How to stop feeling guilty. 9 tips from a clinical psychologist

People are often prone to self-criticism. As a rule, it is caused by increased criticism of one’s own person. People usually blame themselves for mistakes they have made in the past. This is not only unconstructive, but also has a destructive effect on the personality itself and its existence. How to stop blaming yourself? First of all, you need to allow yourself to make mistakes.

Often, self-examination is transformed into auto-aggression, which becomes a so-called brake that impedes self-development, self-improvement, establishing contacts, and relationships with the environment. Sometimes people mistakenly believe that self-flagellation helps to set motivation for “good” actions. However, such a view is misleading.

What did you feel or feel guilty about?

It is best to answer this question in writing. To make it easier for you, here are examples of other people's answers:

That I cannot alleviate the condition of clients, that I am powerless to help them quickly (I am a psychologist).
Because she had no time for the child, she yelled at everyone.
For the inability to help family/friends.
I don't do enough.
I felt guilty that I was not ready to sacrifice my health for the sake of my relatives.
Because I can take care of everyone in the best possible way, I don’t know exactly how.
Guilt for not being able to do everything I should do, for not meeting the expectations of loved ones.
Instead of getting a new profession (which is very necessary and which I was heading towards before the crisis), I baked pies and lay on the sofa.
Because she had grandiose plans and did nothing.
Guilt that someone else has problems around me, but I live happily.
Guilt for being irritated and angry with my husband.
For eating a lot.

Guilt complex in psychology

A child’s guilt complex is expressed in his inability to live normally and feel happy. This feeling is constantly present in his life, bringing negativity into it. It is very important to recognize the complex and begin to eliminate it.

In psychology, strict upbringing is often recognized as the cause of guilt in men and women. Parents use a reward system, instill in the child that he is obliged to meet their expectations. Such individuals do not live their own lives: the complex pushes them to constantly try to please their parents’ will. Children do not go where they want, but where their parents say. Guilt haunts them throughout life. They always feel like they are not good enough at what they do.

Another reason for a guilt complex lies in insecurity. A person becomes withdrawn and takes personally all the mistakes and failures that happen to him in life.

How is pathological feeling expressed?

Here are some signs that a person has developed this complex.

excessive touchiness;
tendency to self-flagellation;
lack of self-confidence;
giving up prospects and aspirations;
desire to punish oneself, a person does not love himself;
the desire to be led;

These signs indicate that the complex is fundamentally embedded in the individual. In most cases, this happens in childhood.

It is worth noting that the feeling of guilt is closely related to psychosomatics. Sometimes a person experiences a number of unpleasant symptoms:

frequent colds;
disturbances in the functioning of the heart and blood vessels;
problems with the musculoskeletal system;
frequent injuries.

In especially severe cases, self-harm and auto-aggression (conscious or unconscious self-harm) occur.

I should have...

Based on the answer to the first question, what should you or should not have done? What was the expectation that you violated? What should that state and behavior look like in which you would not feel guilty? In short, how were you supposed to function? What to do/what not to do?

Try to write it straight, even if it looks crazy - it doesn't matter. For example, if you understand that you should have been a superman, then write: “I had to be a superwoman so as not to feel guilty.”

Examples:

It’s a joy to learn, tidy up, and develop 28 hours a day. And there was nothing to unravel. Tyutya.
Be a support to clients in any star, even if I die myself; take care of the child in any condition.
To work successfully and do many other things, which many succeed, is not at all superhuman.
Continue studying with your teacher or at least study on your own.
To be support and support, to bring reassurance to an anxious partner, showing that I am nearby.
It’s better to be prepared: create more financial reserves just in case.
Be super calm and balanced.
Do your best and cope with stress quickly and without consequences for work.
Study every day and absorb tons of new knowledge.
Have a lot of resources to listen to loved ones, to devote a lot of time to them, not to buy anything for yourself, but to help people with money. Keep the kids more occupied. Don't be afraid, don't be cowardly.
Keep yourself in good physical shape.
I feel a lot of grief because my plans didn’t work out as planned, and I have no right to enjoy any other stability.
Hold on, be superhuman and not experience strong emotions.
Get enough sleep, pump up your abs, learn two languages and programming, be super smart, wise and prudent.

The answers often contain many descriptions that seem like overgeneralization: for example, “I should have always... never... regardless of any conditions or any corrections.” In short, this is a kind of code of a moral neurotic: “I must always be successful in all my endeavors.”

This is a direct path to guilt. The problem is that it is difficult for us not to have such expectations, because society and family invested them in us, and then we continued to invest them in ourselves.

I hope you have thought through your answers and seen that your expectations of yourself and others' expectations of you are excessive. Surely this understanding will help someone correct them a little.

David Burns: How to Deal with Guilt

Photo: Isai Ramos No book on depression would be complete without a chapter on guilt.
What is the function of guilt? Writers, spiritual leaders, psychologists and philosophers have been trying to answer this question for centuries. What is the feeling of guilt based on? Perhaps it was inspired by the concept of “original sin”? Or Oedipal incest fantasies and other taboos that Freud spoke of? Is guilt a realistic and beneficial component of the human experience? Or is it a “useless emotion” that humanity would be better off without, as some contemporary writers in the field of popular psychology have suggested? When computational mathematics emerged, scientists found that they could now easily solve complex motion and acceleration problems that had been extremely difficult to solve with older methods. Cognitive theory has similarly given us a kind of emotional "computational" tool that makes it easier to navigate through the thorns of philosophical and psychological issues.

Let's see what we can learn from the cognitive approach. Guilt is an emotion you feel when you have the following thoughts:

I did something I shouldn't have done (or didn't do what I should have done) and it doesn't meet my moral standards or notions of justice.
This kind of “bad behavior” shows that I am a bad person (or I have a tendency to cause harm, I have a spoiled character, a rotten inside, etc.).

The idea of one’s own “badness” is the main cause of feelings of guilt. Without it, actions that cause harm lead to healthy feelings of remorse, but not guilt. Remorse arises from an adequate understanding that you have intentionally and unjustifiably caused harm to yourself or another person, which violates your personal ethical standards. Remorse is different from guilt because it does not imply that your wrongdoing shows how bad, evil, or immoral you are. In short, you feel remorse or regret about your behavior, while guilt is directed towards your self.

If you're feeling depressed, ashamed, or anxious in addition to guilt, you're probably making one of the following assumptions in your mind:

My “bad behavior” makes me inferior or worthless (this interpretation leads to depression).
If others knew what I had done, they would begin to despise me (this thought causes a feeling of shame).
I may get revenge or be punished (this thought causes anxiety).

The easiest way to assess whether these feelings are beneficial or destructive is to determine whether they contain any of the ten cognitive distortions described in Chapter 3. If these thinking errors are present, your guilt, anxiety, depression, or shame is certainly unjustified and unrealistic . I suspect that you will find that many of your negative feelings are actually based on such thinking errors.

The first distortion when you feel guilty may be that you did something wrong. Perhaps this is true, but perhaps not. Is the behavior that you condemn in yourself actually so terrible, immoral, wrong? Or are you exaggerating the scale of the problem? A charming medical laboratory assistant recently brought me a sealed envelope with a piece of paper on which she had written something so terrible about herself that she could not say it out loud. When she handed me the envelope with trembling hands, she made me promise not to read it out loud and not to laugh at her. Inside was a message: “I pick my nose and eat boogers!” The foreboding of the catastrophe and the horror on her face contrasted so starkly with the little things written on the piece of paper that it made me laugh. I lost all professional composure and burst out laughing. Fortunately, she also laughed heartily and felt relieved.

Am I saying that you never behave badly? No. Such a position would be extremely unrealistic. I just want to emphasize that the more you exaggerate the scale of your mistakes, the greater the unnecessary torment and self-criticism will be.

The second key distortion that leads to guilt is the desire to label yourself a “bad person” because of something you did. It was this kind of superstitious destructive thinking that led to witch hunts in the Middle Ages! You may have actually done something bad, angry, or hurtful, but it is not helpful to call yourself “bad” or “spoiled”, because this will cause you to spend endless energy on worrying and self-blame, rather than on creatively searching for the best strategy for solving problems.

Another common guilt-provoking bias is personalization. You unreasonably accept responsibility for something you didn't do. Let's say you give constructive criticism to your boyfriend, who reacts defensively and gets offended. You may blame yourself for making him upset and jump to the conclusion that your comment was inappropriate. It was actually his own negative thoughts that upset him, not your comment. Moreover, these thoughts are probably distorted. He may have thought that your criticism implied that he wasn't good enough and concluded that you didn't respect him.

And besides, were you the one who put this illogical thought into his head? Obviously not. He did it himself, so you can't take responsibility for his reaction.

Because cognitive therapy argues that it is thoughts that create feelings, you may come to the nihilistic conclusion that you cannot harm anyone no matter what you do, and therefore you have the right to do whatever you want. After all, why not leave your family, cheat on your wife, or deceive your business partner? If they're upset, that's their problem, that's their thoughts, right?

No! Here we again emphasize the importance of the concept of cognitive biases. As long as a person's feelings of distress are caused by distorted thoughts, you can say that he himself is responsible for his suffering. If you blame yourself for that person's pain, that's a personalization fallacy. On the contrary, if a person’s suffering is caused by reliable, undistorted thoughts, then it is real and can indeed have an external cause. For example, if you hit me in the stomach, I will probably think: “You hit me! It hurts, damn you!” In this case, the responsibility for my pain lies with you, and your opinion that you hurt me is in no way the result of a distorted perception. Your remorse and my discomfort are real and authentic.

Inadequate requirements with the word “should”

- this is a direct path to guilt. Irrational demands on yourself imply that you should be perfect, omniscient, or omnipotent. These perfectionistic “rules of life” hurt you by creating impossible expectations and make you less flexible. One such example is: “I should always be happy.” And here is the consequence of this rule: every time you are upset, you feel like a failure. Since it is obvious that the goal of achieving eternal happiness is unrealistic for any person, such a rule only harms and replaces real responsibility for oneself.

Other inadequate demands with the word “should” are based on the premise that you know everything. They assume that you have all the knowledge in the universe and can predict the future with absolute accuracy. For example, you think, “I shouldn't have gone to the beach this weekend because I started getting sick with the flu. What a fool I am! Now I’m so sick that I’ll have to stay in bed for a week.” Such reproaches are unrealistic, because you didn’t know for sure that going to the beach would make your condition worse so much. If you knew this, you would have acted differently. You are human and made this decision, later realizing that your guess turned out to be wrong.

The third type of requirement with the word “should” is based on the premise that you are omnipotent. They assume that, like God, you have unlimited possibilities, can control yourself and other people, and achieve any goal you want. You miss a tennis serve and wince, exclaiming, “I shouldn't have missed that shot!” Why not? Is your tennis game so excellent that you can't miss a serve?

It is clear that these three categories of demands with the word “should” create an inadequate feeling of guilt, since they are not based on reasonable arguments.

In addition to distortions, several other criteria can help distinguish abnormal guilt from healthy feelings of remorse or regret. These are the intensity, duration and consequences of your negative emotions. Let's apply them to assess the unbearable guilt of a married 52-year-old high school teacher named Janice. For many years, Janice was severely depressed. Her problem was that she was haunted by memories of two shoplifting incidents that happened when she was 15. Living a completely honest life since then, she could not overcome the memory of those two incidents. She was haunted by thoughts that created a feeling of guilt: “I am a thief, a liar, a bad person, I am a fake.” The agony of her guilt was so strong that every night she prayed that God would allow her to die in her sleep. Every morning, waking up alive, she experienced bitter disappointment and said to herself: “I am such a bad person that even God does not want to take me.” In desperation, she loaded her husband's gun, pointed it at her heart, and pulled the trigger. The weapon misfired. She didn't cock the gun properly. Janice felt a complete failure: she couldn’t even kill herself! Throwing away the pistol, she began to sob in despair.

Janice's guilt is unjustified not only because of the obvious distortions, but also because of the intensity, duration and consequences of what she felt and told herself. What she feels is nothing like healthy remorse or regret about shoplifting, it is an irresponsible destruction of her self-esteem that blinds her from living in the here and now and does not correspond to any real wrongdoing. The consequences of her guilt create the ultimate paradox: the belief that she is a bad person drove her to attempt suicide, the most destructive and senseless act in the world.

Vicious circle of guilt

Even if you experience unhealthy guilt based on distortions, you can become trapped in the illusion that your guilt is justified as soon as you begin to feel guilty. Such illusions can be very powerful and convincing. Here's what your reasoning might be:

I feel guilty and blameworthy. This means I'm really bad.
Because I am bad, I deserve to suffer.

In this way, guilt convinces you of your own worthlessness and leads to even greater feelings of guilt. This cognitive-emotional connection locks your thoughts and feelings into each other. You find yourself in a closed system that I call the “vicious circle of guilt.”

This vicious circle is fueled by emotional reasoning (see the chapter on cognitive distortions). You automatically assume that because you feel guilty, you must have failed somewhere and therefore deserve to suffer. You are probably thinking: “I feel bad, so I must be bad.” This is irrational because your self-hatred does not necessarily prove that you did anything wrong. Your guilt only reflects your opinion that you behaved badly. This may be true, but it is often far from the truth. For example, children are often punished without reason when parents are tired, irritated, and misinterpret their behavior. Under these circumstances, the child's feelings of guilt obviously do not prove that he or she has done anything particularly terrible.

Self-blame only feeds the cycle of guilt. Guilt-provoking thoughts lead to unproductive actions that reinforce your belief that you are unworthy. For example, one female neurologist who was prone to feelings of guilt was trying to study for a certification exam. She had a hard time studying for the test and felt guilty for not studying properly. Therefore, she spent a lot of time every evening watching TV, and at this time the following thoughts were spinning in her head: “I shouldn’t watch TV. I have to study for the exam. I am lazy. I don't deserve to be a doctor. I'm too selfish. I deserve to be punished." These thoughts made her feel extremely guilty. Then she reasoned like this: “This guilt only proves that I am a lazy, bad person.” Her self-flagellation and guilt only fueled each other.

Like many people prone to feeling guilty, she held onto the idea that if she punished herself enough, it would eventually free her. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The guilt simply sapped her strength and reinforced the belief that she was lazy and ineffective. The only result of her self-hatred was obsessive nightly raids on the refrigerator, during which she gorged herself on ice cream or peanut butter.

The vicious circle in which she found herself is shown in Figure 8.1. Her negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors combined to create the self-destructive, cruel illusion that she was “bad” and had no control over herself.

Guilt is irresponsible

If you actually did something inappropriate or harmful, does it follow that you deserve to suffer? If you feel the answer to this question is yes, ask yourself: “How long should I suffer? Day? Year? For the rest of your life? What sentence will you decide to give yourself? Are you ready to end your own suffering and stop torturing yourself when your sentence is up? This would at least be a responsible, time-limited form of punishment. But first, tell me, what is the point of torturing yourself with guilt? If you make a mistake and cause harm, your guilt will not magically undo the mistake. It will not speed up the learning process, nor will it reduce the likelihood that you will do it again in the future. Other people will not love or respect you any more because you feel guilty and put yourself down in this way. Guilt will not lead to a productive life. So what's the point?

Many people ask, “But how can I behave morally and control my impulses if I don’t feel guilty?” This is the prison guard's approach. Apparently, you believe that you are so malicious and uncontrollable that you must constantly punish yourself so as not to relapse. Of course, if your behavior causes harm to others, a small dose of painful remorse will better help you understand the consequences of your actions than a neutral, non-emotional admission of wrongdoing. But without a doubt, it never helped anyone to think of themselves as a bad person. Most often, the belief in one's own unworthiness only contributes to further “bad” behavior.

Change and learning happen faster when you: a) recognize that an error has occurred and b) develop a strategy to correct the problem. You will make the process much easier if you treat yourself with love and relax. And the feeling of guilt will only get in the way.

For example, sometimes patients criticize me because I made a harsh comment that caused them to think incorrectly. This criticism usually only hurts and makes me feel guilty if there is some truth to it. If I feel guilty and call myself “bad,” I tend to react defensively. I have a desire to deny the mistake, justify it, or launch a counterattack because it’s disgusting to feel like a “bad person.” This makes it difficult to admit your mistake and correct it. If, on the contrary, I do not berate myself and do not feel that my self-esteem is being violated, it is easy for me to admit a mistake. Then I can easily fix the problem and learn something. The less guilt I feel, the more effectively I cope with the situation.

Thus, if you have made a mistake, you need to recognize it, learn from it and change the situation. Does guilt help here? I do not believe in this. Instead of helping you admit your own mistake, guilt only confuses your tracks. You don't want to hear any criticism. You can't stand your own mistakes because they make you feel terrible. This is why guilt is unproductive.

You might argue, “How can I know if I did something wrong if I don’t feel guilty? What if I start to indulge in blind excesses, uncontrollable, destructive selfishness, if I don’t feel guilty?

Anything is possible, but I honestly doubt it. You can replace guilt with a more conscious basis of moral behavior: empathy. Empathy is the ability to visualize the consequences of your behavior, both good and bad. This is the ability to recognize the impact of your actions on you and on other people, and to feel reasonable, sincere sadness and regret without calling yourself inherently bad. Empathy creates the necessary mental and emotional climate to regulate behavior in a moral and self-learning manner, without the need to use the whip of guilt.

Using the following criteria, you can easily determine whether your feelings are normal and healthy remorse or self-destructive, distorted guilt. Ask yourself:

Did I do something “bad”, “unfair”, did I cause offense consciously and intentionally? Or am I unreasonably demanding of myself to be perfect, omniscient, or omnipotent?
Do I call myself a bad or nasty person because of this? Do my thoughts also contain other cognitive distortions such as exaggeration, overgeneralization, etc.?
Is my regret or remorse realistic? Does it stem from an empathic awareness of the negative consequences of my actions? Are the intensity and duration of my painful emotional reaction adequate to the action I committed?
Am I ready to learn from my mistake? What am I doing for this? Do I think how to correct the current situation? Or whining, replaying what happened in my thoughts? Or maybe I’m unjustifiably punishing myself?

Now let's look at some methods that will help you get rid of misplaced feelings of guilt and strengthen self-respect.

1. Diary of recording automatic thoughts. In previous chapters, you learned about journaling automatic thoughts to help you overcome low self-esteem and feelings of unworthiness. This method gracefully deals with a variety of unwanted emotions, including guilt. Write down the event that makes you feel guilty in the “Situation” column. For example: “I responded rudely to a colleague” or “Instead of contributing ten dollars, I threw the alumni fundraising appeal into the trash.” Then “tune in” to the voice of the tyrant in your head and write down specific accusations that cause feelings of guilt. Finally, identify distortions and write down more objective thoughts. You will feel better.

An example of such work is shown in Table 8.1. Shirley was a sensitive young woman who decided to move to New York to pursue a career as an actress. After spending a long and tiring day searching for an apartment, he and his mother took the train back to Philadelphia. After boarding the train, they discovered that food was not provided. Shirley's mother began to complain about the lack of service, and Shirley felt overwhelmed by guilt and a wave of self-criticism. When she wrote down her guilt-inducing thoughts and answered them, she experienced significant relief. She told me that by coping with her feelings of guilt, she avoided the hysterics that she usually threw in such unpleasant situations (see Table 8.1).

2. Techniques for neutralizing demands on yourself. Here are some techniques for neutralizing the irrational “should” demands you make on yourself. First, ask yourself: “Who said I should? Where is that written?" The point is for you to realize that you are not justified in criticizing yourself. Ultimately, you are the one who makes your own rules. Once you have seen that a rule is not benefiting you, you have the right to revise or cancel it. Let's say you tell yourself that you should be able to make your spouse happy all the time. If from experience you realized that this is unrealistic and useless even trying, then you can rewrite this rule, bringing it closer to reality. For example: “I can make my spouse happy sometimes, but of course not all the time. Ultimately, his happiness depends on himself. And I am no more perfect or perfect than him. Therefore, I will not expect constant gratitude for what I do.”

When deciding how useful a rule is, ask yourself: “What are the advantages and disadvantages of this rule?”, “How does asking me to always make my spouse happy help me, and what is the cost of such a belief?” You can evaluate the pros and cons of this house rule using the two columns shown in Table 8.2.

Another simple but effective way to escape from excessive demands on yourself involves replacing the word “should” with others, also using the two-column technique. The expressions “It would be nice if” or “If I could, I would...” are good for this. They often turn out to be more realistic and less upsetting. For example, instead of “I have to make my wife happy,” you could say, “It would be great if I could make my wife happy because she is upset. I can ask what she's upset about and see what I can do to help." Or instead of “I shouldn't have eaten the ice cream,” you could say, “It would have been better if I hadn't eaten that ice cream, but what I did isn't the end of the world.”

And another method is to show yourself that your demand is not true. For example, when you say “I shouldn't have done that,” you are suggesting: 1) that you really shouldn't have done it and 2) it will help you if you tell yourself so. The Reality Method will reveal, to your surprise, that the truth is exactly the opposite: a) you should have done exactly what you did and b) it will hurt you if you tell yourself you shouldn't have done it.

Translation: Anna Kogteva

Who expected this from you?

Evaluate whose expectations these are? Yours or someone else's? Who expected this from you? How familiar are you with the feeling of not meeting expectations? Is this what you expect from yourself or was this something that was once expected of you? Or are they still waiting? For example, “I should have been a superman” - whose expectation is this? The approximate balance of expectations is 50/50: equal parts of ourselves and others.

It may turn out that these expectations are internalized, i.e. learned in childhood without criticism. Internalization is a psychological mechanism in which we non-judgmentally take on someone else’s rule. Whether it is good or bad, we will still take it, and it will live in us as a model of behavior, as instructions for our actions. While we are small, we need support to develop and grow, and other people's rules are good as support, especially if they come from loved ones. This is how internalized expectations arise.

Tell yourself you did your best

Perhaps you were too anxious, hurt, depressed, or simply tired to fully be able to choose a particular path. Accept that, given your psychological or physical circumstances that dominated you at the time of making the decision, you could not have done otherwise.

Allow yourself self-forgiveness - and the self-understanding that depends on it. Study in more detail the circumstances that influenced you and get rid of the negative perception of the consequences.

Three ways to forgive yourself

If that's what you're expecting, this is a story about your Inner Critic or a superhero's cape. Perhaps if you can forgive yourself for not being a superhero in a sparkling cape, not omnipotent and not in control, you will feel better.

Try to forgive yourself. I don't know if you will succeed, but I want to emphasize: we always act at the limit of our capabilities, even when it seems to us that this is not the case. At the limit of capabilities, knowledge, skills.

And at every moment we do the best we can. And it's not our fault that it often looks bad. This means that this is what it is, our best, and it can hurt, but I’m sure that you can still try to forgive yourself.

We are all living people, and a crisis is an extreme condition. It's normal to not be able to act like a superman, even if outside of a crisis you were like a superman. And even more so if they weren’t like that outside the crisis.

How to forgive yourself? Sometimes it helps to imagine that a close friend or your child is in your place. We often have more mercy for others than for ourselves, and we would not blame others for the same. We easily agree to support them.

To practice this technique, you can imagine yourself as a soccer player who has missed the ball three times and failed to score a single goal. This player has two coaches.

One begins to say: “Well, why are you doing this, how are you doing this, you’re stupid, you’re not prepared, you can’t do anything, go, I don’t even want to waste time on you.”

And the second one says: “Oh, well, you tried so hard, it was probably your best blow, it doesn’t matter, do you want me to work out with you? Come here on Wednesday, we’ll train, and I’ll see what exactly you can’t do.”

Which coach do you think will help you, as a football player, achieve better results? As a rule, everyone says: “Of course, the second one!” Then the next important question is: “What kind of coach are you for yourself? How do you treat yourself?

The second mechanism for forgiveness is to compare yourself to others. Our experience is largely universal. If something happens to you, then it also happens to others. There is nothing unique about the processes you are experiencing. Both the emotion of guilt and the reason why we feel it in a crisis are also not unique. If someone else can forgive themselves, then so can you.

The third mechanism of forgiveness: you are the only version of yourself, and no one has as good a reason to be kinder to you as you do. Most often, no one needs this. Therefore, it is better to try to be the first person kind to yourself in your own universe. Come on, be brave!

Where is the line between healthy self-criticism and self-flagellation?

Since childhood, we have been told that praising ourselves is shameful, but criticizing and finding fault is a good thing. These reproaches have become such a habit that you no longer understand where you really made a mistake and where nothing depended on you. But only you remain the extreme one in your head.

If two minutes is enough for you to come up with a thousand and one reasons why you are to blame for a given situation, it’s time to deal with the level of criticism.

According to psychologists Tackling Self-Blame and Self-Criticism: 5 Strategies to Try, there is a big difference between logical explanation of a negative result by certain factors and constantly looking for someone to blame, which most often turns out to be you. The second option is a habit learned from childhood, which it’s time to leave in the past.

Here are typical examples of blaming yourself without reason:

“I wasn’t hired because the interviewer thought I was a weakling and a loser.”
“We broke up because I was too hard to love.”
“I shouldn’t have even tried to get promoted because I’m not good enough for the position.”

By assessing how certain actions affected the result, you will see the situation from a completely different perspective. To better understand what happened, ask yourself these questions:

What specifically depended on you in this situation?
What depended on the other persons involved?
What actions did you take that influenced the result?
What actions of others influenced the result?
What can you change right now?

Objective answers to them will make it clear whether you are really as bad as you claim.

Now, if I...

What else helps to work with feelings of guilt? Remove the subjunctive mood. Instead of thinking in the spirit of “I should have...”, “If only I had...”, “That’s a shame I didn’t...”, try thinking, “Next time I’ll do it differently.”

This is generally a cool technique. The fact is that people with feelings of guilt often think in the subjunctive mood, but this should never be done. And if you catch yourself doing this, then stop immediately and convert it into the phrase “Next time I...”. That's all. No subjunctive moods, absolutely.

Start working for the future

If you begin to pay more attention to the present, you will receive vital energy from it, accumulate it for actions and accomplishments for the sake of the future. That is, you can plan upcoming achievements and direct your intense thirst for activity and your thoughts to fulfill your desires.

Any attempt to think about the past robs you of pleasure from the present and deprives you of the strength to work on your tomorrow. That is, in fact, you are completely in vain, mediocrely and stupidly, draining energy into empty thoughts. And you stress yourself even more with these thoughts. You destroy your health and ruin your mood.

Be kind to yourself

Author of the book “Self-Compassion. About the power of compassion and self-kindness" Kristin Neff is sure that it is self-compassion that helps you accept yourself. She suggests trying a practice that combines inner strength and self-love.

To do this, ask yourself two important questions:

How can I practice self-compassion when dealing with my mistakes?
How to give yourself the opportunity to think about the current situation and learn the necessary lessons from it?

The answers will help you understand how to work through past mistakes without blaming yourself for them.

What does not forgiving yourself lead to?

Focusing on the mistakes of the past leads to being stuck there. A person cannot move forward and develop. In addition, he constantly goes into self-flagellation, trying to punish himself everywhere and in everything. Chronic feelings of guilt and shame prevent him from enjoying and living a full life. It constantly seems to him that he is not worthy of better, more. As well as grievances and all the resulting conditions lead to psychosomatic disorders: body pain, problems with the gastrointestinal tract, etc.

Important! Self-resentment leads to problems in your personal and work life. A person lives in the past and does not notice the possibilities of the present.

Recommendations from a psychologist: how to learn to forgive yourself

How to forgive yourself for past mistakes - advice from a psychologist:

Realize that you are the only person you will spend your entire life with. You are the only one you can always rely on. Any other person can leave your life. Make friends with yourself. And for this you need to forgive, love and accept yourself.
Replace self-flagellation with healthy introspection. Instead of drowning in guilt and shame and simply reliving the past over and over again, learn to analyze traumatic situations and learn from them.
Learn to love yourself unconditionally. You are valuable and deserving of love for the mere fact of your existence. Stop trying to earn good treatment for yourself. You deserve it for nothing.
Study the life stories of famous people. In interviews, media personalities willingly share their problems and methods for solving them. Many openly tell what they were once ashamed of, what they scolded themselves for and how they eventually forgave. For example, the famous actress and TV presenter Larisa Guzeeva for a long time could not forgive herself for her cold attitude towards her own children, as well as for alcoholism, indecent behavior, disruption of performances, etc. But the woman found the strength to take the path of correction, let go of the past and prove to herself and others that she could live differently.
Consult books. For example, read the book by M. Mikhailova and M. Arkhipova “Forgiveness. How to make peace with yourself and others.”

Group psychotherapy is very helpful in forgiving yourself. If you cannot yet contact a psychologist, then find a support group on the Internet. For example, on psychological forums people actively share their experiences of forgiveness. And some psychologists conduct free consultations via chat and answer user questions.

Important! Understand that everyone makes mistakes. This is fine. And life doesn't end there.