Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Buddhist Approaches To Guilt
AllbuddhaBound
Veteran
A person I know, is overwhelmed by their guilt and cannot forgive themselves for things they have done in the past. Tonglen approaches have been tried and compassion works for others, but they can't seem to overcome the judgement of their own mistakes and the guilt makes them depressed and sullen.
Does anyone have more ideas that may help out?
Does anyone have more ideas that may help out?
0
Comments
Each life is a movement from ignorance to enlightenment.
Mistakes made are the food for enlightenment, not only for the benefit of oneself but also for the benefit of others. The learning from one's mistakes can also be used to help others.
Keep working with those negative emotions, acknowledging the wrong & unskilfulness of past behaviour, until the goodness causing this transformation becomes the predominant quality of mind.
For me, forgiveness is something over-rated. Instead, it is best to work with wisdom & goodness.
Forgiveness tries to remove or supplant the sense of shame that is there, where as wisdom acknowledges and works with the sense of shame, transforming it instead of supplanting them.
The Buddha taught to have a sense of shame (hiri) and a fear of the results of unskilful kamma (ottoppa) are two of the 'five gates' to Dhamma, the other three being mindfulness (sati), ready wisdom (sampajanna) and concentration (samadhi).
The Buddha said: There is nothing to fear in feeling ashamed, sullen and contrite. The Catholics say: "God loves one with a contrite heart".
It is essential to trust in the process of spiritual renewal. Trust in the goodness & wisdom of mind causing this transformation, until this goodness & wisdom becomes the predominant quality of mind.
May all beings be well.
It might help to work with a cognitive therapist or someone similar to identify the triggers for guilt and learn to react to them less strongly. If this has been going on too long and the brain has been trained to maintain a depressed state, it may require medicine to bring the brain back into balance.
I don't have the technology for the problem to cause the right conditions for wisdom and compassions. I do believe to keep connections with the dharma studying and meditating because I know those are some of the right conditions for awakening.
The quotes of dhamapada I think echo my observations. You have to let go of some of the wrong ideas before the right ideas may occur to you.
So she was almost crying and the nun giving the talk said something to her in the effect that forgiveness is not condoning with what you did. It is not like saying "oh, that was fine" or "that wasn't so bad". By what I understood she was trying to give the impression that forgiving yourself has more to do with allowing yourself to move on.
I can relate to that idea. I am very narrow minded when it comes to judging myself, but I never feel bad about it. One thing is to say to yourself "hey, you are messing up here, get your act together you twat!" (with some sense of humor), another is to say "I did this, so that means I suck".
People are not fundamentally broken no matter how bad they screwed up. The problem is that people like to put stickers on everything. "Oh I hurt my kids when I was alcoholic, now I will put a sticker on my forehead that says "sucker mom forever". If the problem was alcoholism then you deal with it. You are not alcoholic anymore? Hooray! Unfortunately you can't fix the past. Forgiving yourself here doesn't mean it is ok to toss your kids on the well on a drunken stupor, it just means letting go of the person that you were for once and for good.
What qualifies an action does not qualify a human being. The first is fixed in the past, the second is an eternal process of becoming that can't be evaluated in the same way you evaluate a coin or a stamp, because it is always changing in a dialectic process with everything else, even when you stubbornly reject that fact.
NR said "If the problem was alcoholism then you deal with it. You are not alcoholic anymore? Hooray! Unfortunately you can't fix the past. Forgiving yourself here doesn't mean it is ok to toss your kids on the well on a drunken stupor, it just means letting go of the person that you were for once and for good."
Holding onto the past and dwelling in it has a lot to do with the guilt I am talking about. There also seems to be the belief that they can't let go. No matter how unworkable that it is.
Jeffrey said "The quotes of dhamapada I think echo my observations. You have to let go of some of the wrong ideas before the right ideas may occur to you."
I find that people who are filled with wrong ideas become depressed, angry, resentful and unforgiving. When people see the value in right ideas, things change but it is easy to become so attached to these wrong ideas. The challenge is to get people filling their mind with positivity. Also to overcome this attachment to the wrong ideas.
RenG wrote "thoughts about guilt are getting a little obsessive, and the person is depressed."
Obsession on negative thoughts is a common thread in dissatisfaction and depression.
DD wrote "Keep working with those negative emotions, acknowledging the wrong & unskilfulness of past behaviour, until the goodness causing this transformation becomes the predominant quality of mind."
Accepting the negative emotions and coming to the understanding that they were wrong in that moment are important I believe. We try so hard to avoid these feelings of guilt, try to sublimate them and avoid the pain, but to deal with them in a skillful way is the key. Also in the quotes of Buddha, are most helpful. Knowing what is wrong or false, and what is right or truth, will help overcome these issues.
Thank all of you for your help.
a investigate the meaninglessness of nonvirtue
b investigate fear of nonvirtue results
c investigate the need to be free from nonvirtue quick
one who lacks self guidance
and later possesses mindfulness
is like a radiant moon freed from the clouds
2 the power of antidote (virtue)
(same poem above)
3 the power of resolve
I beseech all the Guides of the world
to please accept my evils and wrongs,
since these are not good,
in the future I shall do them no more
4 the power of reliance
refuge in triple gem
Like entrusting myself to a brave man when greatly afraid
by entrusting myself to this [awakening mind] I shall be swiftly liberated
even if I committed extremely unbearable evils.
Why then do the conscientious not devote themselves to this?
The suggestion's you made, have been a part of this woman's life for some time. She has seen a number of therapists over a number of issues but she seems to experience the same problem over and over. She forgives everyone who has harmed her, but she can't seem to forgive herself. She believes she cannot and should not be forgiven, even though her mistakes have been nothing compared to others. On this issue, she is stuck.
From Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet: "You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." (Letter Four; trans. Stephen Mitchell)
This is not an easy one given we don't know a lot of detail about the person. Whenever there is unresolved stuff that is very resistant to change it almost always means the person feels they are bad in their core self. Therapists think this comes from growing up in a devaluing emotional environment.
It can change but it needs a great deal of gentleness - I would NOT advocate any sort of cognitive therapy or method. That seems to have been tried anyway. Cognitive methods are like telling a brick wall to move. They just make the wall feel worse :mad:
These things tend to change with the slow 'seeping in' of others' acceptance which then helps the person have acceptance.
There is a school of thought that with deeply ingrained issues it takes about 1000 experiences of a better state to bring about change. There is evidence for this in terms of our how our neural pathways change.
Sounds like you are doing well 'hanging in there' with this person. Hold them in mind in your meditation/prayers. Its surprising how that works - the collective unconscious/spiritual field is all powerful!
Ah, sort of like self acceptance one sees develop from maturity and aging.
It also relates to some advice given by Za Rinpoche. He states that trust is separate from love even though we in the west seem to feel one is not possible without the other. He says, that people feel guilt when they believe they cannot trust themselves. The maturing process would relate because a person of greater age comes to know themselves more deeply and experience has taught them they actually can be relied upon to do the right thing.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for that. Again, it seems you are saying time and experience with support and reframing plus spiritual meditation and prayers may be the most effective way to help with change.
Some really sage advice gleaned here.
Out of curiosity, what about guilt puzzled the teachers you knew?
For me, guilt will make me feel terrible until I totally acknowledge it. Yes, what I did was wrong. Then I understand that dwelling on it is wrong as well. Maybe not wrong, just...pointless?
I think Buddha said something along the lines of:
"isn't it awful when someone gets pierced with an arrow?"
"yes, it is"
"isn't it even more awful when the person gets pierced with a second arrow?"
"yes, it is"
I think the point is that when we we're hurt by something, (like guilt), it's even worse that we continue to hurt ourselves by dwelling on it. So don't shoot any second arrows :P
She keep on magnifying them, nurturing them by obsessing over them.
Like someone who would whip himself every nights out of guilt.
All non Buddhists westerners believe that they are their egos.
I think that this kind of logic could likely lead people to terrible conclusions:"well that's who i am, im a terrible person. I should just isolate myself so I can at least i will stop hurting other people" type of things.
Which to me sounds quite a bit like what that person seem to feel like.
"I did terrible things, I'm a bad person, I deserve suffering"
This.
This is why when people tell someone who feel guilty:"No you are not a bad person..."
It wont help much.
Only when she come to this realization herself, through perhaps experiencing how things really are, through meditation, will she be able to understand that she is not a bad person.
By practicing meditation, your friend will come to this realization, and will eventually be able to forgive herself (forgive the state of her ego at that time, which permitted for whatever act she committed).
My advice is to just observing these feelings with mindfulness in deep meditation.
Allowing the feelings to be (not wanting it to go away, not wanting it to stay), observing them, in deep meditation, they will eventually go.
I think the realization that she is no longer the person who made the mistakes, will help her as she comes to understand herself.
Namaste
When one realizes this mechanism of the ego, then one has to then deal with the addiction to the guilt feeling- the negative can be attractive.
Makes sense to me.
I am , with age and wisdom, trying to live right and finding clear sky above me.
It is funny how Facebook is now challenging me. On this site comes people from the past whom I have wronged or have wronged me . They come like memory.
I say hello, ask how they are, then let them go.
But their pictures keeps popping up to remind me...
When we were young we did..., well..., not nice things to each other. All "kids" do that well into the 20s. It was hormones, trying to feel personal power and righteousness, experimenting with who we thought we were, or who we thought we might be.
I was bothered regularly well into my 30s by the "wrongs" I committed socially as a kid up to my 20s. In my 30s I was fortunate enough to figure out we were all doing that cr*ppy stuff to each other. Petty stuff: gossip, extra critical, not giving goofy kids a chance, mocking, etc. TERRIBLE how kids and peer pressure can create such nasty situations.
I was not even among the worst offenders either, Jay Taylor and Kelly Phelps were the terror! The former physically abusive, the latter wouldn't LOOK at you unless... . Anyway..., I digress.
One kid had a locker next to mine in HS. I used to give him a hard time, I teased him (but not viciously, thank "god"). At our 20 year HS reunion I sought him out and was fortunate enough to find him and apologize to him.
He didn't even remember my teasing: he told me he thought I was cool kid and liked having his locker next to mine! I nearly fainted! Crazy huh? I explained my guilt. Gave him a good hug and "let him go."
Hi sndymorn. I'm probably 50% of your claim of being "obscure" in this matter. No biggie. Anyway, I'm grateful for your post. It allowed me to review this "guilt" thing which resolved positively at my HS reunion.
Every time habitual thoughts and resulting feelings from a wrong that has been done to me or a wrong that I have done to another comes up, I consciously forgive and move on. It may happen ten times, a hundred times, or a thousand times. It doesn't matter.
Eventually the mind will let go as there is no more action to be found. Through awareness and with practice, equanimity replaces these negative emotions.