Is that G word getting in the way of your goals?
Where ever your guilt originates from, finding the root cause will help you uncover the reasons behind your self sabotaging methods which will effect every area of your life including reaching your goals.
You see all our memories , thoughts, feelings and emotions get all bundled up together, our conscious mind stores all these like for like experiences together to save us the hassle of processing them. If you can imagine your brain like a huge storage unit and every time we expereince an emotion, feeling or thought that will be stored as memory in our storage facility.
So Guilt will have its own designated area, lets make it a green area where everything we experience and associate with guilt will trigger all those memories to come to the fore. I always think of my brain activity as loads of little men being called to atttention- ”Come on lads, we need reinforcements, this is a case of severe guilt were dealing with” I’m guilty of using blue to highlight the colour green a moment ago and that would of triggered a response in your brain to acknowledge that. This happens instantaneus so usually you won’t notice unless you have awareness of your thought patterns.
So once the guilt trigger is activated, it could just be over a minor thing, the guilt section of your brain storage unit gets flooded with all the memories associated with guilt, providing you with more “evidence” and “proof” why you should feel guilty. This happens with every single emotion we feel. First we have a thought then we experience a feeling then the full emotion. For a thought to turn into a feeling we must hold that same thought for a while, then we begin feeling it . Once we feel it and hold onto that feeling it causes an emotional response in our bodies. think butterflies in your stomach, your face or neck going red, for some people the colour drains from them, a headache – thes are the physical indicators of an emotional response.
3 clues that guilt is running your life
- Every time you find yourself reaching the next level of success a major life experience occurs to stop you progressing e.g illness, pregnancy, broken bones or injury
- Major Mummy Guilt – when you are working you feel guilty , when you are not you feel guilty
- Whenever you do or get something for yourself you need to justify it to yourself first
Benefits of Guilt
- Guilt works best to help us grow and mature when our behavior has been offensive or hurtful to others or ourselves.
- Healthy guilt is telling us we need to do something different in order to repair relationships that are important to us
- The feeling of guilt is trying to get our attention so that we can learn something from the experience. If we learn from our behavior, we’ll be less likely to do it again in the future.
How to change state from a negative to a more positive emotion
You just need to replace the thought with a slightly better one. If you think of your thoughts on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the worst you can feel) If you are feeling a 10 ( really strong negative emotion, like guilt for no reason) replace it with a feeling of 9 ( still feels bad but not as bad) then carry on replacing the thought until you’re neutral then make yourself a cup of tea and it’ll all be alright.
