Guilt: The Most Trapping of Feelings
Guilt is possibly the most annoying feeling in the entirety of emotions. A pain in the neck, constantly nagging and feasting on your happy thoughts. And the worst thing is that it's a part of being human, and in some cases, it's actually a good thing to feel guilty. Imagine a person killing their wife and not feeling like they've done something wrong. Scary, right? If you don't feel guilty, congratulations. You're a psychopath.
Guilt in its pure form is the very essence of our humanity. The good one, that is there when you've done something wrong, pushing you to make things right, warning you not to make the same mistakes again. The bane of existence that I'm referring to, though, is the guilt that comes out of nowhere to clip your wings. The guilt that rouses from a dark corner, when you're least expecting it. And the worst of all, the guilt that people force on you when you say no.
People sometimes use guilt as a form of authority on others. Ever heard of the term guilt tripping? If you haven't, you're so very lucky. Guilt tripping, by definition, is to make someone feel guilty, especially in order to induce them to do something. It's less obvious than mere orders, and much sneakier than peer pressure.
The problem with guilt tripping is that, in most cases, you don't even feel like you're being pushed in a certain direction. You feel as though you owe the person in front of you for refusing to do something that isn't even in your area or responsibility. For example, if a co-worker asks you to do their work for them and you refuse, they'll start to say things between the lines of 'guess I'll have to cancel my dentist appointment, then', or show you how tired they are by excessive yawning and very audible back cracking, or give you the story of how the baby kept them up all night. Suddenly, you feel like it's somehow your fault all of these things happened to this poor co-worker, and you decide to take up their work. It's not easy to notice that you're being guilt-tripped because at the end of the day, the choice comes from inside. Eventually, you're the decision maker, and when you come to think of it; no one forced you to do anything. You just felt falsely obligated to do it.
Sometimes, you'll find people who will even blame you and tell you that you've changed. You might hear things like 'You used to be so helpful.' or 'What happened to you?'. All because they can't do their own job, and they know you're a good person, so they exploit that.
Of course, not everyone is like this. You'll find that many people don't like guilt-tripping someone as much as they don't like when it's done to them, but it doesn't mean that none of us do it. We all unfortunately do, sometimes without even noticing. That doesn't make it a good thing, though. It's just that guilt is a very sensitive feeling and is alerted by the tiniest of inconveniences. The important thing is that we don't make guilt-tripping our lifestyle,an excuse to play hooky or escape responsibility because someone is always at the unfavorable side.
Another form of guilt-tripping, which I personally think is healthy guilt-tripping, is when you do it to yourself in order to finish a certain task or a project. You keep reminding yourself how much you've procrastinated, how much time you've let pass by, how close the deadline is, until you're suddenly feeling guilty, and you start to finish up your work. (here's a little secret: that was exactly the case with this article).
Although being hard on yourself is not the best solution, sometimes it's the most reasonable. We let ourselves off the hook a lot, but as long as you know how to guilt-trip yourself back into achieving, you're on the right track.
But please, keep your guilt-tripping to yourself.
Creative writer: Annan Gamal
Editor: Youmna Medhat
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