Usually it starts with, ‘Oh he loves me so much, how can I leave him’, or one may get to hear something like, ‘I know…’ after each ‘I love you’, or maybe ‘I can’t walk away, because if I do that she will die.’ In all of these statements, the underlying emotion is of ‘guilt’.
Something that you don’t want to do, but you do because you fear that something bad will happen to the other person because of your ‘undoing’. You find yourself constantly living in an assumptive future, because the guilt constantly makes you think of the dreaded reality that may happen if you don’t do what you are ‘supposed’ to do or what you ‘should’ do. In the whole process, all you end up doing is make yourself go through self-pity, self damage and at its peak end up blaming the other person because you kept believing that you ‘did all you did’ for them and them alone.
Anything that has its premise embedded in fear will find out a way to manifest itself. Most of the time, the space where fear ends up manifesting itself is within the relationship. Just like ego, guilt cannot survive alone. Therefore, for you to feel guilty, you will invariably need another person. Therefore, very much like ego again, guilt is a concept. It isn’t real. Guilt is always a result of something that you fear will happen. So, each time you feel guilty, you also feel fear immediately. If that fear is not addressed, it will, someday or the other come up in the space between you and the other person as an ugly reality. So, instead of working with the guilt, what you need to do is to figure out which fear is actually motivating that guilt. Once we identify that fear, it becomes easy for us to work with it. One cannot work with guilt because it isn’t a real emotion, it’s just a concept. And one can never work with a concept. Because a concept doesn’t resolve itself. What resolves itself is an emotion. Here, the emotion in question is fear and not guilt. Also, this underlying fear, like any other fear that we feel, is only a learned behaviour. And if you have spent a good number of years learning that fear as a programme, you may want to go back in time and see why at all you needed that fear in your system? Where did it come from? How did it help you? What was the pay-off of keeping this fear? And do you need it at all now – in the present time and space? If not, then what might it take for you to drop it like a tea bag?
The Transpersonal Therapist 