Depth Psychology Perspectives on Guilt and Shame Part 2

PART – TWO

• To understand guilt that is destructive and toxic.
• To understand the inner workings of survivor guilt.

What exactly is toxic guilt?

TOXIC GUILT

Toxic Guilt is a powerful feeling of humiliation and distress that occurs when you irrationally perceive that you have, committed a wrongful or injurious behavior that has mistreated or hurt yourself and/or another/others. This perception is both erroneous and distorted because there is no evidence to support any wrong doing.
This irrational guilt feeling places focus on a wrongful behavior choice that is in truth not wrong. This toxic guilt feeling is further defined by the presence of a self-blame that is both punitive and judgmental. This self-blame over prolonged time periods may become self-destructive.

Toxic guilt is also defined by the absence of a lesson that might lead the individual down a learning curve that might fix the error in judgment and help the individual acquire the ability to identify and discard wrongful or injurious behavior choices. This means that toxic guilt does not give the individual any way to fix the problem. There is only the constant barrage of self-blame and punitive judgment that ushers in a toxic shame.

Toxic guilt most commonly surrounds the notion of de-merits or irrationally penalizing each and every mistake we might make as an intentional and deliberate act of wrong doing or failure. This suggests that being incorrect or making a mistake requires a constant litany of I’m sorry as if our normal learning curve in life and in relationships is about deliberate failure and wrongfulness rather than the organic nature of learning. This means that the human learning process must allow for mistakes without the interruption of guilt in order to be healthy. If mistakes that are free of guilt toxins are not allowed than neither are we allowed to be human.

There are times when we are in the process of responding to healthy guilt after having discovered wrongs or injuries against others that we have indeed committed. However in the midst of our healthy self-accountability our focus shifts to a rather unhealthy self-recrimination. This means that we have left behind our learning process in favor of a self-blame, self-deprecating, self-punishment process which is to say we are now listening to toxic guilt rather than healthy guilt. This shift in focus from healthy guilt to toxic guilt while being overall quite common occurs most frequently with individuals who are already plagued with toxic shame. When toxic guilt takes over the healthy guilt process learning is derailed and we spend far more time then is necessary in the valley of the shadow.

Another demerit system that utilizes toxic guilt is found in our compensatory thinking system. This system of thought is employed to gain independence from foundational core beliefs that define our identity and worth. The compensatory thinking system sets up specific codes of conduct that must be followed in order to compensate for the core belief oppression such as the core belief that you are not good enough. These codes of conduct set up obedience regiments much like putting in daily treadmill miles to appease the demands of a particular discipline. This obedience and efforting then enable you to challenge the core belief giving you the ability to push back on the belief that you are not good enough. If for example you put in your perfection treadmill miles for the day, when the you’re not good enough belief comes knocking, you present your mileage proof for the day and send the core belief on its way. Some examples of these codes of conduct can be found in the compensatory systems of; perfectionism, righteousness, suffering, or superiority.

The martyr code for example which is a form of righteousness and suffering follows 4-specific creeds;

1. You must work longer and harder than everyone else.
2. You must produce and perform at a higher standard of quality and excellence than everyone else.
3. You must self-sacrifice and fulfill a daily self-sacrifice quota.
4. You must suffer long and suffer in silence.

When individuals who adhere to this martyr code break any of the creeds at any level the martyr character employed by the host will employ guilt to force the individual back to adherence to the code. For example if individuals who employ the martyr code say no to someone who is asking for a favor, the Martyr code/character will use toxic guilt suggesting to these individuals that they have just done something wrong. The guilt will be so uncomfortable that these individuals will lose sleep over their conviction that they wronged someone by not completing the favor. This is text book toxic /irrational guilt. The guilt is irrational because no wrong has been committed. There is no lesson to learn and the guilt has no plans to to leave once the lesson is learned because there never was a wrong committed in the first place. In the act of saying no to performing a favor there exists no intent to neglect nor any intent to injure or marginalize another soul. The guilt is toxic because the intent and demeanor of the guilt is punitive.

This toxic guilt claims that acts of self-care, such as acts of boundary setting or separating other time energy from me time energy, are acts of selfishness. The intent in the word selfishness surrounds entitlement and the belief that your needs and wants are more important than others. Individuals following the martyr code even on their laziest day could not come within 100-miles of that intent and would most likely have a town full of character witnesses who would support that truth. This toxic guilt also blames and shames individuals threatening the use of self-loathing which invites the negative core-beliefs to rush in with a barrage of messages surrounding failure and humiliation. To avoid that experience these individuals will give in and perform the favor. We should also note that the individuals under this code realize that if they disobey the code they will lose a critical part of their identity along with losing their primary defense against the onslaught of their core beliefs if they disobey the creeds of their code. This suggests that this self- imposed toxic guilt is possibly less about disappointing someone surrounding not performing a favor and more about pledging allegiance to an identity definition that comes with a code of conduct. This means that individuals tend to find the idea of no identity definition more terrifying than the idea of adopting an identity definition that facilitates suffering. This is the psychology of oppression serving a master (in this case the martyr) to avoid the greater fear (in this case the negative core beliefs) that your existence is not your own and your worthiness is not secure. This suggests that we solve this existential dilemma by courting illusions that we try to control rather than discovering authenticity that we learn to trust.

How is the guilt experienced by survivors different from regular guilt?

SURVIVOR GUILT

Survivor guilt while irrational, in the sense that the soldier did nothing wrong in the act of surviving what their brother did not survive, is also unique in that it is directly related to the intense nature of the grief and loss that accompanies losing ones loved one to death and more specifically to a violent death. Whether the survivor in battle or the survivor of a traffic accident, or the surviving parent of a child who passed in the Spring time of their short time here, being the soul that survived comes with that deep existential question why am I the one who survived? It is like suddenly being thrown to the deep existential side of the pool placing tremendous pressure on the survivor to figure out what’s so special about me?

The toxic nature of survivor guilt speaks of the self-blame and even self-hatred at times that comes with a deep sense of penance that surrounds the sense that you have done something wrong but can find no way to fix it. The idea that you have failed in some way for not having paid the Piper. According to the myth, a piper was hired to clear out the rats from the village of Hamelin. After he did so (by playing a song on his pipes), he was not paid for his work. His revenge for the lack of payment was to steal all the children of the town. The idea here is that survivors often feel that they are being punished for some sin that they cannot recall nor account for and they must pay this debt, they must urgently find atonement in order to move on with their life. Until that day of atonement they must sit in judgment upon themselves. This is viewed as the only way to honor the loss, but even more so the only way to pay the price for being the cause of the loss.

The survivor then spends much of their time in what is more commonly known as confirmation bias. They look at the loss through a lens of self blame and and make daily confirmations on those actions or inactions that confirm that they were the cause of the loved one’s passing. While the grief makes this toxic and irrational process seem quite logical the engine at the core of this cognitively distorted process surrounds the human dependence upon the illusion of control. Survivors believe at some core level that they should have been able to control the outcome. In order to maintain their faith in the illusion of control they must make case after case surrounding how it was that they could have and should have controlled the outcome.

In the end most survivors feel the conflict on whether to live for the ones who were lost in an effort to pay off the debt or whether to just be grateful to have survived and move on with your life somehow. But there seems to be no honor in the latter choice and moving on seems like a betrayal. This way of thinking adheres to the laws of justice, fairness, and the notion of getting what we deserve. Each of these surrounds the idea of controlling a design that we do not understand. This design does not seem to play by the rules of deserving and not deserving, nor fair or unfair. This design is hidden and seems to be following a plan to which we have no access. Individuals struggling with Survivor Guilt grapple with the difficult task of separating their irrational guilt from a grief that is rational. The line between the guilt and the grief is often quite blurred and at times disappears completely.

One approach to the survivor guilt dilemma is to focus first and foremost on the grief. Grief is designed to enable us to honor the one who has gone through death’s door. Focusing on the honor work first helps to separate the guilt issues from the grief issues. Grief is designed to acknowledge and honor the life, the attachment, and the memory of the one who has passed on. Grief is primarily about paying respect to the worth of the soul and the enormous value surrounding the bond to that soul along with the residual impressions left by that soul upon the souls of others. Grief helps us revere the truth that nothing is lost. The importance of this reverence for the sacred worth of each and every soul is often glimpsed first through the lessons of Grief.

The guilt issues surround the notion that the nature of toxic survivor guilt is truly about your perceptions and misperceptions about your own existence. This means that individuals who possess a deep understanding about the purpose and worthiness of their own existence are less likely to steer their canoe down survivor guilt thought streams. Those who do not possess such an understanding tend to use the loss of the loved one that they have survived as a reason to question the worthiness of their own existence. Thus, we might say that the tragedy in addition to being truly tragic also acts as a lens through which survivors view their life as one who is still here, still alive. This lens forces survivors to look at those preexisting perceptions of your existence and requires them to examine more closely that question that all sentient beings are here to answer, why are you here and what really is so special about you?