Free Yourself From Excessive Guilt Part 1

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about everyone's favorite topic, guilt. And this is something that you might be very consciously familiar with. You might feel a lot of guilt in different relationships in your life or maybe chronically all the time. You also might be experiencing a lot of the effects of guilt without even knowing that it's guilt. And it could be steering your behavior. It could be receding into what I call the background radiation, which I'll talk about in today's episode. And you might be surprised at how much guilt you feel, even if you don't think, oh, I feel very guilty for the things that I've done, or you imagine guilt is limited to certain very egregious violations of your own ethics or morals. Actually, no. You're going to discover how prevalent guilt can be, how it might be dominating much of your choices and your emotions without you even knowing about it. So I'm excited to share this with you. I think it's going to be extremely liberating and. And thanks for joining. If you're benefiting from this show, I highly recommend that you share it with somebody that you think could benefit from this as well. Because we're all in this together. I know that much I've been doing, I guess you'd call it more reflection, soul searching, meaning, purpose, exploration as of late. I don't know why. Maybe it's because my birthday is coming up. But there seems like there's kind of, you know, you can hold on to a certain belief or ideology or identity, like I'm this kind of person or I do this kind of thing or. And whatever it is, as soon as I do that, it feels like life comes and then there's a change or an evolution or something that gave me a sense of certainty in the past falls away. And maybe you've experienced this. And don't worry, we're not going to go down an existential rabbit hole in this show, we're going to stay focused on guilt. But just so you know where I'm coming from more, I will sometimes feel a sense of groundlessness around purpose and meaning, even though I have many things in my life that give me a great sense of meaning. You know, being a parent or having an amazing partner, doing this work and really helping people in a meaningful way. And yet, in spite of all that, there can be times where I feel. I feel this vague sense of what are we doing here and what's the point? And what I'm looking for is some very singular, simple purpose. Like it's just do X and it's simple and it's clear and there's no more confusion. Now, I'll let you know when that happens, if that happens. But in the meantime, you know, what I just fall back on is we choose our own purpose at the end of the day, and nothing, maybe nothing, is inherently universally meaningful. And one thing I come back to is, you know, well, I don't know about humans place in all this. I don't even know if humans are an amazing species. I mean, we are amazing in some ways, and we're extremely destructive in other ways. So, you know, what are we doing? Are we good or bad? Are we for the benefit of everything or destructive? You know, who knows? You can find your own philosophies around all that. I'm not here to tell you that. But what I do come back to is, you know what, Even if it's arbitrary, even if we decide it, I think it does matter who we touch. And I just choose to reinforce that. Perhaps just because you need some sort of compass, you need some sort of North Star, don't you? And so for me, one of those North Stars is Operation Mass Liberation. Let's help wake people up so they're not crippled by doubt and self judgment and really oppressing ourselves inside. So you can become your most free, bold, confident version of you. So I want that for you, but I also want that, and I also want that I should say, for everyone. So if there's someone in your life that you think could benefit from this show, this episode, please let them know. Share it with them. And if you want to give it a review on itunes as well, that really supports the show. All right, so maybe there'll be a whole other episode about purpose and meaning, but for now, let's talk about guilt. How often do you consciously feel guilty? Do you feel guilty right now? What is guilt like? What's the experience of guilt. In fact, let's discover that for a minute first, so we know what we're talking about. Can you think of a time that you felt guilty? And maybe it's right now, in which case, what's happening right now? Or maybe it's something that comes up time to time. What's the situation you tend to feel guilty about or in? You got something. Okay. What is the experience of guilt? I could give you definitions and we could describe it in some sort of cognitive terms. But what is your visceral experience? That's what I'm most interested in. Do you squeeze? Do you tighten up? Do you hold your breath? You know, one of the qualities it feels like when I experience guilt is almost like I'm a kid in trouble, you know, like, oh, no, the teacher is going to talk to my parents. I'm, like, bracing myself. But it has a quality of fear to it, doesn't it? That's what I've seen in myself and other clients. There's a quality of fear to guilt, and there's also a quality of shame or badness or wrongness, isn't there? So it's not like fear like, oh, I'm scared of heights, or something like that. It's the fear that's related to your badness or wrongness in some way, maybe because you are, quote, bad or wrong. I'm not saying you are. I'm just saying that's what guilt feels like. It's the message of the guilt. Now, because of that, something bad's gonna happen. Someone's gonna hurt me. Someone's gonna yell at me. Someone's gonna say something that's gonna make me feel bad. And so then now I'm tense and I'm braced, right? So that would be the relationship between the fear and the shame. So what? What's going on here? What's up with that? Is that useful? Because we tend to have some. Not only experience of guilt, but then some ideas about guilt, like. Well, on some level, I'm not saying you walk around saying this or you have this on a T shirt or a bumper sticker, but you might think guilt is good. I know it sounds crazy, but some part of you might. Guilt is good. Why is guilt good? Well, guilt means I have a conscience. Guilt means I'm a good person. Guilt means I'm better than those people who don't care. Thank you very much. Get a little righteousness sprinkled on there. So maybe we think it's good, you know. Did your parents use guilt to make you do stuff to make you a better person. Don't do that to your brother, your sister. How awful of you. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should know better. What's wrong with you? And then you feel real bad, like, oh, no, I'm bad and wrong. I'm scared. Oh, okay, fine, fine. I won't do it to my sister anymore. I'm sorry. Right. Maybe you do it to your own kids. Maybe do it to yourself. How could you forget that thing? Oh my gosh, I'm so stupid. I'm an idiot. So do you have some idea that guilt is necessary, important? Maybe it's, you know, doesn't feel good, but it's good for you in some way. And maybe, I mean, you could make a distinction between perhaps constructive guilt and destructive guilt. And that's something I talk about some in not nice. I think I might call it healthy guilt versus unhealthy guilt in there. But it's the same. Same thing, just different, different terms. And we could look at that. I'm going to guess that most of the guilt you feel is probably destructive or unhealthy. And then there's this layer on top like, no, this is good for me. I need this, I deserve this. Which is more kind of like guilt sort of thinking like, you know, just guilt is very punishment oriented. And there might be, there is a place for punishment. I mean, some people will say there is no place for punishment. I believe that there is. Now we. When I say punishment, punishment in the strictest behavioral definition means to add something unpleasant or remove something pleasant as a consequence of a behavior. Right? People don't like the word punishment these days, so they'll say consequence. It's the same thing, It's a punishment. But people don't like that word because they think, oh, punishment means beating somebody or incarcerating somebody or something like that. But you know, in simple terms, hey, if you hit your brother with that stick, we're gonna take the stick away, right? So the punishment there is a removal of something the kid likes, which is a stick. And there might be a place for that. So let's talk about the narrow definition of healthy guilt. And then assume that 98% of the guilt you're feeling is probably unhealthy and that there might be some difficulties, dissonance inside of you right now as you hear that and you're like, no, no, no, I'm a bad person or I need to feel this, right? No, that's the old identity. That's this chronic addiction to the Badness that just comes from what you learned and absorbed. And it's a sense of familiarity, but it's not helpful and it's not you. And you can do so much better in terms of kindness and love and connection and relationships without all that burden of unhealthy guilt. So let's look at the instances where guilt might become constructive or healthy. Well, it is in the event that you do something that feels like it's outside of your values or your integrity. And as you can hear, I'm emphasizing your. Because a lot of people feel guilt based upon other people's rules, not your own. We'll get to that in a minute. But let's say it's outside of your values. You behave outside of that, and then afterwards you feel guilt. And the guilt is a sense of, I've done something that's outside of my values and it doesn't feel good. And in that case, it can be like a mechanism on your dashboard. You know, this is a metaphor here. You don't literally have a dashboard in your brain, as far as I know, but it's. Imagine you have a feedback system, and that's the feedback saying, hey, doesn't feel good. Whether it's, you know, fudging some information to deceive someone or leave something out or, you know, you took a little more of the thing than you said, oh, it was this amount and you rounded it so that you got more, or you had an agreement with someone and you broke the agreement. Now they might never know, but you feel that, you know, that might happen in a romantic relationship. Perhaps you have an agreement with your partner for monogamy and, and I don't know, I guess it could go so far as sleeping with somebody, but maybe you do something that's kind of like, you know, is outside of the bounds of that agreement and whatever your rationalization was at the time or something, and then now the next day or whatever, and you're like, whoa, I feel guilt, right? Because that's maybe outside of your integrity, outside of your values. That's a fairly large example. There might be something much smaller. You said to someone, I will be there at 4 o' clock to pick you up. And then 4 o' clock rolls around and you forgot all about it. You find out at five, you're like, oh, no, ah, you might feel guilty, right? And that's like, oh, that's showing me that I want to keep my word with this person or I want to be, you know, in integrity with my partner. So far, so good, right? Okay, well, it can quickly veer into unhealthy guilt even in those circumstances. Because what happens is, let's say you do forget to pick that person up at 4 o'. Clock. You remember, oh no, I feel guilty. Okay, then what will happen is people will spiral. It might be in a source that they actually agree with, like they don't want to break that, you know, that value. But then they go to town on themselves. So it quickly turns into unhealthy guilt, which is very self attacking, very punishing. What's wrong with you? How could you forget this? How could you do this? You're so awful, you're so bad. And we think, oh no, that's what I, you know, that's healthy guilt because I did that bad thing. And that would be the equivalent. And the sort of punishment or consequence analogy is like if you hit your brother with a stick, I'll punch you in the face and you know, put you in your room for four days without food. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second here. You know, consequence, okay, that crazy. That's abuse. Right? Right. You know what would be an appropriate consequence? I don't know, you take the stick away or you send them to their room for five or ten minutes or something based upon their age. Right. So you know, it fits the level of the rule that they broke. But what will often happen is people will break. I see this all the time with clients. I felt it in myself. People will break a very minor rule and, and then they'll punish themselves as if it's something they need to be expunged almost of badness. It's a very intense form of self aggression and self attack or self hatred that's waiting for these opportunities. Then on top of that, there's no quick way out. Because if it's healthy guilt, if you're wondering how to tell the difference, here's a little tip for you. And healthy guilt is there's a way out because there's a road illuminated by the guilt for what to do now to make amends and, or what to do in the future. And if you decide and do the making amends if possible, or if needed, or you decide and do and change and upgrade your behavior for the future, then you feel good and it resolves relatively quickly within a day, depending upon the circumstances. And the faster you take the appropriate action, either the communication you need to take or make the decisions inside of yourself to hold yourself to a higher standard and continue on the path of your values and integrity, then you know, resolves very quickly. But the unhealthy guilt, oh, it just goes on and on. There's no way out. And that's kind of the point. That's kind of the point. We'll talk about that in just a moment, because now let's talk more about unhealthy guilt. Unhealthy guilt arises from often. Well, either it's extreme reaction to breaking one of your own rules, or more often, you're breaking rules that you don't even know you have. They're not even yours. So someone's disappointed in you. I feel so terrible. I feel so bad. Oh, no, I'm so nervous. I'm anxious. Something's wrong, I've done wrong. And we don't even pause to say, wait a minute, what's the rule here? The rule is, you know, so and so should never be disappointed with me or no one should ever be disappointed with me. Maybe you feel anxious taking an afternoon off or taking it easy on a workday. And it's like, you don't know why, but the rule under there is you got to be working hard, you know, on the clock, splitting the boulders 10 hours a day. Let's go. You know, maybe you feel this background guilt because you have something and other humans don't. Maybe you live in a wealthy country or you have access to resources and, you know, there's billions of humans that don't. You might feel guilt like, oh, I feel so bad about that. Ah, what's the rule? You know, I should never have anything that other people don't have. And these are often unconscious. You know, you just see something on the screen. You see an image of someone suffering. You see a. You know, you remember something that you are supposed to do. You are just at your desk working. You don't even know the rule. But this guilt is in the background, and it becomes this thing that I call the background radiation, where it recedes into the distance. You don't even know about it. You don't even necessarily hear it directly. I'm currently tinkering with another book. This one's going to come out. The next one that's coming out very soon. We're coming out in November 2021 here, which is called 100 wins in 100 days. But I'm already tinkering on the one after that, which I think will be a fan favorite, because we're getting back to this topic of niceness. It's going to be called less Nice, more you. And in it, I talk about the background radiation and it's an interesting actual. I'm referencing something that's in physics, but I feel it applies to us psychologically. But it's a fascinating phenomenon of physics. So basically, they theorized about the Big Bang and how everything emanated from a singular point. All everything, all gas, all matter, and it exploded outwards insanely fast and insanely hot at first, and then has cooled down and slowed down over time. And so the physicists theorized, well, hey, if this explosion did happen and that heat just. And that energy shot out into space, it should still be going out there. It'll just have cooled down radically, so it won't be this white hot plasma substance. It'll be something more in the range of. And they did some calculations with their doohickeys and their abacuses and their math, and they said, oh, it should be about this frequency and it should be way out kind of in the background of everything. So imagine like a balloon that you blow up and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. That's kind of what this thing. It would just go further and further and further and further out in all directions. And then, I don't know when maybe it was like 30 years later, people had instruments to measure that kind of frequency of radiation. And they discovered it by accident, these people working at Bell Laboratory, a phone company. And, and they were, you know, they had this receiver they were building and they built the receiver and it was picking stuff up, and it turns out it was picking stuff up from any direction. They pointed it everywhere, all over the place. Anyway, there's these people who are trying to discover and find evidence of this background radiation. And they got in touch with these Bell Lab people and they're like, aha, that's it. And so there it is. It is everywhere, all around us, where we could, quote, hear it all the time if we had the sensory acuity to hear it. But we can't. But through instruments, we can measure it. It's there. And that's what your guilt is like. It's there. And if your sensory acuity is not strong enough, you don't feel it until it's like a real strong guilt storm that like, you know, pummels you. And then you get through it and you're like, I made it. I go back to life as usual, which is life in the box, which is don't upset anybody and don't make sure I don't make any mistakes and follow all the rules and Everybody's rules. Not even just mine, but everybody's. Because I don't want to feel guilty if someone's upset with me, I should feel guilty. There's these if than, if than. If than. Thousands of them, most of which you're not conscious of. So what does that lead us to? I mean, we're doomed, right? You're just doomed. The radiation's everywhere. You're breathing it in right now. No, no, there's good news. There's always good news. Because liberation is always possible. Every problem has a solution. You just got to understand what's going on first. First of all, can you relate to this? And I want you to study this. In fact, the solution is going to be a two parter and I'm going to give it to you in your action step. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step is going to be one. To study what I'm sharing with you for your own, for yourself, for your own experience. To see what is so for you. See if you notice the guilt. See if you notice it in the background. See if you notice it coming up at certain times. Does it go into extreme punishment? Is it your rules or someone else's rules? Just really reflect on this. You want to listen to the episode again to get it even more? Absolutely do so. The second part of the action step, after observation or awareness, is to start to deconstruct these rules. And that is so valuable that we're going to actually have a whole other episode on how to deconstruct the rules. I just thought of that right now. I'm just realizing, like, to jam it all into one action step is probably suboptimal. So we're going to have another episode after this one that is about how to deconstruct these rules and free yourself. So let's add a little bit more to your awareness action step and then we'll give you more of the way out in the next episode. So as you become aware of the guilt, also start to ask yourself, what rule did I break to create this guilt? See if you can uncover it. There might be multiple rules, but there's usually just at least one. You know, I shouldn't. Should or shouldn't is usually the language of the rules. Shouldn't someone shouldn't be upset with me? You know, I should never let anybody down. I shouldn't make anyone uncomfortable. Whatever you discover, those are the rules. And a great follow up question is, whose rule is this? Is this my rule? Is this someone else's rule? Hmm, interesting. And that will set you up for deconstructing these rules, which we'll talk about in an upcoming episode of this show. Fantastic. Thanks for being with me today. I can't wait to hear more about your growth and your journey. If you're not already a member of our Confidence Warriors Facebook group, it's absolutely free. Go join that and get support and connection and accountability with other people on this journey with you until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.