Perpetrating a Cycle of Guilt and Punishment

When we believe that we are guilty of something, what we are truly asking for is punishment. We believe that we don’t deserve the things that we have and it is up to someone to take them away. If no one comes to fill this responsibility, we typically do it to ourselves. When we break down guilt to its essence, we learn that guilt is merely the fear of punishment. You did something wrong, and you’re afraid of the repercussions. You know the feeling when you’ve done something you weren’t supposed to do and now you have to wait for a parent to get home. That’s guilt.

Once we receive our punishment, the guilt is gone. We’ve made amends. We can no longer fear the punishment in which we’ve endured. What happens when that punishment never comes? To get rid of the fear, we learn to punish ourselves. We believe that only when we go through punishment will we be free of the guilt. This is not only the dominant perspective of our justice system, but it’s how we treat ourselves after we make a mistake. We believe that people earn their freedom by going to prison. We also believe that overcompensating can relieve us of an earlier mistake.

Punishment is Relief

There is a reason why the justice system doesn’t work. The issue with guilt is that we believe in the duality of good and bad. The problem with perceiving actions in this black-and-white nature is that doing anything we perceive to be bad will trigger guilt. When we do something bad, we believe that we then deserve punishment. Ironically, we unconsciously treat this punishment as a reward because it relieves us of our fear of the punishment. We then become addicted to this punishment because we no longer have to fear the punishment for what we’ve done. Whenever we eventually make a mistake we can always rely on the punishment to free us from the guilt. As a child, I’ve always felt better after the punishment than before. Once I had gone through whatever my parents planned for me, I knew I was absolved. It teaches us that if I feel bad about what I’ve done, I can be punished and I’ll feel good again.

Self-Punishment

If we don’t have the justice system or our parents to punish us when we feel guilty, we do it ourselves. We do it through punishment like negative self-talk and perfectionism. We force ourselves never to make a mistake again so that we don’t live in fear of punishment. A company will have the value of innovation, but will also be quick to point out a mistake made by another thus producing guilt in the person who made the mistake. The company will then lose the innovation within this worker because to not feel the fear of defamation, this person no longer takes risks.

A lot of us punish ourselves by not taking care of ourselves. Our bad habits when it comes to our physical health are due to our fear of punishment. We work through lunch with a bag of fast food because we are afraid that our work isn’t done promptly. Late night study sessions occur, producing a lack of sleep, due to our fear of failing a class. Work goes into the weekend because we are afraid that we won’t keep an arbitrary deadline. The anxiety when it comes to fear of punishment is typically what we call stress. It’s kind of wild that we dare to call some stress healthy.

How to Heal

What do we do instead? The best thing to do is to put yourself in timeout. Yes, just like when you were a child. The only difference here is that we are not positioning timeout as a punishment. Timeout, when done right, is a place for healing. If you don’t know what healing looks like, take a look at your body.

What happens when you skin your knee? Your body heals the skin without you having to do anything. What happens when you have a cold? Your white blood cells attack the germs within your body to relieve you from the sickness. Again, you have nothing to do. Sure you can put some cream on your knee, or you can take cold medicine. These things might be helpful in the short term but might be harmful in the long term. Cold medicine only combats the symptoms of the cold. Does that mean it also weakens the white blood cells because it feels like there isn’t much to fight? Aren’t we told that to build immunity, we must play in the dirt? Just allow the germs to happen. In the same way, we heal from guilt by just being with. Letting it pass through without having to do anything about it. In this moment of silence maybe we can find the good in our mistake and learn more about who we are because of it.