How To Deal With Thoughts That Cause Guilt

This post looks specifically at how to use thought challenging (or cognitive restructuring) to manage thoughts that cause us to feel guilty. If you often feel guilty then the exercise below can help, even if you haven't heard of thought challenging before. If you are interested you can read about the basics of thought challenging in the earlier posts in this blog. In this post I will go over a quick introduction about guilt then look at a written exercise that has been shown to reduce guilt in research trials.

Guilt has many definitions but for the purpose of this exercise I will refer to it as the emotion that comes up when we feel as though we should have done things differently and/or feel as though something is mostly our fault.

Here is the thought challenging exercise for challenging thoughts about fault and responsibility:

Step 1: Write down the thought
Step 2: List all the other factors that contributed to the outcome
Step 3: Estimate how much influence that each factor had
Step 4: Look at what is left to see your own role in the outcome

For example:

Step 1: Write down the thought. One easy way to make sure it is in a format that can be challenged is to finish this sentence: It's all my fault / mostly my fault that ...

Let's say that my thought is: It's my fault that I couldn't make my relationship work with my partner (Ben).   

Step 2: List all the other factors that contributed to the outcome. This includes people, events, institutions and any other circumstances that influenced the outcome.

So for a relationship break up it might be:

• Ben's depression
• Influence of Ben's parents (always critical of me as no one was good enough for him in their eyes)
• Ben's upbringing (especially his experiences at boarding school)
• Ben's sister (she was always cruel to him and he has trouble relating to women)
• Bad economy (and financial stress on us)
• Work stress (due to five people in my department being let go and rest of us picked up the work)
• My parents (if they had been better communicators I would have learned skills to manage my relationship with Ben more easily)
• Ben's drinking
• Ben's friends (none of them look out for him or help him when he is depressed)

Step 3: Estimate how much influence that each factor had. To do this, write down your best guess as a percentage. It can help to ask yourself: if this factor was different then how much more likely would it have been for everything to work out ok. For example: if Ben wasn't depressed then perhaps it would be 20% more likely for me to stay with him. 

• Ben's depression (20%)
• Influence of Ben's parents (15%)
• Ben's upbringing, especially his experiences at boarding school (5%)
• Ben's sister (15%)
• Bad economy and financial stress on us (5%)
• Work stress (5%)
• My parents (35%)
• Ben's drinking (25%)
• Ben's friends (10%)

Step 4: Look at what is left to see your own role in the outcome. To do this, you subtract each percentage from 100%. 

So you start with feeling 100% responsible for the outcome and you...

- 20% (for Ben's depression)

- 15% (for Ben's parents)

- 5% (for Ben's upbringing)

... and so on. By the time I get up to my parents I am already at 100%. What does this mean? It means that there are a lot of factors that have played a role, some of them much larger than my own. By the end of doing this hopefully you can see that your role in this may be much, much less than you feel. 

Guilt is caused by many things, but perhaps the largest contributor may be that guilt is a survival mechanism that helps us avoid punishment from our parents. As children we are taught to feel guilty and to take responsibility for our actions. We are taught that if we do something that causes our parents to be upset, we should feel very bad. In the parents' minds - they are teaching an important lesson. In the child's mind - we feel guilty and think about how we might be able to avoid upsetting our parents in the future. In order to believe that we can do something to avoid the situation in the future, we must view the event as somehow under our control or that we were responsible. The other option would be to feel that the outcome was not under our control. Importantly, if we believe we have no control, there would be nothing that we could do to prevent our parents from getting mad at us again. It is a survival mechanism to feel as though we are in control, rather than feeling hopeless and as a consequence, depressed. However, this means we must also feel guilty. 

So guilt is a learned reaction where we typically take on much more responsibility for things than we need to. The payoff is feeling that we are in control bad outcomes by noticing all the things we did to create it. The cost is that the guilt can become crippling. 

This exercise can be done repeatedly for different thoughts about responsibility and guilt in order to see that we don't need to feel guilty all the time and that it is ok to forgive ourselves.