Let's Talk About Guilt
Let’s talk about guilt for a moment. In recent conversations with parents and educators, mentions of “feeling guilty” have come up quite often. The fascinating part is that it has actually come across in several layers:
1. A parent or educator feeling guilty for “not doing enough” to help kids.
2. A parent or educator feeling guilty for reactions to the emotions of kids.
3. Children feeling guilt over their own actions/behaviors.
Let me break down guilt before we move on:
When we talk about guilt, we often talk about it as a feeling associated with a particular action that we have done. “I feel guilty about/for/because…” It feels heavy, nebulous, and uncomfortable - and for many of us, the instinct is to get rid of guilt. As adults, we have been socialized to either a) own up to our mistakes and apologize or b) hide them deep within us and carry them in our bodies - until the cycle repeats itself.
Actually, guilt itself is NOT an emotion - it is a rather complex cluster of emotions that come together to create an unpleasant physical sensation for most of us. Broken down into its granular emotions, guilt is: anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. These are all emotions that have very sharp physical sensations - tightness in the limbs, heaviness in the chest, a crumpling of the face, and tingling that we can’t quite put our finger on, but is annoyingly ever present. It also contains the three emotions that trigger our fight/flight/freeze response. Our nervous system is heightened when we feel guilty. Our brain instructs our intestines to conserve energy. We are literally carrying extra weight. The weight of guilt is physical - and all we want to do is shed it. Immediately.
Feeling guilt is actually an indication of a healthy spiritual compass - we are able to recognize that something has not gone well, and we call upon our internal resources to remedy it. However - most of us are socialized to quickly gloss over problems, apologize and move on.
Let’s start with number 3: children feeling guilty over their own actions and reactions:
When a child hurts another child - whether on purpose, or by accident - we rush to make them apologize because we don’t want them to hold guilt. It is the way we were taught, and it is the way we continue teaching. We make them “say they’re sorry” and then expect everyone to move on. The problem is that coerced apologies are very rarely genuine, and will likely create more conflict between the kids.
Radical truth time: we don’t need to make the children apologize. We do need to teach them that it is wrong to hurt others, and that when we do it creates anger/sadness/fear in them, and that building community means supporting one another. We do need to teach them to be kind, compassionate, conscientious humans who are capable of remorse. We also need to teach them that it is normal to feel yucky after doing something wrong - and that, actually, it is better to sit with the yucky feelings than to shoo them away.
Given enough time to sit with the energy of the anger they feel, the sadness they’re holding, and the fear of retribution, they will actually come to it on their own (most of the time). I see this when trying it out with my own kids, and when observing the kids in the various classes, camps, and groups I work in. When forced to apologize - kids will often resist. You will see pouting lips, dropped gazes, slumped shoulders. It will not be natural for them to apologize immediately. (Let’s be real - is it for us adults? - no - it often takes us time to process a situation before we can resolve it - sometimes even years!). Given the space to do something else, separate from the situation, they will often come back and apologize on their own - recognizing that the feelings they are holding mirror those of the other child they hurt.
Why isn’t this the standard practice? Because it is hard for adults to hold space where children are feeling hurt/sad/angry. Yet - if we aren’t able to have that space as children, we do not know how to give it to ourselves - or others -as adults.
This is a segue into #1 and #2:
1. A parent or educator feeling guilty for “not doing enough” to help kids.
Scarcity, oh scarcity - how we are conditioned to believe that we are not doing enough, being enough, and ….anything enough. If we think of adults as all-knowing, all-solving beings, we start to set ourselves up of this kind of feeling of failure. We adults are actually - shockingly - the grown up versions of the children we used to be. We carry those children within us in every interaction that we have.
Those of us that work with children know the feeling of having our inner little ones awakened by interactions we have with the kids and students in our work. When we are faced with the big feelings of children - with the real situations of hurt, disappointment, and the challenges of growing up - we want to fix them. When children hurt, we want to kiss the booboo and make it better. Sadly, we actually do them a disservice when we try to take the pain away. The earlier children are able to sit with their feelings, to accept them as normal parts of their existence, the healthier their relationship becomes with those emotions.
Why do so many parents and educators feel guilty for “not doing enough” to help kids? Because we don’t want them to feel the lack, the scarcity, and the pain that we felt. We want them to have better, be better, and feel better. Here’s the kicker - those of us who think we aren’t doing enough, probably are doing enough. At the very least, the best we can.
Along with this - number 2: A parent or educator feeling guilty for reactions to the emotions of kids:
We are angry at their anger. We are angry at their sadness. We feel like they are entitled, privileged, and ungrateful. We feel guilty about feeling this because we remind ourselves that they are just children.
Hi, let me reintroduce you to your younger self. An adult’s reaction to a child’s big feeling most likely mirrors how their big feelings were reacted to by their main caregivers when they were children. Was your crying met with empathy, or with anger? Were your complaints met with solution building, or dismissal?
We might have years of therapy under our belts, but our neural pathways from childhood still exist, and they become re-ignited when we are faced with children who remind us of our own big feelings.
That’s okay.
What’s the solution? Self-compassion leads to community compassion. Educators, parents, school leadership, clergy…anyone who works with people *NEED* to practice sitting with, embodying, and moving through their emotions. It is never too late to learn emotional literacy - how to recognize, name, move through, and act with our emotions in genuine and present ways. The more okay we are with our own emotions, the more space we have for those of others - especially children.
All of this is to say that we can break down our most complex interactions into the granular emotions that compose them. Let’s look at a few:
Conversation that turned awkward: disgust, fear, sadness.
Someone cut you off on the road: anger, fear, and contempt.
An administrator having to tell a parent that their child’s behavior is difficult: fear, sadness, anger, disgust.
Confronting someone for something they said/did: anger, fear, contempt
First day of school: fear, joy, sadness - maybe more depending on the situation.
Guilt: anger, sadness, fear, and disgust.
Anger wants us to take action - we are tight in the fists, shoulders, and heart. Sadness leaves us heavy. Fear tingles our feet. Disgust crumples our face.
How do we deal with it all?
Take a deep breath.
Tense the body parts where you feel the feelings. One at at time - the most salient first.
Breathe out and shake it/release it.
Repeat until you have space in your body to invite your brain into the conversation.
Think about it - reflect on it - write it out.
Change the conversation. It isn’t guilt - it is an invitation to take space.