rethinking guilt

Please note that this reflection mentions suicide.

My younger sister struggled with a profound misery since she was a teenager. Over the years, when the darkness would get too much, I was one of the people who would go to her and try to help. She once described me as a protector of hers. One week before her thirtieth birthday, she took her own life. And I got lost in a maze of grief and guilt.

Marshall Rosenberg made a distinction between guilt and mourning a decision. Guilt is anger turned inward, self-blame. Instead of connecting us with the people affected by our actions, guilt actually cuts us off from them. Mourning, on the other hand, is an alive process. He said, “Everything that every human being has ever done has been for holy purposes. To make the world more wonderful. Now sometimes our actions fulfill our needs to make life more wonderful. And sometimes they don’t. So we need to celebrate when they do, and mourn when they don’t.” When an action I took or didn’t take brought pain to someone, I want to be able to go through the process of mourning that hurt. If I can genuinely feel that pain, then I can grieve in a way that connects me with that person.            

Grieving this way takes going back to why I made that choice—which means I need to connect with the part of me that decided to act or not act. Here it’s particularly significant that I not come toward that part to find out the reason in order to discern if it’s worthy of punishment. Coming with an intention to judge whether the decision was warranted or not or why the choice was wrong is going to increase the sense of self-judgment that part of me is already feeling. Instead, I want to approach whoever made that decision with Rosenberg’s words in mind—that this part of me did what it did to try to meet a need in the best way it knew how at that moment under those conditions. Rosenberg said, “We don’t do anything but for good reasons. To serve life. No human being does anything except for good reasons. We just don’t want to think there’s anything wrong with us when there isn’t. Because that’s going to make it harder.” I want to connect with the good reason the being inside me chose to act or not to act—and at the same time, connect with the pain that decision brought for someone in my life. Rosenberg’s insight was that these are not mutually exclusive. I can let go of my self-blame and genuinely grieve the consequences of my choice.