Guilt: Failing vs. Mistakes as a Tool for Learning

Last Saturday I enjoyed some time with two friends, also mothers. Our conversation quickly took a familiar turn, to feeling bad about ourselves as parents -- for the times we've lost our tempers, or ignored plaintive requests for attention in a desperate attempt to get something done, even berating ourselves for the frustration we feel in our roles as mothers.

Oh, the guilt we so willingly heap upon our shoulders as parents! I've been studying this for quite a while now -- why do we spend so much time feeling bad about ourselves as mothers, as people? In a more primitive emotional state, I can understand how guilt might function as a deterrent to future behavior that would make us feel more guilty. That is, I feel bad about myself when I yell at my kids, so next time I should remember this and stop myself from taking out my anger at them.

But in all honesty, in the well-intentioned people I know, the modern human psyche doesn't seem to process guilt this way. In fact, I think guilt only serves to keep us in a rut of feeling bad about ourselves, of feeling we have failed somehow. And when we feel bad about ourselves, lots of other moods can creep in that start to run our emotional fields: depression, victim energy ("no fair!" or "why me?"), resentment and blaming, lethargy and resignation ("why bother?"), chronic rage -- often suppressed but sometimes erupting full force and catapulting us right back into that guilty seat.

Where does this guilt come from anyway? It feels deeply ingrained in the human race, this sense that somehow we've done something wrong, we haven't lived up to some theoretical ideal, we've failed to meet an imagined level of perfection – more on this in the next blog entry.

For today, I’d like to propose that guilt has outlived its usefulness as a learning tool. At this point, I sense guilt just as confirmation that our hearts are in the right place, our intentions are good, we are trying to grow and do better. And stemming from that, I’d like to explore what I feel as the difference between this sense of something being “wrong” with us, versus the concept of making mistakes.

What if we could remove the judgment from the idea of making mistakes, remove this sense of wrongness or failure? What if we could truly accept mistakes as essential for learning? What if we replace the guilt and negativity that follow mistakes with a sense of compassion for ourselves, and a commitment to deeper study of the situation?

Self-compassion seems to be the key to shifting from the guilt-based processing to that of feeling our lives as on-the-job training grounds. And this willingness to dig deeper into understanding the situation seems to me a much more advanced way of learning from mistakes, than the simple guilt-as-deterrent idea.

Here’s a practical example – suppose I lose my temper with my kids. In the guilt-based system, I have failed to be a good parent, and somehow I feel I need to honor this mistake by punishing myself through guilt, which over time leads to the downward spiral of feeling bad about myself and a stressful, negative view of myself and probably my life in general.

In the training ground model, when I lose my temper, I register that it didn’t feel good. I take a few minutes to cool down and apologize to my kids, and then I do the deeper exploration: I reflect on why I’m feeling frustrated with the situation – do I need some alone time? Some creative time? Some time out of the house? I experiment with ideas to get these needs met. And if guilt comes up, I use it as a reminder to feel compassion for myself, for this advanced training I’m doing, for my willingness to be here and try. I am confident that this deeper reflection and self-study, learning to ask for what I need as a human being and modeling having compassion for my mistakes, will benefit my kids much more than that huge load of guilt and failure I was dragging around.

Perhaps in the big picture, guilt can function as a signal to consider a radical paradigm shift in the way we approach our lives, not just as parents but as evolving human beings: from guilt to compassion for ourselves, from the concept of failure to those of growth and exploration, from stress and negativity to excitement for living and learning.