Bad conscience and guilt: Gaining understanding and treatment
A bad conscience can come from various psychological mechanisms. Here you will get an overview of some of them, what you can do yourself and what you can expect if you contact us for therapy.
We hope it can contribute to a step in the right direction – out of the trap of conscience.
No one is perfect on every level and everything can always be handled better. Thus, a feeling of guilt is unavoidable for any sentient being. But for some it can prove to be extra burdensome.
In this article, we will provide an overview of common mechanisms behind excessive guilty conscience, but if you wish, you can immediately click on more specific articles in our series on guilty conscience.
Shame and guilt – caught in the maelstrom of the zeitgeist
12 Tips for Chronic Guilt for No Reason
Feeling Guilty About Everything and Anything? This is How to Break the Pattern of the “Blame Game”
Visit our front page if you wish psychologist in Oslo, or via video therapy across the country. To read more about our psychologists and book an appointment, use the button below. Or read on in the article for help with self-help.
Bad Conscience – An Introduction
A guilty conscience must be the most misused of our basic emotions. It is actually a feeling that can help guide us back to the right path when we have actually done something wrong.
But in our time, it is largely abused as a tool for psychological warfare on ourselves.
When we speak of a guilty conscience, we must therefore immediately separate between healthy and unhealthy feelings of guilt.
We can get a healthy feeling of guilt simply because we have done something wrong. In these instances, the feeling of guilt is meant to help motivate us to engage in reparative actions.
All too often, however, a guilty conscience is an unhealthy expression of self-punishment, especially over not fulfilling unattainable inner demands and expectations.
Imagination is the only limitation for which parts of reality one can abuse to keep oneself down.
Bad conscience for having eaten, not to mention eating candy or something else unhealthy, not have trained, after a breakup, to end it, not to stay in the relationship, with your boyfriend, ex, children and parents, not least if they are old. It can happen if you are ill, away from work or have infected others. One may have a bad conscience for saying no, or for not saying no. It can also occur over thoughts and feelings one has. In cohabitation, it can occur after infidelity, or for lack of and too much sex drive.
There is almost no way, and can be a great challenge in everyday life.
Trapped in the maelstrom of the spirit of the times?
How has it become so common to walk around feeling a size too small? Why can't we give ourselves permission to be who we are and just live life in all our human imperfections?
Why can we sometimes see the irrationality of our self-accusations but still be unable to shed the painful emotions?
You, the reader, may have come across various advice and tips online already. “Tell yourself you are good enough”, “lower your standards” or similar. This is absolutely true, and in some cases this can be a helpful reminder.
But sometimes you may not be aware that you are driving yourself far too hard. Things may have always been this way and you don’t even think about it.
Fish don’t believe in water.
In situations like these, awareness and active work with your inner dialogue can be enough to create more space within yourself.
This is especially true for those who have a fairly healthy sense of self-worth, but who can get caught up in the hamster wheel, stuck in a time crunch, and hit by the myriad demands of the zeitgeist.
Chronic guilt – for no reason?
In many cases we find that the problem goes deeper. A chronic guilty conscience, often for no reason, is commonly linked with a vulnerability in an individual’s self-esteem.
Rationally you can understand that you are too hard on yourself, but it feels like you just aren't good enough and should step it up anyway.
When things feel like this there is an emotional block in place somewhere, often unconsciously.
In situations such as these, therapy can be helpful in getting to the bottom of what the driving force behind the difficulties is and attempt to weaken the inner mechanisms of self-sabotage
Preferably pulled up by the root.
Freud was already concerned with the central role of a fundamentally indefinable feeling of being guilty of something.
If such an idea has once taken root in the psyche, it can act as a driving force for a number of symptoms, such as anxiety and depression.
The mind may become preoccupied with finding confirmation of such a basic assumption in everyday situations.
Thus, chronic bad conscience in everyday life can originate not only in the maelstrom of the zeitgeist, but also in disturbed internalized relationship experiences from childhood.
This does not necessarily have to mean great traumas; often the driving force is a more subtle, emotional tension.
The child who grows up with suffering around him develops fundamental guilt for his own shortcomings in helping.
The child who does not have negative feelings towards others confirmed will feel bad and guilty for still fostering such feelings within.
Other times the induction of guilt can occur via various forms of conditional love, such as high expectations and demands.
Sometimes difficulties with guilt can be rooted in growing up with more or less direct accusations, criticism and disapproval. Among other things.
One is often unaware that such basic conditions can become the driving force for chronic guilt, and simply becoming aware of this can help.
Other times one is aware but driven by chronic guilt just the same.
Then, emotion-focused work where one works through some layers of anxiety and guilt-ridden emotions, especially suppressed anger, will often be effective in breaking the pattern.
We often experience that there is a lot of anxiety and guilt associated with having conflicting feelings about the figures we grew up with.
In some cases, adaptation to one's environment goes so far as to become purely self-destructive.
Simply saying no or having an opinion, want, thought or feeling that conflicts with the needs of others can create a feeling of guilt.
Then therapy with a psychologist will often be necessary. If you want to give therapy for a guilty conscience a try, you can quickly and easily book an appointment in two minutes here.
Keep in mind that we also offer video therapy for people across Norway. In our experience it works just as well as in-person therapy for most people.
Therapy for a guilty conscience with trained psychologists in Oslo
If at any time you would like to try therapy, we will start with your problems as you experience them here and now and work with specific examples from your everyday life where feelings of guilt, or other symptoms, are intensified.
The specific episodes often carry a larger narrative. We will work actively to understand the specific symptom-driving mechanisms, not least the unconscious ones.
Through this work, relevant links to the past often emerge, and we then also work in depth with these.
We endeavor to not just “talk about it” or “dwell on the past” but to work actively to help you form a healing relationship where you can be yourself and you can react as an entire organism to what you have experienced.
Thus, you can resolve eventual remnants from your past that have gotten “stuck”, become aware of your patterns and achieve lasting change going forward.
In this way, we try to combine a depth psychological perspective with an active working method. We try to avoid digging into the past for the sake of digging, but also not just scratching the surface.
The degree to which your self-liberation process is successful is greatly dependent on the cooperation we manage to establish.
Gaining a shared understanding of the mechanisms that lead to your difficulties, and finding a helpful way to collaborate, is a natural goal in the start-up.
You will quickly discover if therapy is something for you. Keep in mind that we also offer video therapy right in your own home. It can be worth trying.
Click this link to learn more about what to expect from therapy with us.
Self-help
Perhaps it is sufficient, or at least helpful, to do some work on your own. We hope that this mini-series of articles on bad conscience will be a good place to start.
We try to delve deeper than the traditional tips, but at the same time make it as concrete as we can. Here we have stated in Click here for an article in KK in which we have spoken about guilty consciences.
In the articles linked to below, you can read about some of the psychological mechanisms behind these emotions, then you can read more about those that are most relevant to you.
We wish you the best with the important work you are embarking upon.
Shame and guilt – caught in the maelstrom of the zeitgeist – This article looks at common sources of guilt in today's society, where the list is set so high that one is guaranteed to tear.
12 Tips for Chronic Guilt for No Reason – This article contains a bunch of tips for distinguishing healthy guilt from bad conscience with some coping tips. A number of possible mechanisms for the development of sconscience explained.
Do you have a guilty conscience about someone? Psychological first aid for those of you who have actually done something wrong – This article is primarily about cases where you have actually done something wrong, have guilt healthy varietybut misuse this in order to punish yourself rather than reach out to others.
Then you will never be using the healthy feeling of guilt to bring yourself back on the course you want to be on. Rather, you get “stuck” in the bad things you have done and use it to keep yourself down.
It is helpful to do a team effort and utilize your healthy capacity for guilt. This also touches on the theme of the next blog post:
Feeling Guilty About Everything and Anything? This is How to Break the Pattern of the “Blame Game” This blog post is about when someone "gives you" guilt. When someone around you has put you, or is constantly putting you, under pressure to take responsibility for things that are not really yours, and you give in.
Did you have parents who constantly “gave” you a guilty conscience? Either directly or subtly, through accusations or hints about their own pain? Someone around you that constantly plays the role of “victim”?
Or maybe a partner that has started to pick on you and criticize you daily? And you have started to believe that it actually is about YOU? Then this blog post may prove helpful.
Many people have difficulties believing that a psychologist can help specifically them. Others have tried without getting results.
Remember that we are experts in our field with many years of continued education. We are accustomed to helping people who have previously not gotten much out of therapy.
You will quickly find out if this is something for you. We do not think you will regret giving it a try.
