No Longer Ruled by Guilt

Where love isn’t, a sense of guilt tends to be. Our patients, the perfectionists, to be specific, tend to feel burdened by an inordinate and overwhelming amount of it. It would be fair to say that their lives are ruled by it. The feeling of guilt implies embarrassment stemming from the awareness that one broke an important rule—the more sacred the rule, the more intense the feeling. And, for many, guilt is usually associated with at least a somewhat aggrandized sense of self-importance, or the perspective that one’s self-sacrifice is meaningful. Moral perfectionists, those who strive to become saint-like, carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, believing that their deeds profoundly affect those around them. So, when they’re associated with others or at least significant others, every decision, every step, and each evasion, to the perfectionist, is as significant as any fork-in-the-road moment. Everything feels as though it matters immensely.

A Blueprint for Survival and Meaning

Children growing up in homes with at least one highly reactive parent tend to feel this way. Their role in the relationship is shaped by duty and thoughtfulness; any deviation could have catastrophic consequences. So, moral perfectionism becomes the blueprint for survival and meaning, where each day is marked by success or failure, based on one’s emotional impact on the caregiver. Considered from a child’s point of view, this amount of clout can easily make one feel special and powerful, as though the fate of the world depended solely on them. And it could also feel as though randomness and luck are mere background characters or extras, if not completely irrelevant. The bubble in which the child lives is, in their grasp of it, fully determined by them. And with great power, comes great responsibility, as they say.

So, for our moral perfectionists, life is defined more so by duty and less by passion, which is believed to be for children and those not that special. The result is that one’s sense of self is modulated by the dial of guilt. Additionally, a lack of love may also contribute to one feeling guilty. Questions like, “Shouldn’t I want to see my mom?” arise in treatment. The implication being that the lack of desire here implies a lack of gratitude, and in extreme cases psychopathy, in the patient—“If I were a good daughter, I would just want to go see her.” Yet, our relationships with others, including our parents, are messy. So, we may ask our patients to explore why there may not be much love in some relationship to begin with, with a focus on love’s foundations. Love entails reciprocity, a mutual interest in one another’s lives; it entails space, allowing each other to have lives outside of the relationship; it entails minimal manipulation, meaning that guilt-tripping, normal to an extent, shouldn’t be a prominent component; it entails meaning, the sense that each meaningfully influences the other (this feels one-sided in the relationships based solely on duty); and it entails joy, looking forward to and feeling good in each other’s company.

The Perspective of Self-Importance

When one has to force oneself to spend time with another, we may ask: “Why do you consider this a moral issue?” And we return to the perspective of self-importance. Children may learn that they can easily affect a parent’s mood, which increases their sense of mastery, but they fail to gain a broader outlook. “How much have you really influenced the person who can’t contribute much to your life?” “Did you aid them momentarily or did you help them see the world or their life in a way that meaningfully changed it?” "Would they be happy knowing that you spend time with them solely because you felt guilty?" "Can you force yourself to enjoy their company?" And, “Was this being a moral issue a way to guide your decision-making?”

Patients are often both relieved and disheartened to discover how limited their ability to influence others is. To be clear, I’m not arguing that one should discontinue any relationship. I’m more so arguing that we should have more clarity about what these relationships are and how they arise. A relationship built solely or mainly on guilt, again without the pull of love, is built on a dysfunctional and unfair foundation. Our patients hardly ever ask themselves, again due to guilt and self-importance, if being placed in those roles was warranted and is actually desirable to them. We may ask: “Would you expect your child to want to spend time with you if they grew up the way you did?” Many would say no.

Guilt is powerful because it feels objective, as though some deity envelops us in it, and as it’s based on a sense of “That’s just the way things are,” which of course must remain unquestioned. Finally, one often strongly feels as though guilt could be overcome with activity, which almost always feels meaningful. Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams argued, “Those who suffer most in childhood usually suffer most as adults, and in scenarios that uncannily mirror their childhood circumstances.” In this respect, the circumstances are foisted on the recipient, who may welcome them to perfect them. The purportedly guilty party may cave, litigate, and ingratiate with the hope of cultivating in the other life-altering insights. So, we may ask: “How likely is that to occur, especially when guilt seems to work perfectly?”

Moral perfectionism is based on the flawed premise that other-worldly rewards await the saint, or at least those that may feel miraculous, which creates a sense of hope that feels almost impossible to discard.