Earn This Life: How to turn guilt into fuel #healyourmind #podcast #mentalhealth

Even coming back from the war, I struggled a lot with survivor's guilt. I had lost a friend to the war. Like, when I was in Iraq, my vehicle drove over an active bomb that didn't explode for some reason. My friend's vehicle, when he was in Iraq, drove over a bomb. It exploded, and he died. Who knows why that happened? And I struggled with that for a long time. And everybody told me, don't feel guilty. It's not your fault. The guilt wasn't the problem. The only reason I felt guilt was it was an expression of love from my brother. It wasn't a bad emotion. So instead of demonizing it or trying to make it go away, when I went kind of deep down this path, after hitting that rock bottom to heal, to figure myself out, I reframed it. And I actually, for a long time, put a picture of my friend up on my wall, and it said, this should have been you. Earn this life. My guilt became my ally. My guilt became fuel to drive me forward. And any emotion can.

But guilt and shame, if you look at Hawkins scale, are at the very bottom. I mean, they vibrate at, like, 50 or 100. You obviously had to transcend that guilt and morph it into something else, because guilt is not a sustainable emotion to drive you forever. How do you do that?