself making better decisions a little bit here and there. And then all of a sudden you wake up and you're like, Holy crap, I made a bunch of good decisions in a row. I've found that with not just the fitness regimen or whatever, But in all aspects of life, When I'm producing a show, If we continue to look forward to what is the next thing that we have to do correctly, The show usually ends up pretty well. But pretty good. I don't know if I said that right. But when we start going, Oh no, This just happened or oh no, I did this wrong, And then we sit in that, That's when there are problems usually. But if you're always just looking forward and going, All right, What's the next right thing I could do? Yeah, Absolutely. And it is in every area of our life. That's why I bet you you can see it in editing things. If you're recording something that the person that you're recording keeps staying in when they make a mistake and oh no, It's probably very choppy and it never picks up and never pulls out of that. But if you just go with it, Eventually you'll pull yourself out of it. And if you learn to do things, That's one of the things that I'm doing with the podcast is just going with it. If I screw up or make a mistake, I'm just going to keep going because I'm not going to let it stop me and screw up the rest of the podcast. Now if there's a little bit of editing to be done, So be it. But I bet you if I stay doing it this way, There's going to be less editing and less editing as we move forward. Whereas if I kept letting myself get stuck in that, There would just be more and more. So yeah, That's a good example of how it can play out in other areas and you can take that and spread it out into your own life, How it can affect yourself in certain specific ways in your own life. So I think that is going to do it for the guilt. Let's get out of the guilt. Wrap it up for the guilt show and move on to happier, Healthy things. So I want to say thank you for joining me for the podcast and that's going to do it. I'll see you next time. This podcast is presented by Life Enhancement Services of Rhode Island with New Shore Productions. For more information on Glenn Ambrose and his work, Visit life-enhancement-services. Com.
4.6 (223)
Alice
July 10, 2022
Another excellent talk. I especially love when you said all forgiveness is about self forgiveness. I thought about all the people and situations I have trouble forgiving and when I looked at them from the perspective of forgiving myself, the energy shifted in a positive way. IT was also helpful to learn that guilt and grief are two separate things. Thank you 🙏💫🤍
Sarah
April 30, 2020
Thankyou for talking that through with me - I recently experienced a death and this has helped me process my thoughts and feelings, much appreciated 👍
Julie
July 4, 2019
Great tips in this one!
Anna
April 20, 2019
Really supportive and down to earth podcast. I feel better after listening, prior to it I wasn't feeling so good. Can you recommend any podcasts particularly around self acceptance please? Thanks Glenn.
Peaceful
March 29, 2019
I can control what's going on in my head. Guilt only leaves me in quicksand. The sooner I forgive myself and let go and accept myself after hiccup the sooner I can continue living life and evolving as I grow.
Kristine
March 23, 2019
Insightful! Thank you!
Dave
March 16, 2019
Thanks so much for turning around guilt and looking and dealing with it in another more positive way.
Frances
January 31, 2019
I really needed to hear this one today, thank you... Love the concept of starting the day again to make things feel better... You're all stars ✨💜x
Colleen
April 30, 2018
I loved this one, and I love it when he reminds us that we can start our days over whenever we want!
Jo
November 7, 2017
Always so helpful. Thank you 🙏
Veronica
September 22, 2017
Really enjoyed listening to this since guilt has been coming up a lot for me. I found the tips helpful
Chefy
April 10, 2017
Lifts me up!! Thank you ✨✨✨
Marie-Loup
March 27, 2017
Great way to start the day! Merci!
Uma
February 27, 2017
Really loved the casual yet gentle approach and style of his talking... Makes me feel a lot lighter about life.. Namaste 🙏💛😃
Karen
February 3, 2017
I love this guy. So real. So practical.
Margaret
January 20, 2017
At first I felt like these were "tough love" but the more I listen the more I appreciate the plain, everyday language providing very meaningful lessons. Thank u!
Kit
January 17, 2017
Really enjoy Glenn's perspectives about life struggles 🙏
Kate
January 16, 2017
Always awesome 🙏🏼❤️💓🌟
Oivi
January 12, 2017
Thank you for these comforting words!
Katie
December 1, 2016
Guilt can be a very difficult thing to deal with.
