Two Kinds Of Guilt

Appropriate & Inappropriate Guilt

There are two kinds of guilt: earned guilt and unearned guilt. Guilt is a really powerful feeling tied to deeper beliefs, values and thought patterns.

Like a lot of difficult feelings, guilt is really uncomfortable. We do whatever we can to get away from fully feeling it. At least, that’s what I always did.

But the thing about feelings is that they hold tremendous information. If we don’t take the time to be consciously and deeply present with our feelings, we often don’t get the deeper truths they offer.

It isn’t always easy being present with our feelings, particularly the difficult or painful ones. It may seem much easier to medicate, distract ourselves, or try to wish or will away difficult feelings. But looking deeply at our guilt is really important, especially if we’re on any kind of path of personal growth or recovery.

Learning the difference between these two kinds of guilt — what we might call appropriate guilt and inappropriate guilt, or earned guilt and unearned guilt, is really important. When we get clear about what the guilt is really rooted in, it gives us valuable information that we need in order to make conscious choices about how we’re going to respond or react in our life.

Guilt is very tied to responsibility. Note how the word “responsibility” breaks down literally as “response-ability”; our ability to respond. Frequently with guilt, we’re caught in patterns of unconscious reactions that inhibit our ability to respond from our centered, present, adult self.

But when we get conscious about our responses and act from a place of decision rather than unconscious habit, our decisions will come from a place of empowerment, maturity and groundedness. Our actions are the result of deliberate choice, rather than just the unconscious acting out of old ways of being, doing and thinking that no longer serve us.

Earned Guilt

So what’s the difference between earned and unearned guilt, or appropriate and inappropriate guilt?

Appropriate guilt is pretty straightforward. It’s when we do something wrong and we know it. Appropriate guilt is the result of our conscience letting us know when we’re acting outside of our own integrity. The more conscious and emotionally mature we become, the clearer and less confusing our inner conscience and guilt become.

Our reactions to appropriate guilt also show us where we are in our own self-development and our relationship with pride, fear, humility, faith or courage.

The cleanest, clearest, and simplest way to resolve earned guilt is to make direct amends to the person, place, institution, or circumstance where you behaved badly. Assess what you did wrong. Own up to what you did, and make reparations directly to wherever the harm was perpetrated.

I’ve had to work through a lot of earned guilt in my life. For example, I used to be a thief. I was a thief for a really long time and a pretty good thief, too. I rarely got caught. I stole clothes, jewelry, food, shoes, and I actually had quite a lot of pride in my shoplifting abilities.

I did get caught once when I was a teenager, and I threw on my most innocent face as the police brought me home in a police car. I swore that it was the first time I had ever done it. I even squeezed a couple tears out, even though I was completely full of crap. I was already a practiced thief by that point, and a practiced liar, too.

I started stealing when I was nine years old. Candy bars and cigarettes from the local store — I could talk at length about the deeper psychology around theft and stealing. It’s rooted in feeling undeserving and believing that the universe will not give us what we really need, so we must steal it. But that’s another blog post.

The point is, I had a lot of justifications around my shoplifting and theft in order for it to fit with my own inner moral code. My shoplifting is an example of how getting really conscious about our earned guilt is important, because it gives us information to get really clear about our own values and the opportunity to change them.

From my perspective, we get to determine our own moral code. It may certainly be informed by external moral codes of our family, our culture, or our religion, or it may be something that we come to within ourselves.

My own internal moral code has changed radically over the years. When I was a thief, I generally didn’t steal directly from individual people. I stole from businesses, corporations and stores. It was very easy to justify that CVS, Walgreens, Target, or Macy’s wouldn’t even miss the items that I took regularly. So I never really felt bad about it. In fact, I didn’t feel bad about it at all. In my own moral code, I was a have-not and they were the haves. I was my own little Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor — me.

Now, there’s an intrinsic downside in that worldview, which is that it keeps you in a poverty mindset. But again, one of the values of looking deeply within yourself is the opportunity to expand and evolve your worldview. When I got clean and sober and started on my own personal growth path, I couldn’t steal with impunity anymore.

Disappointing as it was, I actually felt guilty when I stole a seven-dollar lipstick from the drugstore. I only wanted to pay them three dollars, but I didn’t set the prices. I probably only stole the lipstick a couple of times before I realized that it felt bad.

The bad feeling was not worth the six bucks. It probably cost me more than that in therapy to manage the bad feeling of appropriate guilt because my morals were evolving.

The same thing happened when I received extra change at the cash register. I was at the grocery store and I saw them count me out an extra ten. I thought, score! And I walked out of the store feeling richer for my $10 and the store clerk’s mistake.

My first justification was, well, that’s her mistake and it’s my benefit. But then as the afternoon went on, that $10 started to get heavier and heavier. I knew that this poor cashier’s innocent mistake, who’s probably working for minimum wage, was going to get her in trouble. I could say, ah, it’s not my problem. It was their mistake. Yeah, but I saw it happen. I was consciously aware of it and there was actually stealing in that.

On the ultimate level, there are no secrets in the universe. Everything is recorded. We don’t get away with anything, which is such a bummer if you’re a liar, a cheat, or a thief.

I was always hoping to get away with something, but I have clearly come to experience that the easier, softer way is to live a life of integrity. It’s much more beneficial, too. It pulls me out of a poverty mindset and calls me to worthiness, value, courage and hope.

I went back a few days later and gave the clerk back the $10. I don’t know if the girl got in trouble, but that $10 bill became like a bad dog following me down the street and I wanted to kick that puppy to the curb. Returning that $10, making those direct demands, was food for my soul and my own self-development.

The importance of making amends is explicitly laid out in the powerful process of steps eight and nine in the 12-Step programs. In step eight, we make a list of all the persons we have harmed and become willing to make amends to them. In step nine, we go out and make those direct amends wherever possible, unless it’s going to cause more harm to other people. Although you can go to a priest and confess your sins or to a temple on the day of Atonement, making direct amends where we have done harm is one of the most profoundly transformative practices that I have experienced.

The best way to make amends is face-to-face, not through email or text. Unless the other party won’t see you in person, it’s just not as powerful to rectify our wrongs virtually.

When we honestly and humbly own what we have done wrong, it clears the karma and it can actually be transformative for the other person as well. I have more than once had the opportunity to make amends to another person for harms I’ve done to them, and it’s really healing for them too, just to be in that resonance of honesty and grace.

I don’t ask for forgiveness. I’m just being honest and shining light on my own shadow. And then it’s not a shadow anymore. It actually becomes a source of strength, because from a spiritual standpoint, courage and self-responsibility turn humiliation into humility. Avoidance turns into grounded presence, and lack into gain. It’s a character-building experience, and once character is built, no one can take it away from us.

As I grow in character, I grow in my strength and fortitude as a person. My experience of the grace of God and universal flow is more present in my awareness. I move out of that poverty mindset and imposter syndrome, which comes from a deep belief that if you really knew who I was, you wouldn’t like me. That falls away because I no longer have anything to hide. And when people love, care and respect me, they are loving, caring, and respecting the real me; not some fake facade that I’m putting out so I can hide my bad behavior.

Appropriate guilt is tied to our own value system and sense of integrity. When we go outside of it, we feel bad. It’s about our relationship with ourselves. Of all the relationships in my life, my relationship with myself is primary because everything I do, everywhere I go — there I am. On the deepest level, I can’t be secretly out of integrity and hope to get the benefits of integrity because again, there are no secrets in the universe.

I don’t know if there’s a day of reckoning after our death, but the quality of people’s death and dying process is very clearly tied to the integrity of their life. I’ve known people who have cleaned it up on their deathbeds. It’s never too late to come into integrity.

A dear friend’s nephew was dying of brain cancer in his early 30s, and he’d struggled a lot with addiction and mental illness. He’d been really abusive and neglectful; constantly in and out of prison. He didn’t show up as a father for the two kids he had with different women.

As his disease progressed and it became clear that he was not going to survive, he had the opportunity to make amends to the mother of his six-year-old daughter and to his little girl. He was able to acknowledge his destructive behavior to his family members, too.

It was quite profound and beautiful. My sense is that he was not able to fully forgive himself, he’ll get to work that out in future lifetimes, I guess.

From my perspective, he pulled his life out of the toilet as best he could. It was really inspiring to see. He died with loving people around him rather than in a dumpy rooming house with a needle in his arm. He had a good death. We should all aim for that. Owning our appropriate guilt can be an important part of that process.

Unearned Guilt

So what about unearned or inappropriate guilt? This is guilt that’s externally imposed on us from social codes, unconscious relational agreements, unspoken family expectations, and cultural or religious taboos. These are all part of the unwritten norms of institutions that we were born into. If those external value structures align with our internal value structures, that’s fine — if we misbehave, those things become a part of our appropriate guilt..

But if those external structures don’t align with our own internal, authentic value systems, then we have a misalignment of integrity and it can cause a lot of inner conflict. This unconscious guilt is often part of a habit or a pattern that makes us feel guilt or shame and we don’t even know why. Because many of the expectations are unspoken and assumed, we often don’t really even understand what’s happening or feel like we have the power to change it. This is where getting conscious about our feelings and separating appropriate from inappropriate guilt is really, really helpful and powerful.

It’s important to notice that what I’m calling unconscious guilt is actually part of our limbic brain. Humans are social creatures. At a time early in our evolution, tribal or clan culture was completely tied to our survival. We needed to operate as a unit, as a group, in order to take care of the well-being of the group. If everybody was off doing their own thing, there might not be enough food, shelter, warmth, or water to sustain the community.

One of our innate functions as social beings is that we energetically, emotionally, and behaviorally attune to other people — the idea that water seeks its own level. We naturally want to attune with other people so that we’re all on the same page to make things easier and more comfortable.

One of the ways we can understand unearned guilt is that it’s a chemical signal in our body that we’re acting outside of group expectations. Those group expectations can be really powerful, even though they’re usually unspoken. They certainly may be codified as laws, taboos and even directly expressed expectations, but a lot of the time they’re never said out loud.

If you’ve been going to your mother’s house for Christmas for the last 20 years and you’ve come to hate it, but you feel guilty for not wanting to go, that’s inappropriate guilt. External expectations from the family or even just mother herself may not align with your own inner integrity, especially if those relationships are dysfunctional.

Stepping outside or going against the clan, culture, or religion can be really uncomfortable in our bodies. It may upset other people because, again, this more tribal structure is about safety, expectations and obligation to the group. It’s not about individual development at all. It’s about your responsibility to tribal survival or to make sure mom doesn’t have an uncomfortable feeling.

I have a client who’s making tremendous positive changes in her life. She decided to stop drinking and has begun a really powerful path of self-transformation. She’s doing great.

Recently, she went to a work conference where there were a couple of big drinking events. Although she was newly sober, and a little nervous, she feels good about not drinking. But when she went back to her hotel room, she felt this weird guilt. It’s because she was stepping out of the social norm of everybody else getting all sloppy and drunk.

People might not like it when you start to evolve because it points to their own devolution. It is true that misery loves company. But as we start to grow and resonate up the consciousness scale, the dissonance of people stuck in dysfunction becomes really obvious. They might even feel attacked by someone else’s positive change, because of how clear their low development seems in contrast. As we start to emanate more light, we also cast more shadow.

Now, in an optimal circumstance, when one person begins to do their self-growth work, others are inspired by it. It heals and evolves the whole system. I have seen a wife get sober, and then the husband gets sober, then the kids get into therapy, and even the grandma starts doing better by going to Alanon and stops taking Valium all the time.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always end this way. I’ve also witnessed circumstances where one person gets better, but the family can’t handle it. They are not interested in looking at themselves and they reject and eject the person out of the system.

However, the most common path is the middle path where one person will grow and develop and then the whole system just recalibrates itself around that.

To be clear, unearned guilt is guilt we feel when we haven’t actually done anything wrong. It’s inappropriate guilt when it calls us to act outside of our own integrity in order to adhere to these external structures, codes, rules, and expectations that don’t align with our own value system.

This is an extremely common experience in the LGBTQ population with family, cultural, and religious expectations or even obligations under law. At its most extreme, the system rejects any kind of sexual or gender variation at all — Johnny can’t have a boyfriend and Susie had better dress like a girl.

These expectations teach that if you don’t obey, terrible things are going to happen. God gets all fucked up if you’re gay apparently, which is not true. In fact, there’s plenty of gay animals in nature.

There’s an example in this beautiful children’s book called And Tango Makes Three. It’s about two male penguins from the Central Park Zoo in New York who form a pair. The zookeepers give them an egg that they help hatch and raise to be a healthy part of the penguin colony. Fabulous story.

However, deviation is more complicated with humans. We have to make our own decisions of whether we are living from our own integrity or deferring to cultural, family, or religious norms. It’s often not an “either or”. This is where getting really conscious about appropriate and inappropriate guilt can help us make the complex decisions of how to navigate our life circumstances in a way that feels honest, grounded and in integrity with ourselves.

When we’re aware of what’s happening and gather all the information from our feelings of guilt, we can make decisions from a mature, grounded and empowered place. We can experiment and change our mind.

I have a client who’s a lesbian and her parents were actually very accepting of that, but they were really afraid that grandma and grandpa couldn’t handle it. For a few years, she wasn’t allowed to bring her partner to Christmas dinner. And that started to really feel out of integrity for her because her brother got to bring his wife. Why couldn’t she bring her wife?

Since her mom was caught up trying to protect grandma from the “horrors” of homosexuality, my client went behind her mother’s back and talked to grandma. She told her that she was in love with a woman. And her grandma said, “That’s great, honey. What’s her name?” Then the problem was actually breaking the truth to mom, who was apparently deeply entrenched in some unwritten code that didn’t even really exist anymore.

This is another reason why bringing our own integrity into these social, familial, cultural, and religious contexts can be really helpful, because we’re all connected in our own evolution and can help evolve those systems. They may just be unconsciously acting out behaviors that don’t even fit them anymore. My client’s wife now comes to all of the family functions and it’s normal; in fact, even healthier than her brother’s relationship with his wife.

So I encourage you to take some time and examine your own guilt. Is it earned and appropriate?

Ask yourself, Where have I behaved badly or outside of my own moral expectations of myself? Where is my conscience letting me know that I should make amends or apologize?

If you’re conflicted, ask yourself, Is my guilt unearned, passed down through generations or written in some book somewhere that doesn’t feel like it applies to me?” Then we get to decide to consciously choose how we’ll behave, rather than acting out unconscious patterns that keep us stuck.

If you feel bad about something, own your part. I encourage you to make it right, and not just notice your guilt and try to avoid or justify not making restitution. However, if we act on feelings of unearned guilt, it may separate us from our own deeper truth and keep us stuck on old patterns we might do best to outgrow.

Our actions create our reality. Once we become conscious of the two kinds of guilt, the empowering choice of how to act is our own.

Thank you so much for reading! If you want to do some free workshops with me, I’m on Insight Timer every week, which you can find at this link. You can also get a free download of the first chapters of my book, Allies and Demons: Working with Spirit for Power and Healing.

If you’re interested to find out how Spiritual Psi-Kology work might benefit you in your life, or learn more about my year-long mentorship program, shoot me an email at info@reneemckenna.com.

Blessings on your path,

Renee LaVallee Mckenna