The difference between those two can make a huge difference in your life. One of them contains a moral judgment about yourself, the other one doesn’t.
The thing with judgments is, that they can destroy a lot. In ways that aren’t perceivable at first sight.
It is strangely a very common human thing, to make judgments not only about “outer” things or people but also about ourselves. This is not strange itself, strange is the fact that not a small amount of us judge themselves quite harshly actually.
Or better: our mind does it and we just accept it most of the time.
The problem is that it doesn’t make us better when we judge ourselves very harshly every day.
The power of focusing on what works.
It is an outdated misbelief, that by pointing out a mistake, again and again, that improvement is inevitable.
When for example dealing with children, it is more powerful to point out each time when they have done something right or good instead of focusing on pointing most of the time out what doesn’t work.
It is smarter if you want the positive to grow, to focus on everything that already works.
Because where focus goes, energy flows. Never point out only the negative, without emphasizing also what is already working well. Otherwise, in most cases, you destroy the energy for growth and potential.
The same goes for yourself. Most intelligently, you stop judging yourself negatively.
By feeling guilty, we subtly judge ourselves as bad. By regretting something we did or didn’t, we are aware of a mistake and are able to try to make it better next time or not doing it again. We don’t judge ourselves, we rather regret but also make the cognitive decision to improve our behavior.
Here is, what can make a huge difference in your life:
Feelings of guilt can suck our energy by torturing and paralyzing us.
Feelings of regret let us be able to change and most importantly, keep our self-esteem untouched.
We keep our dignity, as the German psychologists Doris Wolf says.
Feelings of guilt are moral affects. They are less about if what we did was fair or unfair but more about ourselves, judging us by metaphysical criteria of good and bad.
The mistake by doing so is the fact that we subtly assume that we were able to have acted differently in the situation as we did.
Important to understand is that in each moment of our life we are trying to make the best, most intelligent and correct decisions according to our most current experience, intelligence, and consciousness. There is no other way in each moment.
Unfair judgments.
It creates a moral judgment unfairly. And this judgment can be able to push us into a swirl of negative emotions. And by the law of where focus goes, energy flows, the tendency of increasing our misbehavior rather than decreasing it is much higher, once we got into this swirl.
Feelings of regret are ethical affects. They prevent such damage to our self-esteem.
We are able to regret something even though we know we weren’t able to have acted differently in this situation.
This is helpful to analyze what we did in which way wrong in the moment of our misbehavior.
We can focus on perhaps making it up or learning from it rather than letting it be a trigger to talk ourselves down.
Remember, the law of “Where focus goes, energy flows.” It is always working.
Regret instead of feeling “guilty”.
You can’t change the past but the present and future present moments.
One of the pioneers of the psychosomatic medicine, the psychoanalytic Franz Alexander, declared already in the sixties that feelings of guilt rather hinder the psychological development much more than supporting it.
“It is no exaggeration to say that there are no other emotional reactions that play such a constant and central role in the dynamic explanations of psychopathological phenomena as feelings of guilt and inferiority.”
Franz Alexander
Psychopathology is the scientific study of mental disorders.
Time to stop feeling guilty.
So, maybe stopping to let the thoughts and judgments that create feelings of guilt and inferiority to happen, is not such a bad idea for your long-term health and general well-being.
Feelings of guilt, are similar to declarations of war to yourself.
It is just logical that with several war declarations during a day you cannot find your overall peace that is not only vital for your psychological development but also for your overall health and healthy self-image.
Feelings of guilt prevent us from accepting ourselves to be who we are.
But not only that.
They even prevent us from becoming who we are able, to become.
They destroy inner peace and harmony, as well as our potentials to grow beyond our current state.
But only through the ability to grow, the freedom to make mistakes, we are able, to find what by nature is waiting for us,
bliss and deep happiness.
This post is highly inspired by the content of the book of the German Author Michael Schmidt-Salomon, called “Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Warum wir ohne Moral die besseren Menschen.”
“Beyond good and bad. Why we are without moral better humans.” Is the translation.
It is a very intelligent and deep book about human development and psychology, connected to our natural desire to feel happiness.
It seems though, unfortunately, that it is only possible to buy it in German. Paragraph
Forgive yourself. You are worth much more than carrying unnecessarily heavy baggage due to unfairly judging yourself.
Throw it off and feel the lightness of being.
By doing so, you do others a big favor with it as well.
“Guilt is the thief of life.”
Anthony Hopkins
