How to use guilt to your advantage
Why a long maligned emotion needs to be better understood and embraced.
Guilt is often maligned in self-improvement content. And much of this is with good reason. The emotion can unnecessarily punish people over long periods of time.
Even further, guilt has been used to shun LGBT communities via religious convictions and general bigotry. In fact, guilt has been used to shame virtually every marginalized group and even dominant majority groups. It takes no prisoners.
Political arenas take it further, rebranding guilt as a scarlet letter, as proof of moral bankruptcy of opposing factions, evidenced by the endless lawsuits and investigations being thrown in both directions ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
But guilt serves an important evolutionary purpose that is rarely discussed, and which is useful in everyday life. It isn’t always evidence of an immutable character flaw.
Looking inward for evidence
Can you remember the earliest thing you felt guilty about?
I have a vivid memory from when I was 6 years old and living in the Philippines. We were at school and on a playground. One of the other school boys had jumped up and was hanging from the horizontal soccer goal post by his hands. I began pushing him, making his legs swing back and forth like he was on a swing. Then, suddenly, he lost his grip and fell, landing on a metal pipe super hard. He curled up in a ball and I was worried I’d killed him. He burst out crying and was eventually fine, but I felt terrible, and ran away from the scene.
In hindsight, I knew I was pushing him too hard when we’d been playing and I bared some blame for the incident. That guilt was good — and it demonstrates a key role of play amongst children. We learn empathy and when we’re being too rough with each other. We see the other person yelp out in pain. Seeing their face wince, and feeling the discomfort that imposes on us, carries utility. The guilt we feel has a formative effect on behavior (play is especially helpful to children with autism when being socialized).
When we look deeper on the role this emotion plays, we can see clearly how it has accompanied us across time.
Researchers assert that guilt plays three key roles:
The anticipation of guilt prevents social transgressions.
It leads to reparative behaviors: apologies, gift giving, acceptance of punishment, and self-punishment.
Expressions of guilt, which reduces punishing behaviors and furthers social cohesion.
For example, on three — when an accused criminal pleads guilty, and then expresses remorse for their actions — it tends to result in a reduced sentenced relative to those who plead innocence in the face of obvious guilt. But this reduced sentence only happens if the accused seems believable in the eyes of the judge. Alligator tears don’t get them far. As humans, we value displays of guilt when warranted.
Which should be a lesson. Because there’s an entire faction of humans who don’t apologize for their actions or express remorse for how they’ve conducted themselves, even if they do feel guilty.
I’m convinced this is what undermined a long relationship I had. My partner wasn’t capable of apologizing for anything, and I mean, anything.
Not only did it allow fights to be prolonged and enable endless resentment to build in me, it also created an asymmetry in the relationship. One day, I realized I was spending all this time apologizing for my behavior while she just went on with her life as if nothing happened. I saw no evidence she felt guilty for any mistakes, other than her defensiveness and shouting.
When there’s no apology, it signals there’s no sense of guilt — which then makes you question if the other person values the relationship or not.
Perhaps we can learn from children
In a study led by University of Virginia researcher Dr. Amrisha Vaish, researchers invited 2 and 3 year olds to come in for an experiment. They put them in a room with a marble track, the ones where a marble ball rolls along a weaving rollercoaster-like track. But there was a block tower that was positioned just near the track. Before they began the experiment, the researcher told them to be careful not to knock the block tower over and that they’d worked very hard to build it.
By design, when the kids played with the marbles, they’d eventually knock over the tower, which was feebly assembled and too close to the track. Then, the researchers studied their reactions.
The 2-year-old group expressed general sympathy for having knocked over the tower, staring down at the blocks and seeming to feel bad. But the three year olds took it further and attempted to rebuild the tower.
Scientists regarded guilt in this context as a good thing. The three year olds showed reparative instincts. They felt the urge to amend for their actions, demonstrating the emergence of prosocial behaviors — which are correlated to happiness, wellbeing, and even longevity. It’s the opposite of antisocial behaviors, which you often hear in context to criminals and serial killers.
Guilt is an unselfish emotion. And when it induces prosocial behaviors, you are doing things that benefit others. You’re repairing a friendship, reducing resentment, apologizing, doing things to make up for your wrongs, giving to charity, helping a stranger, making someone laugh. It is all the goodness that we can offer as people.
Guilt feels bad. And that’s the point.
Resist the urge to mask it and be defensive. Investigate that guilt and the source of it. Audit whether it is warranted. If it is, take actions to help alleviate it and right the wrong.
Taking ownership of mistakes helps you maintain these friendships, and avoid the damage that I felt in my previous relationship.
You should remember too that this emotion, like every other emotion you feel did not arrive here by accident.
It’s theorized that guilt evolved in a competitive framework. Humans worked in groups to survive. And those groups who had ways of resolving their relationship conflicts tended to outcompete those who didn’t. A lack of guilt led to infighting and the breakdown of the tribe.
Humans are constantly looking at and judging each other and it is through necessity. If there was a group member who was eating the whole groups food stores without any second thought, he was seen as non-cooperative, and a threat. He was often ostracized — which could be fatal.
No, this isn’t the case today. But the fact remains that we need other people to be happy. The evolutionary underpinnings are still there.
Remember — humans have a unique, and profound ability to retain reputational information about vast quantities of people. You risk sullying that reputation, and your most important relationships, by shunning any feelings of guilt. You also risk the happiness of your peers by refusing to act on that guilt.
A few final thoughts before you go
Remember that though guilt is often weaponized against marginalized people, it still stands to benefit us greatly in other contexts. We should feel guilt periodically. Nobody is so saintly as to not make mistakes.
Feeling guilty if you lack good social awareness or emotional intelligence to manage a situation, can help alleviate a faux pas you might have committed.
There are many ways to manifest this if you struggle with this emotion. For example, it’s shown that children who are low in sympathy often make up for that gap by feeling more guilt, which helps them modify their behavior further. The opposite was also found: with children who felt low guilt showing more sympathy, which also helped them smooth over problems.
For me, understanding the role of guilt, and it’s evolutionary purpose, has helped me better accommodate and utilize it in everyday life. I no longer see it as an intruder sent to torture me.
Accepting guilt plays into a broader theme of accepting all of yourself and the emotions you feel, rather than rejecting them as a contagion on your character. Remember that it is in your DNA to feel guilt. It’s also a sign that you possess empathy and aren’t a heartless sociopath.
Investigate those inner voices. Validate them. And if they are valid, act on them. Clean up the mess you made. You, and the aggrieved, will both be happier in the long run.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential.