Breaking Free from Guilt: A Guide to Embracing Self-Compassion
Guilt often plays out something like this…
You have a group of friends, and one friend invites you to do something on the weekend. When some of the other friends ask what you're doing on the weekend, you're not sure whether to tell the truth, lie, or invite them along. Whatever you choose, you feel guilty.
Or perhaps you attend an evening event for work but end up missing parent-teacher interviews. The thought of skipping the work event stresses you out, and you worry about what your coworkers, boss, and clients would think if you didn't go. So you attend and spend the whole night feeling guilty about missing parent-teacher interviews.
Then that guilt follows you home. You end up yelling at your husband before you leave the house, drive to the event in a bad mood, give someone the finger for cutting you off in traffic, have an extra drink so that you can act happy and pretend that you want to be there. When you get home, you wake your child up as you crawl into bed with them after they've fallen asleep so that you can get a little cuddle to make you feel better before retiring to your room. You grill your husband for all the details about how the interviews went and promise yourself that you'll cut back on work events. You miss the next event but feel so guilty for not showing up that you go to the next one, even though your child has a hockey game you'd like to watch.
When you get caught up in this never-ending cycle of trying to be everything for everyone, you stretch yourself too thin.
Here's another example.
You're in a relationship, and Christmas is coming. In your family tradition, you always have dinner, go to church on Christmas Eve, wake up early on Christmas Day and open presents, spend the day relaxing, and head off to your Aunt and Uncle's house on Boxing Day for an early dinner. In your partner's family, there's no church, presents are opened on Christmas Eve, Christmas day is spent visiting everyone from family to friends, and then they go on a vacation for the rest of the holiday. Now, add a new baby to the mix that everyone wants to spend the first Christmas with, as well as multiple marriages, half-siblings, and step-parents.
How is someone supposed to decide how to spend the holidays? Someone's going to be disappointed, so is it going to be your family or theirs? You compromise and make a jigsaw puzzle-type schedule where you feel exhausted and resentful and spend much of Christmas on the road travelling between destinations, trying not to pick fights or blame each other for the madness. You feel guilty when you're spending time with your people and not theirs, and you feel guilty when you're spending time with their people and not yours.
Research tells us that guilt is actually good and lets us know when we're behaving out of alignment with our integrity and values.
The difference between guilt and shame:
Guilt is I DID something bad
Shame is I AM bad
Guilt focuses on behavior, and shame focuses on the self. So if we had to pick one, guilt is best and often motivates us to change our behaviour and make amends.
Many women say they feel guilty because they feel pulled in many different directions with things that have competing priorities. I've even heard it called a "guilt complex," but it's not actually guilt we're feeling. It's a shame, and it's not helpful. Many, if not most, women and people socialized as women have this experience.
Why are women more prone to shame?
There are many reasons why we think this way. First of all, our society has given us expectations that we are supposed to live up to. We're supposed to care about our looks but not too much, be thin but don't work too hard at it, go to post-secondary, get married at a young age, have children, have a good career, keep the house clean, cook all the meals, raise the best kids, hide emotions, have nice things but not spend too much money, and do it all without breaking a sweat.
Another reason we feel shame is because all of these pressures impact our self-esteem and self-worth. In order to avoid shame, blame, and criticism, we try to protect ourselves with perfectionism. If we do everything perfectly, then we can finally be worthy of love and belonging. Anything short of perfection and we're destined to be worthless and unlovable.
Shame needs three things to thrive:
Secrecy
Silence
Judgement
To move through feelings of shame, start by noticing how you're feeling, talk about it, and stop judging yourself and others for it.
Ask yourself who you're trying to impress. If your friends and family love you, which we'll assume they do, would they really want you to be stressed and unhappy? Of course, they have their own preferences, but ultimately, your happiness is a priority. If we're worried about what acquaintances, neighbours, and society thinks, it's impossible to please these people 100% of the time, and we also need to ask if their opinions are actually important to us.
The antidote to shame is self-compassion.
We're often asked to make impossible decisions and live up to impossible standards, so giving ourselves the grace of self-compassion allows us to recognize that we're doing the best we can with the resources that are available to us at this moment. The better we get at doing this, the more compassion we can have for others as well.
I often tell my clients that our thoughts and feelings are just as important as other people's. This perspective helps us to consider what we truly want and ensures that our desires are part of the equation. You won't be able to please everyone all the time, so let that go and start to ask yourself what your priorities and values are so that you can use them as a decision-making tool. You may need to write down all of your thoughts and feelings in order to get clear on what you really want, but with practice, values-based decision-making will become second nature!
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