Meeting on "guilt"

We had our Ideas Cafe meeting yesterday on guilt.

There were a number of significant points that emerged out of the discussion.

1.  Guilt is an emotional response.  It is a fast reaction to and judgment of one's response to a situation.

2.  Like anger and other emotional reactions, these snap reactions alert us to pay attention to the situation but perhaps are not always the most accurate take of the situation.  The logical side of senses should be called into the picture to analyze, then confirm or question if this is the proper response.

3.  Guilt for our mind is like pain to our physical body.  Without pain, we will not be alerted to parts of our body that are being hurt and require attention.  Similarly, the guilt response focuses our attention to the implications of our action or inaction to a situation.

4.  Chronic pain can be counterproductive to healing of our physical body just like lingering guilt becomes useless in motivating us to do the right thing.

5.  Early administering of pain killers can dull our senses to our real physical condition that may require more attention.  Early brush off of a guilt response as "lesson learned, time to move on" may lull us into trivializing the experience and continue to commit the same transgression again.

6.  Guilt is judged by moral standards so ingrained in us by our parents or other powerful figures in our early life that we don't know where it came from and accept it as "innate".

7.  Chronic guilt is alleviated by examining and perhaps changing the moral standard used to judge the past event causing the guilt.  It is all in the psyche and how we look at the event without ever changing the facts of the event.

The discussion was very lively with several people mentioning that they often feel uneasy and "guilty" when crossing the border or when talking to a policeman.

Interesting enough, transgressors of customs rules at the border or traffic rules often justify to themselves that the rules are nonsensical and therefore feel no guilt at all in breaking those rules.

There is also the questionable association of pleasure with guilt and whether that indicated a particular type of upbringing we had.

When citing examples of guilt, cheating on one's spouse was the example that was used over and over again.  There has to be some strong association between sex and guilt and that should be topic for a great discussion some day!