Got guilt? Restore and feel better after guilt
Guilt is an emotion that most people learn during their normal childhood social development. It works like an alarm to let us re-examine our behavior, learn from it, and restore any relationships damaged due to our wrongdoings.
Is it healthy?
As most things in life, there is a pang of good guilt and a bad one:
-The healthy guilt is an alarm that allows us to learn from our actions and move on.
-The unhealthy guilt is more like an obsessive pinprick.
It becomes an unhealthy emotion when there is no lesson to learn and no way out of guilt. It does not drive us to rebuild our relationships. This unhealthy emotion has a lot of shame. Being shame that distressing feeling of how bad we are. In shame it is about the individual, but it no longer is about the moral individual in its environment like guilt is. Guilt is a socially driven emotion.
Our emotions can influence how we act and think. If we feel bad about ourselves, we usually withdraw from social life. We can sometimes misbehave; and use any excuse to corroborate our bad feelings, especially when we are sure others wrong us (when sometimes it may be the other way around).
Be skeptical about your feelings of guilt, especially if there is no lesson in it. It can be a sign of depression or another condition. If this affects your social, academic, and professional functioning, call (314) 714-5227 and start feeling better.
Body image – Shame of not being fit to fit in
Body image was first defined as the “picture of our own body which we form in our own minds” (Schilder, 1935). It is the way in which the body appears to us.
Body and identity are personally and socially constructed. All too often, we are conscious of having a big butt, pear shape body, old-looking hands, … We all have a body part we are not all that happy about. It can be more than one part that troubles us. Unfortunately, that part of the body often makes us feel not fit to fit in.
We may feel shame, at risk of being shunned, of not being allowed to belong as a group member. After all, ugliness is associated with very negative traits such as low intellectual capacity, lower achievement, criminal behavior, and so on.
History
The Greeks used the word stigma to refer to bodily signs that exposed something unusual and wrong about the moral status of a person. Not looking good involves a risk of being unable to move up in the world. Our search for beauty should not come as a surprise. After all, and regardless of how we define beauty: Beauty is a virtue.
Shame feelings
It is not uncommon to feel shame and not fit to fit in. Some people remember who said what. Others do not remember how they received their judgmental message. A few even acknowledge that we can be our worst enemies. In any case, such an idea can hurt like a pinprick. It can hurt for a long, long time.
You can feel better. The first step is to open up and ask for help.
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