Interesting Psychology Team
we’ll be discussing the role of guilt in narcissistic abuse. Guilt is defined as the fact of having committed a specific or implied offense or crime. And as a feeling a person gets when they feel that they have disappointed themselves or others in a relationship, guilt is not always toxic.
However, in a healthy dose guilt can help a person identify ways in which they’re not living in alignment with their authenticity. And. Highest self is an appropriate emotion to have when a person has wronged another and needs to make amends for doing so, guilt can be used, used as a weapon. However, it is very easy to make another person feel guilty for doing something wrong, even if they have not in fact done.
So. It can be used as a tool to put fear in victims, by threatening, to induce guilt for doing something to upset the perpetrator. It can also be used as a way of controlling a person by making them feel badly about mistakes. Thus, keeping them constantly reinforcing their behaviors until they get it.
Quote unquote right. Narcissistic abusers are notorious for using guilt to abuse victims. Guilting may look like the following case. A victim does something that the perpetrator decides to take personally, for example, their home late for dinner, the perpetrator can then get angry at the victim for doing so claiming that they do not care about them and the relationship and that they should be ashamed of themselves.
The victim then feels bad and wants to do something to repair the damage and thus restore grace in the eyes of their perpetrator. They may offer apologies, promise not to do it again, or even beg for forgiveness. In this case, the perpetrator may say something like, quote, I accept the apology, but make sure this does not happen again.
And quote, the victim is now motivated to make sure that they don’t make such mistakes in the future. In this example, the perpetrator has subtly manipulated the victim to feel guilty, as opposed to communicating about the mishap, like a mature adult, they have a victim, right? Where they want them striving to be better.
So they don’t disappoint their perpetrator and thus work to avoid being guilted. Victims of guilting are usually highly motivated to accomplish often a Mount grey success and are very capable people. They are often incessant people, pleasers. They struggle with over self-evaluating and constantly self-correcting certain that when something does not work out in their relationships, they must’ve done something to cause it.
Deep down victims of guilting feel empty, worthless, and usually struggle with low self esteem. They will usually be very critical of themselves with an inner critic that bash them for every mistake that they make. As a result, victims often have a tremendous performance anxiety with a feeling that the only worth they have is what they can accomplish and what they can do for other people.
Guilt can be an incredible motivator. It can cause people to work very hard to amass great wealth and to accomplish great things. The issue with guilt is that it is a low vibrational state of consciousness. And as a result, it leads to low vibrational outcomes and relationships and never to true inner fulfillment.
Those who struggle with feeling guilty. Struggled to put themselves first and feel bad for taking care of their own personal needs, many struggled to even identify their needs at all and meet them feeling as if they have no right to have or take care of those needs dealing with. And healing. Guilt is similar to dealing with other toxic emotions.
Victims need to understand that they were made to feel guilty. And I think guilt is not necessarily intrinsic. The guilt was placed onto them by manipulators and perpetrators who made them feel this way and used it to abuse. Oftentimes these were parents who did so feelings of guilt, maybe identified, but not identified with, they need to be felt and not stuffed down.
They need to be processed and not made into a story with a narrative of inner negative self-talk. That is usually self-abusive. If you are struggling with feeling guilty, if you feel that it is difficult to put your needs first if you feel guilty when you are actually doing things that are good for you, and understand that it is not your fault that you feel this way, but these feelings need to be processed, worked through so you can free yourself emotionally to be your authentic self.
Put yourself first. Meet your own needs without feeling bad for doing so.
