Self Inflicted Guilt
Written by Narcissistic Abuse Expert and Coach, Randi Fine
Author of Close Encounters of the Worst Kind Second Edition: The Narcissistic Abuse Survivor’s Comprehensive Guide to Healing and Recovery©
Narcissistic Abuse Awareness and Guidance with Randi Fine
Why do so many of us suffer from self inflicted guilt? Why are we able to offer kindness and compassion to others, but not to ourselves?
One of the most damaging ways in which we tend to abuse ourselves is through feelings of self inflicted guilt. Often this tendency was programmed into us in childhood. Many of us were disciplined through the use of guilt tactics and it became ingrained in our thinking process.
Good, well-intended people fall prey to this kind of self-abuse most often, because by nature they tend to be more concerned with the feelings of others than they are with their own. And because of that nature, compassionate people would never dream of inflicting the same kind of guilty emotional pain on others as they inflict on themselves. They default to that way of thinking without giving it a second thought.
If we examine the times that we feel guilty for something we have said or done, we will often realize that we had only the best intentions for saying or doing what we did. We never meant to hurt anyone. So why is the degree of punishment we have chosen to inflict upon ourselves so disproportionate to the offense. Why do we continue to beat ourselves up?
When our actions come from a place of goodness and love, but are received by another in a way we never intended, that is not our fault. We should not feel guilty. This type of guilt serves no purpose at all. It is self-abusive. Either we can take some kind of action to correct what we are feeling guilty about or we cannot.
Self inflicted guilt is a programmed, automatic response. In order to break the cycle we have to first be aware of what we are doing and why. We have to remind ourselves to be as gentle with our own selves as we would be with others. Realizing that we would never dream of causing someone else to feel as bad as we are making our own self feel will help us to break the cycle.
I don't believe that our tendency toward self-inflicted guilt ever goes away entirely. But overcoming the need to automatically beat ourselves up is the first step in learning self-love.
That is an important mindset to reinforce for many reasons, but mostly because the way we treat others ultimately depends on the feelings we have about ourselves.
Randi Fine is an internationally renowned narcissistic abuse expert and coach. She is the author of the groundbreaking book Close Encounters of the Worst Kind: The Narcissistic Abuse Survivor’s Guide to Healing and Recovery Second Edition, the most comprehensive, most well researched, and most up-to-date book on this subject. In addition to helping survivors recognize their abuse and heal from it, this book teaches mental health professionals how to recognize and properly treat the associated abuse syndrome. She is also the author of Cliffedge Road: A Memoir, the first and only book to characterize the life-long progression of complications caused by narcissistic child abuse.