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How To Forgive Ourselves – Totally Chapter 2: False Guilt
You have to look people in the eye and make them feel guilty. – A 13 year old Girl Scout on how she sold 11,200 boxes of cookies
Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. – 1 Peter 5:7
A guilty conscience is the seasoning of our daily life. – Paul Tournier
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think that it is their fault. – Dr. Henry Kissinger
False guilt is a sense of shame in our hearts that God did not put there. It is sometimes called pseudo-guilt. Freud, for example, taught that pseudo-guilt is an unconscious need for self punishment, self torment, or self sabotage. This is the sort of thing we sometimes can do. One can accept an element of truth even from one whose system you would not totally endorse. The word pseudo-guilt comes from the Greek word pseudos, which means “untrue” or “lie.” It is false as opposed to true, not false as opposed to real. For false guilt is real. It is painful. It can be torture. But if we can recognize and identify false guilt for being precisely that which did not come from God, as Christians we are often on our way to being set free.
The bottom line of this chapter is that we should learn not to feel guilty once we see that it is pseudo-guilt at work. Do not be controlled by false guilt.
One way forward in forgiving ourselves therefore can be summarized: we should not let ourselves be worried by any guilty feeling that is not from God. In the next chapter I will deal in detail with true guilt. In the meantime, here are two principles:
1. You must learn to identify and dignify what is from God (true guilt).
2. You must learn to detect and reject what is not from God (pseudo-guilt or false guilt).
If you apply these two principles, you are well on your way to forgiving yourself and letting yourself totally off the hook.
How To Forgive Ourselves – Totally Chapter 2: False Guilt
How To Forgive Ourselves – Totally Chapter 2: False Guilt