Guilty Feelings Stop You From Moving Forwards

We can define guilt as the bad feelings of remorse, regret, shame, loss, and so forth, resulting from events, real or imagined, from the past. Actually it is also possible for a person to experience guilt from an imagined future event. They vividly imagine doing something they consider would be inappropriate or ‘bad’ (or not doing something, where the ‘not doing’ is perceived as a bad thing) and then they feel guilty.

Such is the power of the imagination…

Guilt And Conscience

It’s a good thing that humans have a conscience (well, most of us do), it helps us to stop repeating mistakes, or helps to stop us from making them. Having a conscience is a good thing, and feeling guilty is a normal human emotion, we all make mistakes from time to time.

Having excessive and prolonged guilty feelings is not a good thing…

Overcome Excessive Guilt

There are a truly vast variety of ways of ways that excessive guilt can manifest itself to the point of having a continued and negative effect on someone’s life. Here is just one…

John, a 40 year old truck driver, had a furious argument with his father one morning and stormed out of the house.  Later that day, after drinking half a bottle of scotch, John’s father had a heart attack and went into a coma. John spent the next two days by his father’s bedside in hospital, hoping that his dad would wake up.  John’s father died, and John never got the chance to say sorry. I saw him many months later, and he hadn’t moved on at all, his thoughts of his father were dominated by the sad desperate memories of being by his bedside during those final hours. Anyone would probably feel remorse in such circumstances. John, however, was ‘stuck’.  The treatment took just one hour (it would often take a little longer for something like this); I disassociated him from the memories of his father’s death and re-associated him with times when his father made him laugh, a lot. It actually transpired that John’s father had a long term heart condition, drank half a bottle of scotch every day and could be very argumentative. These facts didn’t stop John from feeling guilt, though; simple, straightforward NLP mind-training techniques did.

Guilt Is Universal

Well, almost universal. We don’t think we have met anyone who has never experienced the emotion. We all have times when we regret doing something, or saying something, or not doing or saying something. We see clients who have somehow got stuck in a rut where they have feelings of overwhelming guilt, and are unable to get on with their lives. All experiences are learning experiences, but you haven’t learned the lesson until you have integrated the experiences of the past and moved on.

NLP & Hypnotherapy Are Very Direct Ways Of Solving Problems

Well, they are the way we use them. In the example above it would not have helped John to move on from his father’s death by spending six months talking to him about it.  Our work isn’t ‘therapy’; it involves the training of your conscious mind, your imagination, to think in more useful and resourceful ways.