NAMELESS GUILT
A
number of years ago my wife, Brenda, conducted classes in self-awareness and
self-development based on the principles of Attitudinal Healing and on what she
had learned from her life’s experiences. She ran night-time classes every week
for 10 weeks covering a range of subjects encompassing meditation techniques
designed to assist people to still their busy thoughts, and look within their
own minds to see things differently in order to find answers to their problems.
I attended these classes to lend Brenda a hand.
A hot topic at one of these particular sessions
was letting go of guilt. Brenda’s view, and mine, was that guilt was the
underlying source of all of our problems and conflicts. Guilt generates fear in
all its guises – anxiety; self-doubt; feelings of unworthiness; anger;
insecurity; debilitating addictions; depression and so on. In our minds, guilt
implies that we deserve, and should expect, punishment.
I remember one participant, a man in his 60s
I’d guess, telling the group that all of his life he had wrestled with guilty
emotions, but most times he couldn’t identify the reasons behind his guilty
feelings. He described his experience as “nameless guilt”.
What he said struck a chord with me because
most of my life I’d suffered from the same affliction.
I think I first became aware
of these guilty feelings after reaching puberty, although it was many years
later that my suppressed and denied guilty feelings surfaced into my conscious
awareness.
I
can now understand, in my teens, how the changes to my rapidly maturing body,
the production of hormones that stimulates libido, and the concurrent onset of
a kaleidoscope of confused feelings and emotions revolving around sexual urges
and sexual impulses, contributed to a shameful sense that my thoughts, feelings
and fantasies were wrong, dirty and sinful. Guilt, at least at a subconscious
level, followed.
Like most boys of my generation, my sex
education mainly came from other boys, based on macho, ill-informed,
self-gratifying conversations about treating females disrespectfully as merely
objects to satisfy the sexual desires of testosterone-driven young males.
On reflection, there were many other causes
of a growing stockpile of guilt that was pushing its way up through my
subconscious to my conscious mind. Other things that made me feel ashamed of
myself because I knew I had done the wrong thing. Like lying or cheating; or
attacking others to save my thin skin; or holding grievances; or seeking
revenge; or selling out in order to be approved of; to name a few.
By the time I was in my mid-thirties,
“nameless guilt” was plaguing me. Although my ego put up a false front of bravado,
self-confidence and know-it-allness - fooling most of the people most of the
time - the person I thought I was, was a lot different to my phoney public
persona. This was taking its toll on me, with my self-doubts plaguing me and my
shame constantly haunting me. This led to some disastrous relationships,
marriage breakdowns, binge drinking to escape from the person I thought I was
and a slide into despair, anger and depression.
It’s taken me many years to understand that
my path in life, like most people, is strewn with mistakes, wrong decisions and
poor choices and I can either capitulate under the heavy weight of my guilt and
shame for these errors, or I can look at them honestly, admit my mistakes and
learn from them.
The past is over. I can’t go back and change
what has happened. All I can do, is be aware of what I did wrong and be
determined not to repeat those mistakes by making better choices now and in the
future.
“Nameless guilt” has assisted in bringing me
to where I’m now at in my attitude and behaviour. It’s no longer the heavy
weight it used to be.
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