The gift of guilt.

When we start reconnecting with emotions and an ability to express them, a confusing period can follow.

Emotions are complex states composed of sensations, thoughts, memories, postures and behaviours. They’re dynamic and can change rapidly.

Guilt is similarly complex. We often think of it as what we feel after ‘doing something wrong’. We treat it as the signal that we broke a rule, agreement, or expectation. We feel remorse at letting someone down or taking more than our fair share. We hope that by doing the right thing, we won’t feel guilt.

But guilt has another facet. One that doesn’t imply you’ve done something wrong, but that you’ve done something right. It’s a sign of ‘moral engagement’, as one philosopher (Nicolai  Hartmann) put it. It’s the result of making choices based on your values rather than following external rules that you don’t really believe in. It comes from being a liberated individual acting from a coherent inner-locus of control rather than just living up to external expectations. 

This kind of guilt arises from seeing that choosing one path means letting go of another. This could be because you’re prioritising yourself after having always put yourself second. Or that you’re choosing a riskier path after having prioritised safety. And vice versa. It’s a kind of heartbreak over the reality that we cannot do everything and satisfy every value, aspiration, or expectation at all times.

It’s the nature of the Middle Way between the crushing guilt of watching the news and knowing you can’t relieve all the suffering in the world, on the one hand; and distracting yourself with whatever’s available to alleviate the feelings, on the other. The heartbreak comes from knowing that you’ve made a real choice in an imperfect world.

It’s liberating to face these complexities and know there’s nothing wrong with you. But they are often skipped over in daily conversations or too personalised in therapeutic ones. We feel like we might get overwhelmed or sucked into a void. So we keep struggling to find a way out of the heartbreak. 

In Shared Reality Leadership, the practice is to be with this human complexity and open up real possibilities in the moment through individual and group coherence. When we reveal and mirror experience, a coherence emerges that enables us to move through what I would call ‘charge and choice’: emotional charge can be transformed into wise choice through trust in coherence.

We start leading from the pause rather than filling it.

Join me and a small group today for Shared Reality Leadership:

1. Leading from the pause

2. Letting silence create precision and possibility

3. Using speech to point and reveal rather than instruct or justify 

Conversational moves to try will be offered, along with time to debrief together.

Info and registration here.

Bring a cup of tea.

Amina

P.S. This is a 75min open session online - today, June 24th 6pm UK / 1pm EST. It's exploratory. New people welcome.