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Guilt
Shakespeare wrote that some are born
great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness cast upon them.
I don’t know about greatness but I am sure that all those who are chronically
guilty were not born guilty; they all had it, “thrust upon them.”
As a very small child, guilt kept them in line. Like a flower, it was planted in
their soul at tender age and tended with liberal doses of admonitions not to do
it again, because mum, dad, teacher, God or all of them, “are very disappointed
in you.” There is a strong link between guilt and an unspecified withdrawal of
acceptance that chills your soul. A feeling which, for the rest of your life,
you make strenuous efforts to avoid.
Happiness for the guilt ridden isn’t found so much in joy as in the relief of
avoiding being the cause of disappointment.
Imagine if you can a wooden doll with a number of invisible eyes screwed into
its tummy; the sort you find in the ends of curtain wire.
Guilty people are like such dolls. Their persecutors can hook into these
invisible eyes with unswerving accuracy, give it a little tweak, and suddenly
there’s that hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach, and that cold awful
feeling that you’ve failed again.
Children can be locked into this game when the parent who originated it is 90
years old, or even dead.
The rules are firmly embedded in your head in such a vague way, that you always
feel vaguely guilty.
It follows that religious sects which impose quite rigid guidelines on their
members have quite a lot of guilty members and a good number of ex-members.
Perhaps that’s why so many Irish Catholics are into guilt in a big way. With all
their religious and cultural rules and mores, they have a lot to be guilty
about.
Although there are whole families where the children are manipulated by guilt,
it is more common to find one guilt ridden child who carries the can for the
others for the rest of their life. It is usually the daughter and rarely the
youngest, unless she’s the only daughter.
In essence, guilt is not so much a feeling, as a rather vicious game, which
starts when a child’s freedom is restricted to meet someone else’s needs.
Helping someone to work out in whose interest the game was first started, may be
the first step in finding themselves, “not guilty,” and setting themselves free.
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