Your Erroneous Zones

by Wayne W. Dyer

Self-imposed Guilt. This second category of guilt reactions is a much more troublesome area. Here the individual is being immobilized by things he has done recently, but which are not necessarily tied to being a child. This is the guilt imposed on the self when an adult rule or moral code is broken. The individual may feel bad for a long time even though the hurting can do nothing to change what has happened. Typical self-imposed guilt includes having told someone off, and hating one’s self for it, or being emotionally drained in the present moment because of some act such as shoplifting, not going to church, or having said the wrong thing in the past. Thus you can look at all of your guilt either as reactions to leftover imposed standards in which you are still trying to please an absent authority figure, or as the result of trying to live up to self-imposed standards which you really don’t buy, but for some reason pay lip service to. In either case, it is stupid, and, more important, useless behavior. You can sit there forever, lamenting about how bad you’ve been, feeling guilty until your death, and not one tiny slice of that guilt will do anything to rectify past behavior. It’s over! Your guilt is an attempt to change history, to wish that it weren’t so. But history is so and you can’t do anything about it.