What Does The Feeling Of Guilt, Anxiety, Regret Tell Us?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Guilt … Feelings of guilt indicate that you have violated your personal moral code, and you should protect yourself from repeating this in the future. If you don't pick up on messages that you have violated your own standards, you are depriving yourself of the feedback you need to be sure that you are acting in accordance with your own beliefs.

The first thing that needs to be done is to "catch" the moment when feelings of guilt appear in a particular situation. Respectfully and gratefully acknowledge that guilt alerts you to a violation of your personal morality and the need to insure yourself against such incidents in the future. Armed with a sense of curiosity, assess whether the broken standard is worth keeping. If not, you can update it, change it, or drop it.

Sometimes it happens that the standards that you adhere to and when you violate which you feel guilty are no longer worth clinging to. For example, a woman who has been taught from childhood that her main purpose is to preserve her home may feel guilty about building her own career. After some time, taking into account the changing realities of the world and her achievements in the professional field, she may regard this belief as no longer in line with her values and principles. In fact, she can open her eyes to the fact that she never considered him worthy, but just tried to implement it in her ostentatious behavior for years.

In another situation, you may conclude that the standard is still worth keeping. And then the feeling of guilt when it is violated is quite appropriate. It is also appropriate to use this unpleasant feeling in the future so as to awaken in yourself a desire to ensure that you will continue to meet this standard in the future.

Anxiety. At the first stage, the most important thing is to recognize the presence of anxiety, to identify this feeling itself. You also need to realize that anxiety alerts you to certain future events for which you need to better prepare.

The second step is to assess what you need to do to better prepare for a particular situation. Perhaps it will be gathering information to fill gaps in the picture of the future, building or acquiring certain skills, or setting a goal oriented towards a positively formulated result.

If you already have experience overcoming similar situations, just remember what steps you took then, think about your skills and abilities that helped to achieve success and solve your problem.

Another way to cope with feelings of anxiety is to imagine how you face a threat or problem in the future. Scroll through specific steps and actions, rehearse them until you feel the strength and ability to cope with the situation.

Adequate preparation can mean learning or acquiring certain skills necessary to face up to what lies ahead. For example, say you are anxious about a planned public performance. If planning, selecting and structuring material is already familiar to you, then you can learn this skill and calmly get to work. If this skill has not yet been formed, it will be useful to involve someone from the outside who would teach you this. Also, adequate preparation for a speech can consist in staging a speech, performing certain exercises for interacting with the audience, reading a thematic book, and so on.

Finally, adequate preparation can mean changing a negatively formulated result to a positive one. The source of your anxiety can be a negative image of the future, for example, such as: "I will fail", "I will look like a fool" or "With this development of events, I cannot cope with the situation." Such thoughts prevent you from thinking rationally and prevent you from taking the steps that can really help you get out of the situation successfully. A positive image of the future sets a different direction. Knowing what you want to come to is much more calming than knowing what you don’t want to come to. In addition, if you know what to achieve, then it will be clearer for you how to do it.

The value of anxiety lies in the feedback it provides. When this feedback goes unrecognized, anxiety becomes an unpleasant, even paralyzing experience. But after you have “caught” this feeling, realized it, thanked for the signal, then there is an opportunity to move from a feeling of despair to a feeling of confidence and readiness to face the impending situation. This positive emotional state frees up your inner and behavioral resources, motivating you to act rather than wait and be in an anxious state all the time.

Regret. Feelings of regret tells you that in a given situation in the past, you could or should have done differently than you did. It notifies you of the need to take some action to insure yourself against repeating similar mistakes in the future. Whatever you regret, and however painful it may be, it is important to realize that this feeling is letting you know you have made a mistake. Try to evaluate your mistake in terms of the actions you could take to avoid it.

Try to remember the mistakes you made (past sources of regret) that you corrected, knowing exactly what to do to get it. Use these examples as a basis for acquiring inner peace.

Then try to imagine a future situation in which you act as you outlined for a regretful situation. Replay this situation several times, live it - this will help to fill with confidence in your own ability to implement the "correct" scenario of actions in the future. This sequential chain helps you cope with feelings of regret and allows you to redirect your attention to other important things. In this situation, it is valuable to deviate from the usual pattern of regret for the perfect actions, which only makes you feel worse, and to acquire new skills that are gradually integrated into your life.

Even the most unpleasant feelings can be helpful if you respond to them as important signals about your needs. Trust yourself and your feelings …

Based on the book by Leslie Cameron-Bandler, Michael Lebeau is "Hostage of Emotions."