When I was an assistant editor at U.S. Catholic magazine, I remember publishing a piece by Christine Gudorf called “Don’t Cancel That Guilt Trip.” She makes a strong case for why we should, as a society, hang on to a little guilt in so far as it shapes our consciences. Constructive guilt makes us grow spiritually. The piece isn’t categorized as cognitive behavioral therapy, but it does some of that for me. 

You can get to the entire article by clicking here.

I excerpt from it below.

A few weeks ago it was brought home to me how strongly our society has rejected the idea of struggling with one’s conscience as necessary or beneficial. I was teaching Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” (Harbrace, 1982), and the main character, Celie, was having trouble sleeping. Slowly it came to her that she had a guilty conscience: she had told her stepson to beat his wife if he wanted her to mind. When I tried to get the class to probe why Celie’s conscience worked in this way, there was tremendous resistance. While they recognized that Celie felt guilty because she knowingly chose to do wrong, they denied any useful purpose to her guilt. They were uncomfortable with the whole concept of guilt.

As we went on to read Elie Wiesel’s “Legends of Our Times” (Schocken, 1982), a collection of stories and essays about his life as an Eastern European Jew before, during, and after the Holocaust, my students became even more assured that guilt was a useless feeling. For as they pointed out, Wiesel wrote that it was the survivors of the Holocaust, not its perpetrators or passive witnesses, who felt the greatest guilt. Furthermore, they denied that anything would be gained if the perpetrators or the passive witnesses had felt guilt. For after all, the students said, what’s done is done, and emotions after the fact change nothing. Most of them felt that Wiesel should try to forget what had happened instead of dwelling on it.

This dismissal of the importance of guilt is part of a larger contemporary Western social trend. People want simple, black and white answers, even slogans, about how to solve complex social, political, and economic problems in a postindustrial society. One source for this attitude is the media, especially TV, with their orientation to action, controversy, and entertainment at the expense of social values, knowledge, and understanding. TV does not report and has created widespread intolerance for any statement or explanation longer than a 30-second sound bite.

But the distaste for guilt in U.S. society lies much deeper in the American psyche than nostalgia and media influence. Since colonial days Americans have been noted for their extreme pragmatism: we focus on problems and solutions. My students reject guilt as useless–it does not offer a solution to the problem at hand. Instead, they say, it creates new problems. Celie had already told Harpo to beat Sofia; the Nazis had already killed 6 million Jews. What good did guilt after the fact do the victims? It only created more suffering in Celie and in the survivors.

Ignored in this seemingly pragmatic approach is the fact that human lives–and human history–are not a series of discrete, unconnected moments and events. Our lives and our history are continuous; each moment or event is constructed on what went before.

If Celie dismisses her guilt feelings every time she feels them, sooner or later she will no longer feel guilt, no longer have an internal alarm when she commits hateful actions. We instinctively know this as parents. When we see one of our children pushing another from a swing, we intervene whether or not the evil action is complete. We don’t say of just-completed actions, “Oh well, she’s already been pushed off. There’s nothing I can do now.” 

When we cannot prevent our kids from doing evil actions, we use the occasions of their evil actions to induce guilt in the expectation that guilt feelings now will promote responsibility in the future. We say, “Look at the bump you put on Mary’s head. It hurts her. She didn’t do anything to you. Would you like it if she pushed you off the swing when she wanted to use it? Now go sit on your bed and think about what you did until you can tell Mary you are sorry and won’t do it again.”

But as our children get a little older, the lines become more blurred because we have learned to feel a social discomfort in the face of any kind of suffering, including guilt. It is as if modern medicine has not only made us intolerant of any kind of physical pain, because it is understood as unnecessary but has also made us uncomfortable with any kind of psychic or spiritual pain, whether ours or others’.

If our 10-year-old is recklessly racing a bike down a steep hill and her 4-year-old sister riding on the handlebars is seriously injured as a result, we are likely to react very differently depending on our daughter’s reaction. If she seems unaffected and denies responsibility (as would a young child who lacks a developed sense of conscience), we are likely to come down hard with blame; if she is remorseful to the point of self-loathing, we are likely to put the best possible light on the affair and minimize her suffering by suggesting extenuating circumstances.

Oh, don’t worry about it.

With our friends and spouses as well, we have a strong tendency to interpret the loving support we owe them as requiring that we support their feelings of goodness and self-worth and dismiss their feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and remorse.

Social critics and religious ethicists point to this discomfort with guilt as the result of popularizations of psychotherapy applied to changes in work and life in the modern West. Western society, even Western religion, has come to understand the central task of the self in the late 20th century as self-therapeutic. Life has become a search for individual well-being, for contentment and happiness, with individual pain and suffering as the enemy. If you doubt the prevalence of the therapeutic approach to life, ask yourself, What do I want for my children?

Most of us will answer that we want our children to grow up to be happy and content, to enjoy their work, family, and friends, and to be safe and secure. Few of us will answer that we want our children to be saints, to dedicate themselves to the well-being of others, to develop their characters and consciences. Few of us would want our sons or daughters to be Saint Damien of Molokai, Edith Stein, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, or a member of Mother Teresa’s community. It is not that we want them to be Donald Trumps or Hillary Clintons or Bill Cosbys or Albert Einsteins–most of us want our children to be “normal,” “well-rounded,” and “at peace,” free of obsessions of all kinds. We expect that both faith and institutionalized religion will assist them in achieving this therapeutic goal.

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