Is Guilt Negatively Affecting Your Relationships?

Many people struggle with guilt. Much of this guilt is experienced consciously and for some, routinely on a weekly or even daily basis. Parents feel guilty about being not good enough, not ‘present enough’, or not living enough for their children. As colleagues, we can feel guilty for how we reacted (or always tend to react) in meetings, leaving us to wonder whether we have offended others, spoken out of turn, or unfairly dominated a discussion.

As romantic partners too, there can be huge amounts of guilt. Are we being attentive enough to our partners, loving enough or taking them on enough dates? These feelings can of course also be weaponized and used against our partners — to make them feel guilty about not doing enough around the house, not being ‘there’ enough for the kids, or for leaving us deprived of sex.

We can also suffer from unconscious guilt. Many clients I see struggle with a persistent and generalized sense of guilt. It can be a constant feeling not linked to any specific actions or behaviours but a loose feeling of not being good enough, of always coming up short, or feeling strongly scrutinized and judged. When they do inevitably come up short in some area of life (leaving socks around the house or forgetting about an anniversary), these people almost feel a sense of relief as the behaviour confirms what they already suspect deep inside — that they are not in fact good enough and that there is something insufficient or morally wrong with them.

But is guilt always bad? In a recent book on guilt, psychoanalyst Donald Carveth distinguishes between absolute destructive guilt, persecutory guilt, and “good” or reparative guilt. The first type of destructive guilt has no redeeming value. It is a function of the superego and formed likely in childhood. This guilt has no root in reality and is only and ultimately destructive. It is the voice that repeats to us that we are a failure, that we will never amount to anything, or that we are essentially irredeemable.

This destructive guilt needs to be opposed and rejected. In therapy, or with a good partner, we can work to manage these destructive voices and dilute them with other positive evidence. This is one of the elements of the popular CBT therapy — to reframe a destructive core belief through careful plotting of counter-evidence. (What are the facts that do not support this destructive core belief?)

The second type of guilt, however, is something that can be very useful, necessary and healing. Reparative guilt is other-oriented, meaning that it can be useful in repairing rifts and forging stronger bonds with others. Carveth argues that guilt is inevitable and often necessary for more positive human relations. Sometimes we need to feel a little bad about forgetting an anniversary or over-reacting in anger towards a loved one.

This kind of guilt can help steer us towards making better choices and even give us motivation to change bad habits. For instance, knowing that we act out when we drink too much and become belligerent and insulting to our partner can help us to make changes to address these. We should feel guilty for these behaviours and this guilt can spur us to make better choices that create stronger bonds with loved ones.

The couples’ therapist Esther Perel makes a similar case about the positive role of guilt in the context of relationship conflicts. For instance, when inevitably we harm our partner in some way, there can be a tendency to become shameful about this injury. We feel bad for the way that we treated our partner. If this shame is too intense, we can distance ourselves from our partner and ‘disappear’ into ourselves in a spiral of self-pity, activating the negative superego and its self-destructive voices.

This is not good from the point of view of the relationship and repair. To build healthy relations we need occasional doses of reparative guilt that can pull ourselves out of our indulgent experiences of shame. This kind of guilt is not all-encompassing and destructive. It acknowledges that humans make mistakes sometimes but we also have the capacity for repair and atonement. Learning to distinguish between destructive and reparative guilt is important work that many of us need more practice to discern.