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Guilt - The painful realization of failing one's own moral standards

Ecdysis

MyPTSD Pro
So...

I find this so hard to talk about.

Growing up as a victim of trauma and violence, I swore that I would never, ever do that kind of stuff to anyone myself.

I'm in my mid 40s now and thankfully, I've managed to keep that vow, as far as actively harming anyone goes.

However... I got retraumatised a few years back and that brought up a whole lot more childhood trauma and I spiralled really, really badly. I went through the darkest years I've been through in my entire life - worse than the childhood trauma itself, worse than doing the trauma therapy for it... This retraumatising incident was the one that truly broke me and I've been a pure mess ever since.

During this time, I've brought harm to others, via neglect. I don't think I can write the details cos it's so painful to me. So I'm going to pick two analogies, that are kind of similar. That's as close as I feel I can get to it. Example A: I work for a company, say a train company, I'm responsible for passenger safety, due to my mental state, I start drinking and go to work drunk and endanger people's lives. I know I shouldn't be doing it, but I'm so desperate at this point, that I worry if I call in sick, I'll lose my job, making my desperate situation even more desperate. Example B: I'm caring for children and as my mental state deteriorates, I can't work out what to do - I don't know who to ask for help, without making everything worse. I want to ask social workers/ social services for help, but I'm so desperate and worried that I'm convinced social services will "take the kids away" so I keep postponing getting help, because I fear asking for help will make things even worse. During this time, I neglect the children to a degree that causes actual harm.

Yup... so those two examples are as close as I can get without sobbing and feeling like I should suicide, as a way of trying to get rid of this guilt somehow.

I feel so awful. I always swore that nothing like that would ever, ever, ever, ever happen to me, because of my own first hand experiences of trauma and neglect during childhood.

Things got so awful so fast and so massively tho, that all my coping mechanisms were gone, by the time I realised I had to somehow fix the problem.

I feel like I can never forgive myself for this, even tho it was "only" neglect and not active violence or anything like that.

This weighs so heavily on me. Knowing that any harm was caused by me kills me a million times worse than all of the harm that was caused to me at the hands of others, when I was a child. I'd gladly endure more trauma, if I could somehow atone for the harm that I ended up causing.

I don't know how to process this, don't know what to do with this guilt, other than to accept that I'm a flawed human too and that when I'm at my absolute limit, when something's so bad that it literally breaks me, to accept and acknowledge that I stop meeting my own standards of moral behaviour and that I fail, like almost all humans do in those situations.

It has also taught me some hard lessons about what mental state my parents must have been in at the time, when they neglected me as a child.

Ugh... I feel sure that I will take this guilt with me to the grave... That I'll never be able to truly lighten it's load.

I've been doing things since then (volunteer work) to try and make amends, but it will never be able to undo what happened.
 
Hi @Ecdysis , Idk if this is useful, I am poor at expressing myself.

What you describe by analogy is a person in greart need, who very much cares about who they care for. And if like myself I would venture tends to view the consequences of your actions in a light that likely was not as traumatizing for others as you fear. Coming from abuse and neglect is different than being more secure and experiencing an instance of it. I think too it is probably likely you forget what you do and have done well that carries more weight than you are feeling. It is also not necessarily accurate to size up the negative effect of your actions; that is others may not have felt as negatively impacted as you fear.

If the situation is continuing and there is something identifiable, such as substance abuse, it may be a good idea to start getting support there. And please don't let guilt stop you; many a pilot for example has flown intoxicated also. The point is, as you said it is the worst situation you've experienced, and you deserve all the help, support and resources for coping you can get. And time to rest.

If there is someone you can trust to tell, please do so- a mentor, best friend, pastor, someone who is understanding of trauma and also wise. If they know you well their direction may be invaluable. The guilt is because you are a good person, not because you are a monster. Nor are you repeating your past on others or at others' expense. It is good that it gives you possible perspective on your parents, that too is wisdom. But equally so you are not them, not doomed, and it doesn't paint you as a bad person, just a person desperate, struggling, suffering, and doing your best. But now you know you need more help. That doesn't make you bad or weak or shameful, just honest. You can change course.

If this isn't helpful please disregard. But please take the chance on believing it isn't worth suicide. I think nearly every person (or many of us) recoils in shame at things we've done/ not done. In some ways it's inevitable with spiraling, a hard consequence to avoid, both the (in)actions and the guilt and shame that follows. But now small steps to recovery and getting stable again. I think we feel horrible or like monsters sometimes, but really we're just people struggling like other people. And knowing this isn't who or how you want to be speaks volumes to your desire to heal and your character. The best way to make amends for it is changing course, and allowing others to help you also. The worst condemnation I feel will probably be from yourself.

Many hugs to you.
 
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I've been doing things since then (volunteer work) to try and make amends, but it will never be able to undo what happened.

Guilt and remorse are two of the biggest factors of my trauma. In fact there is a word for this form of trauma, called moral injury or in my case, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS).

For context, I was indoctrinated into an armed group at age 8. I committed numerous acts of violence against others during this time, and I am responsible for loss of life, permanent disability and trauma. I've spent the past 16 years learning about aggression, violence and trauma in an effort to make sense of my upbringing and essentially "rehabilitate" myself. At age 31, I have made great strides in this endeavor. It will never be complete, but I am by-and-large a prosocial individual who has genuine community engagement, positive reciprocal relationships with family members and friends, and who does not hurt others.

What I have learned over the years is that quite frankly, there are things in this world that you can never take back. There are decisions you can make that you cannot un-make. When we look at our past, the biggest factor in our capacity to process is largely the recognition that this is true, and our brains attempt to organize and process these truths with the limited biological capacity (in terms of data) that we have as human beings.

In this, is where we find grief. Grief is not something human beings are biologically designed to endure, because grief is not something that we can solve. It is, as Buddhism puts it, an "Imponderable Question." We cannot explain death, we cannot understand things that we cannot change. In striving for meaning (the idea that our lives have a purpose, that existence is meaningful) we come face-to-face with death, which is not something that we can assign a correct meaning to.

Our ability to logically process death is subpar, and it becomes even further impaired when death happens around us, or even caused by us. Guilt is different than remorse. Guilt is our emotional response to moral injury, whereas remorse is our self-conception, the conception of others, and our behavioral commitment to changing the pieces that cause harm.

Remorse was the first "emotion" that I ever felt at age 30, when I experienced neurogenesis at the hands of psilocybin. I almost killed myself and ended up hospitalized. These past two years have been some of the hardest in my life. Having gained a sense of "affective" emotion, I felt exactly what the cost was, for the harmful actions that I committed. They can never be undone. They cannot be atoned for. They cannot be balanced out.

My victims will most likely never know justice, though I would certainly be open to that process, I simply do not have enough information about their identities to pursue that avenue (and frankly, reaching out to them would undoubtedly cause them more pain if they are not in a place to deal with their trauma - it would be self-gratifying to offer an apology, though I am now, after many years of treatment, genuinely sorry).

In my therapy what has become paramount is the comprehension of how to "be" a human person in my day-to-day life, knowing that I have hurt others. How can I exist as ethically as possible, knowing that I am a perpetrator of harm? The police were involved in my abuse history (as it is relative to organized crime and trafficking and corruption in my area). They knew that this was happening (and often participated) and did not arrest me or put me in jail.

So I am left here, alone with myself, an Island-of-One, attempting to determine the way forward. Even prior to developing emotions, it was cognitively challenging to understand my place in the world, my existence, my socialization, because I was and remain so distinct from my peers. One thing that has become beneficial to me, if not my victims, is learning to accept the fact that the truth is? I am both good and bad. I am not all good, or all bad. I am both, which is true of most human individuals.

Whatever it is that my history means, that is beyond my capacity to understand. As a religious person, it is beyond my capacity to understand if I will ever be redeemed by my G-d. That is not my decision and it is not up to me. Whether or not my victims forgive me, that is not my decision and it is not up to me (and it is also not something that they are ever required to do). I must exist in absentia of this knowledge, because it will never be known.

I do not know what death means. I do not know how my victims have lived, if they have lived, and while that may reveal itself at a later time I am not in control of that process and never will be (as I have tried to gain this knowledge to the best of my ability and failed). All that I can do now, is what I can do. I can dedicate myself to peace. I can dedicate myself to rehabilitation and recovery. I can attain as much knowledge as it is possible for me to learn, so that I can take good actions now instead of harmful ones. What that means? I do not know.

Regardless of your past actions, regardless of how you behave now, regardless of your beliefs or your identity - you deserve compassion. Some people call this radical, because I extend it to every human - even rapists, pedophiles, genocidal maniacs, despots -> these are human actions. They have not divorced themselves from humanity by committing them. Thus, even though it is difficult to imagine, I believe in preserving their basic rights and dignity.

It is not reciprocal. In the words of Sarah Sisko, "It is not linear." They would not do the same for me. That is not about them, it is about my standards of conduct for myself, and how I would choose to treat any human person who crossed my path. Perhaps others think I am an evil monster. Perhaps they believe in my journey of rehabilitation. I have had both types of responses over the years. All I can do is what I can do.

It took me a long time to get beyond the barrier that it is impossible for me to speak about my past because others will reject me. If they reject me, that is their right. I will not force myself upon anyone, and no one is required to interact with me. But for those who do, I can act well. I can teach what I know about violence and perpetration. I can help. I can be honest. I can work to heal myself as much as possible so that I am the best person I can possibly be.

I can transform guilt into reverence. Not for myself. Not to condone my behavior or uplift it, but to hold my past experiences - and theirs, and them - in a liminal space of gentleness - because gentleness is what my victims deserve. My self-flagellation does not fix any problem. It is simply more violence, and I can refuse all acts of violence, even those toward myself.

All human beings deserve compassion, dignity and fundamental rights. There have been times that I denied this to others - I violated their rights, I did not respect them, and I showed them brutality. But now I choose a different way. You are a human being, and thus you deserve these same qualities. And as you grow and learn to engage with the portions of your history that involve harm to others, you can choose a different way as well.

This answer has been heavily self-centered, because I cannot know what your thoughts and feelings are and would not attempt to prescribe them (nor do I know the specifics of your history), but this has been my journey so far and hopefully there may be something that you can reflect on, or relate with in some way.
 
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I think @Weemie makes an important distinction between remorse and guilt, as well as grief, which if you ask me is huge.

I don't know what your beliefs are, but I do think it can be forgiven. And to trust that. Even people can forgive.

Best wishes to you.
 
I wrote some on the topic a few years back…

What I'm asking for, is any advice from folks who do rate their guilt and shame.

- When I've been super lucky I've gotten the chance to learn from what I've f*cked up. To be presented with the same scenario, different time & place, and choose differently. It doesn't erase the guilt of the past, doesn't change it, but it helps to balance it. To square it some.

- When I'm not that lucky, it's just something I've learned to wear. Snort. Often times badly, but hey. This is the one that chafes the hardest in the onslaught if the 'not your fault' business. Yes. Actually. Some things are my fault. And there is jack all I can do about it. <<< That I know of, in any event.

- When I'm unlucky, not only do I really f*cking hate & despise what I did, but I would do it again.

***

I know this is long. And most of it is caveat. To forestall the "It isn't your fault' business. Yes. Actually. Some shit is my fault. Isn't a question I'd ask, usually, my fault = my responsibility. But I figured law of averages means I'm probably not the only person with well earned guilt, shame, regret. And maybe someone has a better answer to how you deal with that, than mine; You just do. Own it, learn from it, and if you're f*cking lucky as hell maybe you'll get a chance to do differently someday.
 
Thank you for your replies.

This is still so raw for me that I totally suck at speaking about it.

Over the last few days, I've been thinking about "Why has this topic only come up now that I'm in my mid 40s - that's weird, surely?"

And I have to say that the (equally weird) answer is that I've made my life both during childhood trauma and after childhood trauma into one massive, constant, superhuman effort of *not* doing things that I have to feel guilt, remorse, regret, shame over.

I think it's probably a very strange partly dysfunctional coping mechanism, like someone becoming an alcoholic or a workaholic or whatever.

I was so horrified by the perps in my childhood, that I made it my mission to be the opposite of that.

So I'd stand up for all the kids at school being bullied, even if it meant I became a target of the bullies myself. I'd stand up to injustice, even if it meant that it had negative effects for me. I refused to take paid jobs in any company that was exploiting humans, animals, the environment, whatever. I've also probably done more volunteer work in my life than paid work, in an attempt to do good things in the world.

I'm not saying I've never done anything wrong, that would be ridiculous. But I've always made sure to protect those weaker than me an made sure that if I was picking a fight, it was with someone my own size, or someone stronger.

It's come at a big price, overall, I'd say. I've sacrificed a lot for this. It was like an inner compulsion of "You must do the opposite of what the perps in your childhood did".

Which is why I think it's such a huge, shocking disappointment to me now, that I've finally broken under the load of life and stopped being able to live up to those standards.

I'm not sure what to do with either of those things... The realisation that I've been some kind of weird addict trying to desperately be the opposite of a perp all my life, or the fact that I've finally hit a wall in my life where my ability to function crumbled at a time when I also held a lot of responsibility and I feel like I've failed.

I think it's making me realise that we're all broken somehow, that we're all sinners, that we're all fallible. There's still a huge spectrum within that of doing good and bad and I still think everyone has the option of making better choices.

But I think until now, I sort of viewd that as a theoretical thing and figured that if I devoted my whole life to making morally good choices, then so could everyone else.

At the same time, I've always felt bad about the many small ways that I've not been able to live up to my standards - by driving a car, I'm definitely contributing to pollution and global warming, by buying food in a supermarket, I'm supporting industrial scale agriculture and plastic packaging... I mean, there's a million ways in which we all contribute to doing harm in micro-moments every single day.

Ugh, sigh... I don't know if any of this makes sense... I'm not sure it's meant to... I think it makes sense when viewed through the lense of a child growing up with abuse and trauma... That that traumatised child would vow to "live the opposite"... And that putting that into practise in the real world, as an adult, has been... challenging... and a huge emotional burden... and a partly adaptive coping mechanism and a partly mal-adaptive one...

I guess I have to comfort that traumatised child and have to tell her that it's an impossible mission to always try to do the right and the good thing and that she doesn't need to be on that mission, just because she went through childhood trauma. It's okay for her to live a fallible life and to try and find a balanced, measured way of contributing to the world by doing good things, but that being broken and failing is part of the human condition and that now that I'm grown up, I can view the trauma and abuse she went through as a kid as having been done by people who were also broken and who were failing at life. And I guess I have to find a way to live with the discomfort of "having something in common" with all the broken people in the world (which basically is everyone, to different degrees).

Maybe I also have to somehow review my moral judgements about people being broken. As a kid, I grew up with very harsh moral judgements about the broken, abusive, violent people in my life. I viewed them as "bad". Maybe a more grown-up perspective is to try and untangle it from my own personal experiences of suffering as a child, and viewing it more neutrally and seeing people's brokenness not as a moral indicator of how good or bad they are, but to recognise that some people get so much awful stuff pile into their lives, that they end up more broken than others who have the good fortune/ the luxury to have been broken less by life. Maybe I should have compassion with those people that have been broken so badly that they no longer have empathy with anyone else. Maybe I should acknowledge the horror that those people (who I've often seen/ experienced as perps) are living. Maybe I should view their brokenness spilling out onto others not so much as their evil deeds, but as their inability to shoulder the burden of what evil was done to them, without it leaking out onto others?

I don't know... A lot to think about...

I'm grateful to have finally voiced it tho... I've been carrying this around with me for a while and feeling like it's something truly unspeakable and that I musn't voice it, that I can't face it, that I'll break even more if I do face it...

I'll try to reword it as this for now: I'm gutted and deeply saddened that the bad things that happened to me... that I didn't manage to fully contain them to myself, that I didn't manage to do enough therapy, quickly enough when they happened... to prevent them spilling out onto others and affecting them negatively too. I would do anything to have been able to prevent it and it breaks my heart that I didn't have the strength to prevent the cascade of bad things happening and it affecting others too.
 
Quite often I find remorse and guilt fill the chasm between did and didn't.

But did and didn't are the result of feeling like we could - when we couldn't.

We take couldn't and think that's weakness instead of Avoidance. When you look at the symptoms, A is for Avoidance, a symptom that not only stops us from doing but the stress feeds the loop to create further avoidance.

We take bad things that happened because of PTSD as weakness - instead of our screaming for help - which is what most of us did - even if we didn't know we were doing it.... That feeling of failure - was it YOU that failed? Or did many other people fail you?

Then we go back and imagine we could do what we couldn't do - and fill the chasm between what we did and what we wish we did with remorse and guilt.

Stop trying to fix the past because you can't - its done - it's over. You CAN NOT CHANGE IT.

Learn from it, and move on to living today. Focus on getting better, focus on learning to stop ruminating, focus on today. Focus on moving on.......
 
Part of the 12 step program... never been in it ...is making amends wherever possible. When are your volunteering amends going to be enough?If at all possible direct the amends to those you hurt. I hear gross remorse and it is understandable. However, I wonder if that diving into a cesspool as you are will lead to more trauma inflicted by you upon yourself. Try, ....maybe you have, personally or by letter contacting each child. If they are estranged write. They may ridicule it but you have made a clear break from the self hatred by putting it to rest in some form of communication. Any other amends is not necessary as you are or appear sincere. To me you are still engaged with the trauma on an extreme level but you yourself are the victim of it all like trying to work off this debt that can never be enough. It beats on you every time you try to help others. I love the definition of guilt that was given. I also, even after making those contacts to acknowledge and ask forgiveness have times of rumination over the past but have learned skills to deal with that and you can,also. A man once said to me why is it the good that I want to do I do not do and the things that I do not want to do I do. It is a question that plagues all of us. Please, dear person stop abusing yourself. You amends are nothing but self imposed penance which you can never do enough of to be free. Thank you for writing. Self hatred will kill you and your life is worth more than that. If you are going east so to speak , turn and go as far west as you can in learning you are a valuable person and worthy to be at peace with your past. Find a better solution. So much help available. Work at the things you can digest from all of us and leave the rest for another time.
Peace.
 
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