Guilt can feel like an illness.
It plagues us, following us around everywhere. It feels like we can’t get away from it, while it’s ingrained into every cell and fiber of our beings just waiting to be ‘activated’ so that it can impact any and every activity, thought, or progress that we try to make.
Spirit talks often about guilt and the dire need in the human realm for us to release it. It doesn’t matter if I’m giving a mediumship reading or an intuitive reading, the concept of the recipient carrying around the plague of unnecessary guilt is brought up by spirit and/or the client’s higher self in at least half of them. While the specifics are different and individualistic in all readings and circumstances, guilt seems to be a common thread amongst many of our experiences.
Why is guilt such an issue for us in the earthly realm? Why does it plague us so much?
Some of us feel guilty about the loss of a loved one. About how the loved one transitioned, about interactions before they transitioned, or life prior to that period of time.
Some of us feel guilty about decisions we had to make prior to and after the transition, or guilt about how we couldn’t save them. Others of us feel guilt about how we are handling life after the transition. Are we doing enough to honor them? Are we living life the way we believe they would have wanted? We feel guilty if we make decisions that we perceive they would have disagreed with if they were still here with us earthside. Some of us feel guilt for how we grieve, for what we are feeling or not feeling in our own private moments.
Then there are the other kinds of guilt burdens we carry.
Some of us feel guilty about relationships with living loved ones. We may be estranged, feel the burning tug to become estranged for our own well-being, have the need to set boundaries that are hard or painful, or be deeply struggling with not being able to help them in the ways that we ‘feel’ we should be able to.
We often blame ourselves for the free-will actions and decisions of others, and frame the life path journeys and choices of other people within the scope of our own free will. We blame ourselves when there is no blame to be had. We make ourselves feel that we can control the uncontrollable, which is ultimately other people besides ourselves, and then impose guilt upon ourselves when that perceived control turns out not to be true.
We experience guilt as parents, daughters, sons, siblings, and friends. Should we be doing differently? Are we doing enough? Did we do enough? Are we enough?
Other times, we feel guilty about our pasts. Past choices we’ve made, or about where we currently are in life.
It is not uncommon for us to mull over decades-worth of what we perceive as “mistakes” and to carry that guilt with us until we leave our physical bodies.
And these are just a small handful of the countless scenarios that plague us with guilt throughout our earthly journeys. Oh, what a weight we are carrying!
Spirit is right when they say that the weight of guilt is an unnecessary burden and that we don’t only need to work to release as much of it as we can, but that we also deserve to release as much of it as we can.
So why do they say it? What is their reasoning?
1) The thing about guilt is that while we think we are actually putting the other party first by imposing the guilt on ourselves, it’s actually the opposite.
We think that we handled a situation poorly, and therefore we must punish ourselves by incessantly analyzing it and feeling badly about it with no end date in sight. Subconsciously (or perhaps consciously) we tell ourselves that if we make ourselves feel badly enough, that doing so will give the other person the ‘justice’ they deserve.
Subconsciously (or perhaps consciously) we tell ourselves that if we make ourselves feel badly enough, that we will ‘teach’ ourselves a lesson and never make the same ‘mistake’ again.
But when it comes down to it, we aren’t feeling the guilt for the benefit of the other party at all.
We are feeling the guilt for the benefit of ourselves.
We are feeling the guilt as a mechanism to self-soothe.
We are feeling the guilt for us.
We aren’t feeling guilty because the other party ‘needs’ us to.
They don’t need us to feel guilty – there is no guilt to be had.
Spirit tells me and my clients that ALL the time. And if you think about it, it doesn’t matter if the other party is in spirit or here living on earth: the other party does not benefit from your guilt. Guilt is, for lack of a better term, a self-serving coping mechanism to lay on top of the deeper parts of our grief and our pains that need to actually be looked at, felt, and healed. And, this brings up that….
2) Spirit knows that focusing on our guilt is impeding our true healing in the areas where it actually needs to occur. Spirit knows that guilt is a distraction from what actually hurts.
For example, when it comes to death and loss, we are angry. We have every right to be angry – incredibly angry. To FEEL angry. We have SO many emotions running through us. From all different directions and scopes. And that can be so hard to process.
When we feel guilty, we are directing many of those emotions, and especially the anger, at ourselves. We are our own safest target. We aren’t processing our actual, deep emotions – the emotions that are truly driving our pain: we are placing guilt on ourselves as a distraction so that we may cope, but creating lasting damage to ourselves in the process if left unaddressed.
This can apply in many other situations too. It is not uncommon for us to misdirect the anger we feel towards an exterior living person or situation, inwards towards ourselves, OR to layer self-guilt over that anger so that we don’t need to address what lays underneath. This is the classic, “Well if I would have only done _____, then he/she wouldn’t have done ______/then ______ wouldn’t have happened. It’s ALL MY FAULT.”
3) Spirit knows that guilt can be the result of conditioning that cycles through families. This often stems from childhood and being raised via a guilt-conditioning loop. “If you love me, you won’t misbehave.” Or, consistently pointing to supposed problems within the child beneath the action as being what’s ‘wrong’, rather than the action itself being what needs to be corrected. Instead of something such as, “Sneaking a cookie is wrong because it’s dishonest and dishonesty is a form of lying,” we may have been told something like, “Why are you so dishonest? You’ve been terrible lately! I won’t have a child of mine who lies!”
As parents, I know we all make a lot of mistakes, myself included. I know we all say the wrong things sometimes, just like our parents did, and so on and so forth. And I know we all do and did the best we can. But I can also see what spirit is saying too. That sometimes the verbiage, while ineffective in the psyches of some, can also cause others to grow up constantly pointing the fingers inward at themselves for every little thing in their lives, critically over-analyzing themselves, and putting the needs and well-being of everyone else over themselves to the point of it being not only unhealthy, but also somewhat detached from what is the reality of perceptions. For example, some people may come home at night after work and nearly obsessively feel extreme guilt about having said what they feel was the wrong thing at work when in reality their coworker(s) didn’t think twice about the statement. Then, they wash, rinse, and repeat throughout their daily lives in situation after situation.
Spirit knows that familial cycles can’t be healed and shifted until the existence of guilt conditioning is recognized and healed on individual levels first. In other words, problems with guilt are bigger than just with ourselves. The pain of carrying the guilt burden starts with just us, but it does bleed over into those we love, will love, and those that will come after us if left unaddressed.
4) Finally, spirit knows that you deserve to be free. You are carrying undue burdens. I can tell you with 99% certainty that you will not carry your guilt with you to the afterlife. I’ve never met a spirit person who feels guilt. Not a single one.
Guilt is a human emotion that we place upon ourselves, which is why they want us to understand it, learn about it, grow through it, and release it.
Only then, can you get to some of the real parts of you that lay underneath, even if there are emotions there that you’re trying to avoid. Right now, you’re just torturing yourself with falsities, but you’re torturing yourself just the same.
Do you know what a weighted blanket is?
Consider that guilt is a weighted blanked that weighs 25 pounds.
Now, consider that you are the loved one who transitioned to spirit instead of a special person you’ve lost. Instead of them, you are in the spirit realm, watching your living loved one emotionally burden themselves with guilt because they feel they didn’t do enough to try to save you. You try to call out to them every single morning, “No, don’t! I am SO INCREDIBLY HAPPY! OH MY GOSH, if you could just FEEL an ounce of the level of LOVE I feel over here, YOU WOULD BE CURED OF THE GUILT YOU FEEL! I LOVE YOU SO, SO, SOO MUCH!!”
But, instead, every single morning, you watch them pull themselves up out of bed, drape the 25-pound blanket around their shoulders, and they trudge around unhappily, carrying that sucker with them day in and day out. All. Day. Long. The blanket is hot, very uncomfortable, they get itchy, it makes them ache, it makes them sweaty, they trip over it. But there is nothing YOU can do about it. YOU know their guilt is pointless, but they choose to put the blanket on, and only THEY can remove the blanket from their shoulders. All you can do is watch helplessly as they torture themselves with something heavy that you want them to desperately feel nothing but the weightlessness of pure love over.
That is exactly what spirit is saying to us. That the guilt we carry around is as useless as walking around with a heavy blanket hanging on your shoulders on a 90-degree day.
In fact, if guilt teaches us anything, it should be teaching us to remove it. I know it’s a feeling, and it’s easier said than done because it can take some work. But. Guilt makes about as much sense as…. the blanket. No matter the scenario.
And that is exactly what spirit seems to always be trying to teach.