🔒 Overcoming Emotional Roadblocks: Transforming Guilt into a Stepping Stone

Hey there, first of all, I want to thank you, as always, for your support. I want to thank you for listening, for sharing and, especially you listening to this premium podcast, for your financial support. Today's question comes from Helen and she asked how to deal with the guilt, and even though that was a very succinct question and didn't go into a lot of details, I do know exactly what she's talking about. I deal mostly with parents who have lost children. I deal with people with all kinds of loss, but mostly with parents, and what I have found to be I was going to say, almost universal, but I think universal of every parent I've talked to who has lost a child is the feeling of guilt and the reason why the feeling of guilt is so important. I think blame is one of the main things that can block us on our path to moving forward with our grief. If we're blaming others or we're blaming ourselves, that can create an incredible roadblock to going towards healing. So I think this topic is very important and I thank Helen for her questions. So what I'm going to talk about is understanding why we do feel guilt. I'll talk about some of the common forms of guilt. What can trigger that. I'll give you some strategies to cope with it, how to begin to foster forgiveness and healing, and I'll give you a couple of examples and then we'll wrap up.

So, when it comes to understanding guilt and grief, guilt is, first of all, discuss what guilt is. I believe that all human emotions are natural and there are no quote bad emotions. We tend to think of emotions like fear and anger and guilt as bad, but I believe guilt serves a purpose. But what purpose does it serve? Well, I believe it's more of a forward looking thing. If we do something wrong and we feel badly about it, we feel that guilt, then the next time we might be less likely to do that thing wrong because we don't want to feel the guilt in the future. I think that's the purpose that guilt serves. But what happens? We get caught up in the guilt and we start feeling guilt about things in the past and we ruminate on them and we go over and over and over again. That type of guilt serves no purpose, because regretting things in the past doesn't serve a purpose, because we can't change the past. We can only change our behavior in the now. So, understanding what guilt is and why we have it again, guilt itself is not bad, but when guilt ties us to the past and makes us to keep reliving the past and it doesn't allow us to forgive ourselves, it doesn't allow us to move on. And I believe that guilt is another form of anger. When I was talking about forgiveness earlier, when we are angry with someone outwardly we call it anger, but when we turn that anger inward, we call it guilt.

So what are some common reasons why we feel guilt? One might be unfinished business or unspoken words, things that we wish we had done with someone before they passed, things that we wish we had said to someone before they passed. We might feel responsible for their person's death. We may regret our actions or our lack of actions. And when I say feeling responsible and I say this is a really common thing I mean responsible for no matter how that person passed away. Now you may feel like, oh, I am responsible because you did something or you didn't do something, you said something to someone or you didn't say something to someone.

But I can tell you that I've talked to people that I felt guilt about things like disciplining a child who then took their life and said well, if I hadn't disciplined them, maybe they wouldn't have, or someone who felt like if I hadn't let my daughter go out, for example, on a date, and she was in an accident where she was killed, if I hadn't let her go out, if I just made breakfast for her at home, for example, then she would still be alive. I actually spoke to one mother of an adult daughter who was killed by a drunk driver nowhere near the mother. The mother hadn't seen her that day, but that mother had actually gone and figured out seven things, and literally seven things wrong that she had done that day to blame herself for her daughter's passing. I can tell you what my daughter's shame had passed away. It was sudden, it was unexpected. We had no idea why it happened, but I found myself thinking maybe I was responsible. Somehow I had to give her a shot for arthritis every couple of weeks and I'd given her a shot a couple days before. And was it my fault? Did I do something wrong with the shot? Was the autopsy going to come back and say that that was the cause of her passing? Or was it the drugs that she was on for her arthritis? Maybe I shouldn't have given her those drugs, or maybe I should have sought another opinion from the cardiologist she was seeing or maybe I should have taken her back sooner and you can see where this is going.

We can go to any lengths to blame ourselves, to make ourselves responsible, and you may wonder why is this? And as I thought about it, I think it's kind of a form of control. If we believe that we, if we had done something different in the past, that we could have prevented this tragic event, then that gives us a sense of control that we can change things in the future or keep things in the future safe if we just do all the right things. But we know that this isn't true. We know that some of these things that I say sound absolutely silly to you. I'm sure listening to them, but when we say them to ourselves, we seem to take them seriously and we allow it to block our healing.

So, when it comes to coping with our guilt, I want you to reflect and accept the past. First of all, accept what has happened. Accept that, no matter what you could have done or didn't do, that it's not your fault. There's nothing that you could have done to prevent your loved one from passing. I believe that we all have an exit point, or maybe multiple exit points, and nothing can cause us to go before that time and nothing can keep us here after that time. So stop giving yourself so much power.

As parents again especially, we tend to think of ourselves as we're supposed to be omniscient. We should have known better. We're supposed to be omnipresent. We should have somehow been able to be there and we should be omnipotent, that we should have the power to change things and to keep our children safe. And none of those three things are true. We are humans. We are limited in our capacity, in our power, in our knowledge and our ability to be the more than one place at once. So don't blame yourself for it.

When it comes to it, I ask you to talk to yourself the way you talk to a good friend, and you know that if a friend came to you and Told you that I'm responsible for my daughter's death, who passed from cancer, because if I just take her to the doctor sooner, or if I just tried this other treatment, you would say to your friend no, it's not your fault. Or if your friend had a child who passed by Suicide and they said it was their fault because they wouldn't let their child go to the prom, or was their fault because they didn't listen to the child? You would say, no, it's certainly not your fault. So I ask you to talk to yourself the way that you would talk to a good friend and, if you need, get some help, talk to someone else. When I talk to people that come and speak with me, getting that different perspective, getting a perspective for someone who's not just going to tell them what they want to hear, but who's going to be honest with them and who's going to listen to them and hear them out. That often helps people. So understand that Guilt is a natural motion.

You probably understand practicing forgiveness. You probably understand how important forgiveness is. If you've enlisted my podcast for any amount of time or you study in your Death experiences, your people talk about all the time about how important it is to forgive. Well, just as important as it is to forgive other people, it's important to forgive yourself as well. So it also will encourage you to build new connections and relationships with people that are in certain similar circumstances, listen to their stories, stories and support each other because, as someone else says, you know it's not your fault. It kind of gives you permission to forgive yourself.

So those are my thoughts on guilt for today some different ways that I believe that you can learn to cope with guilt, and I think it's again, it's extremely important. It's the number one thing when I'm working with someone, no matter where they've lost a child, a dog, a spouse, whatever I always explore Do you have guilt? Do you have someone that you need to forgive? If it, whether it's yourself or your loved one that's past, or someone else, that forgiveness is key in moving forward. So I hope you find this helpful. I'll let me know and if you have any question like for me to answer, just let me know and I'll be sure to address it on a future podcast. Have a great day.