Guilt is the emotion you experience when you’ve knowingly done something wrong.
Whether it’s stealing a cookie from the cookie jar, cheating on an exam, or lying to your spouse, true guilt is a distinctive and narrow emotion.
Unfortunately, we often get guilt mixed up with other painful emotions. The most common is sadness.
Because of our strange cultural aversion to pity — feeling sad for another person — many of us make the subtle emotional mistake of assuming that because something bad happened and we were involved, we’re therefore guilty.
For example: Your mom calls and says she’s feeling lonely because she hasn’t seen you in a week, and almost instantly, you feel guilty. This is probably fake guilt.
It’s sad that your mom feels lonely. It’s disappointing that you’ve been too busy with your kids and work to visit your mom. But because you haven’t knowingly and deliberately done something wrong, it can’t be guilt.
Learning to distinguish true guilt from fake guilt is vital for managing problematic relationships because many people use fake guilt as a way to manipulate us.
In the example above, the mom knows that if she tells her daughter how lonely she is, the daughter will feel bad (fake guilt). And in order to stop feeling bad, will put the rest of her life on hold to come visit her.
The best defense against emotional manipulation is to confidently distinguish between true guilt and fake guilt.
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