Why do we feel guilty?

We feel guilt because we don’t feel accepted and acceptable for who we are inside—for our real feelings including all our inner drives, and our behaviors and actions resulting from those drives. It began as children when we discovered it was wrong to do certain things and act certain ways, because we were punished, criticized, or in some way made to feel bad for our behavior. There was no explanation why those behaviors were wrong, and we were too young to understand explanations anyway. But we didn’t feel loved when we did those things. But we noticed that when we acted in certain other ways, our parents and peers responded positively, so we knew to act in those ways in order to gain approval, love, and acceptance.

So when we did things that met with disapproval, we felt bad and wrong, and this translates into guilt. It carries over into adulthood. Of course we develop guilt from our religious school teachers as well. We understand God as a being who approves of certain actions and behaviors, and disapproves of others. We feel accepted and loved if we perform certain actions, and we feel cast out and unacceptable if we perform others. And additionally, if we don’t perform certain actions we feel cast out or accepted depending on whether those actions are deemed approved and acceptable, or even required. Initially, others teach us what is approved or blameworthy. As we grow, we introject these beliefs, and they become our beliefs. Just as parents and teachers condemned us for our ‘sins’, we begin to condemn ourselves and set up an inner critic and judge, who monitors whether our behavior conforms to the standard we have been taught and have inculcated.

Behind the feeling of guilt is the need for acceptance and approval, or the need to feel loved for your inner being, not for who you pretend to be, or who you appear to be on the outside. We all have the need to be loved, accepted, and valued. But since no person has pure and unconditional love for us (love is not just a feeling, and we are usually only ‘loved’ by those who like our outer personality or our possessions, or by those who feel responsible for us), we never received a love that penetrated to our inner being. Real love understands all our drives, all our sins, and loves us always. When we receive real love, we feel forgiven for our sins. We don’t want to sin anymore because we are celebrating the purity of love and we exult in the spirit of love. This love purifies us, and makes us want to be pure. It satisfies us, so the pleasure of sin holds little appeal. Real love comes from God, and we can access this love through the Prophets of God.

Healthy remorse, which comes from a developed conscience based on sound moral and ethical training, can free us from guilt. We recognize our wrongdoing, turn to God for forgiveness, possibly apologize to someone we wronged, and then attempt to do better. Here, there is no lingering sense of being a bad, guilty person. We all fall short of perfection, we all 'sin'. But it is a fallacy to believe that we are inherently guilty, wrong, inadequate, deficient, unworthy, and worthless. These identities we assumed as children were based on very flawed ways of controlling our behavior.

(more): We hold onto guilt so we don’t have to feel the pain of not being loved and accepted in our weakness. When we were young, our parents punished us and criticized us when we did something they interpreted as wrong or bad. They made us feel as though we were wrong or bad for doing it. We couldn’t realize that they did not know how to give us pure love based on reflecting the spirit of God. We believed them, so we believed we were bad. Now, we use the identity of being bad or wrong as a way to ward off the pain of not being loved, just as we did as children. We think that by thinking we are bad, we are punishing ourselves, as we should, because that is what our parents did. We actually become the judge for ourselves, instead of letting God be judge. We think that by condemning ourselves, we will appease God. But God wants us to trust His love and His justice, which comes from communion with Him, and letting Him forgive us, as we try to do better. Basically, we are using our parents’ form of justice and applying that to ourselves, instead of using God’s justice and love for our lives.