Dear Natie:

Guilt, like any other emotion, has a purpose. Its purpose is to motivate a person to correct one’s behavior, and in so doing,  to become a better person- through speech (what a person communicates to others via the spoken/ written word) and through action (what a person does to or for others).

To suffer guilt, to express it on and on and on without any practical use is a form of self- indulgence: an excessive, unrestraint self-gratification of the masochistic type: somehow, going on about how guilty you are, makes you feel like you are a good person (?)

It may cause a person to FEEL like a good person, but it doesn’t make a person good. It is only the correcting of your behaviors that makes you a good person.

So please no more guilt talk (“I think I’m the devil… a monster”). Instead earn what you can and correct your behaviors (speech and action) with people in your present and in your future life.

Regarding your ex, since you believe you hurt him terribly, you can offer to pay for him to attend counseling and address there the hurt feelings that you caused him.

I hope that you move on from useless guilt and choose what is good and useful.

anita

Dear Natie,

I’ve been mostly away from the forums in the past few months and haven’t followed them closely. But I’ve noticed that you’ve posted again recently and feel the need to say something… because I see that you’re having a hard time, torturing yourself with self-doubt, believing that you are a bad person for leaving your ex.

Your inner critic is working overtime, telling you things like:

im paranoid i am afraid im narcissist or a sociopath.

i feel like i have the bigger part of being the toxic person

sometimes i feel like im not normal or that im asking too much…

what if i never loved him enough , what if i broke him for life

what if after everything i have put him through that he is right that i am the devil or this kind of a horrible human…

sometimes I wander if this sour relationship was all my fault and if i lost a gem

maybe im the one who deserves the pain

it makes me wonder if im ever worthy of love again

You are taking all the blame for the failure of the relationship, making him into a saint, and yourself into a devil. But based on what you’ve shared earlier, he was no saint. Over time he got increasingly demanding and accused you of being selfish for not giving up on your career for his sake.

You yourself saw it and at times had some clarity about it. For example this is what you wrote in December 2021:

i made good progress in the last couple of months accepting that this relationship has ended and i realized exactly why i lost attraction to him after 3  years of dating; simply because i never felt understood or we never really connected ( as i mentioned in my earlier posts it was more of mother – son / teacher-student) relationship and so i got exhausted and lost any kind of attraction, thats not to say that i didnt mess up big time as well and hurt him at one point.

But then the inner critic took over and you spiraled into self-doubt and guilt again. Anita noticed it in your previous thread, and I agree, that you have a deep core belief that you are bad (“I am bad”). This core belief is feeding your shame, guilt and doubt. And I can almost guarantee you that this belief has formed in your childhood, even if you haven’t been aware of it.

You said you used to write apology letters to your mother if you got a bad mark – that’s how big your feeling of guilt was. You also felt guilty if your parents fought with each other, and you tried to do everything to prevent it – you tried to make your siblings behave themselves (you were “controlling”) so your parents wouldn’t get upset.

In short, it seems to me that you felt responsible for your entire family and also felt guilty (and a bad person) if you failed to keep your parents happy and conflict-free.

I believe that’s how your core negative belief of “I am bad” or “It’s all my fault” developed. And I think this belief was lurking in your subconscious until you cheated your then-boyfriend with a woman. That’s when the “genie” was released from the bottle and it hit you with full strength, telling you that you were a monster, a devil etc etc.

And it’s still active now, telling you those same things for leaving your boyfriend (that it’s all your fault, that you are toxic and he was a gem, that you deserve to be abused, that you aren’t worthy of love etc etc…).

It pains me to see you torture yourself like that, telling yourself these things, because I know they stem from a false belief and have no basis in reality. It was formed in the child’s mind, because we as children always blame ourselves for our parents treating us (or each other) less than lovingly. The way I see it, you’d need to heal and transform that childhood belief. This will free you from your relentless inner critic and allow you to feel better about yourself…