Hello, and welcome to A Mind of Her Own. I’m Jennifer Reid, MD, a psychiatrist and author. This is the second episode of my series, Guilt Free, For Real.

Today, I wanted to talk to you about something that I’m asked about a lot on podcasts and interviews, “Is guilt always bad?” After all, the name of my book is Guilt Free, which suggests that we’re trying to eliminate any and all guilt.

Interestingly, when I was researching guilt, what I learned is that guilt actually can be adaptive. In fact, guilt may be one of the reasons that we’ve been able to become larger and larger communities, to collaborate, to work together to enhance the success of our species. Why is that the case? Because what guilt does is help us to connect (when it’s used in moderation, in adaptive circumstances.)

That seems counterintuitive, but let me explain.

Guilt is when we believe we’ve done something wrong. And if we believe we’ve harmed someone, that we’ve done something that’s hurt them or made life more difficult, we feel guilty. Guilt doesn’t feel good. It also pushes us to try and do something about it. We want to relieve that feeling of guilt, and that can lead to things like apologies, attempts to repair, maybe make up for it, or at least try to learn for next time to not do that again. This is an adaptive type of guilt.

We all need to be able to feel this type of adaptive guilt because without it, it’s actually going to make it much harder for us to connect. If we hurt someone and we see that they are hurt and we don’t feel anything about that at all, you can see how that would cause real problems in relationships and certainly does. So this type of guilt can be adaptive for everyone.

When it becomes maladaptive, though, is when it’s not based on a particular situation or circumstance. Instead of, “Okay, I’ve made this error. I want to try and make up for it,” we are saying, “I just feel constantly like the things that I’m doing are not as good as they should be. I’m not doing enough. I’m falling behind. I’ve let people down. I’m letting myself down.”

I’ve found, within my clinical practice and certainly even in my personal life, (and in my own experience), that women are more likely to feel this sort of constant overwhelming sense of guilt than men. Guilt in these situations does just what it does in adaptive guilt, pushing us to try and do something to make up for it, right? We want to relieve ourselves of this uncomfortable feeling. But what can happen then, what I see happening then in women’s lives, is they take on more and more. They become hyper-competent and begin doing all the tasks, carrying the cognitive load, remembering all the appointments and things we need to pick up and things we need to plan and prepare for.

Then, people in our lives are stepping back and saying, “Okay, if you’ve got this, then I guess I won’t need to help or support in that way.” But it’s counterproductive, right? Because the more we add on, we still believe we need to do all of those things perfectly. And then we perpetually feel like we’re falling short.

The reason I wanted to write this book about guilt is I really wanted women to know that they are not failing, that falling short of an unreachable ideal is not failure. And what we can learn how to do is shift this intense maladaptive guilt.

In the first episode of Guilt Free, for Real, I told you about the Guilt Equation, how we can learn to examine our guilt.

Guilt = Our Expectations for Ourselves - Our Perceived Reality

When I recognize a guilty thought, it’s important to review my expectations. Are they fair? Also, I want to set expectations based on my own values and what I think is reasonable, not some comparison to some idealized version online or even in my own head of what I imagine that I should be doing.

Another question I’m often asked is, why do women seem to have so much more guilt than men? It’s such a complicated answer, but I really want to hit on some key points. Number one, women, girls from a very young age are socialized to feel guilty. We are socialized to take care of everyone around us, to be able read their minds, read their emotions and try to protect them from those. We’re taught that to be valuable or loved we need to look a certain way, we need to act a certain way, we need to have self-control. We need to be able to put forth this image of really having it all together. And unfortunately, what this can then lead to is constant guilt.

For men, I think it’s a different pressure. Of course men experience guilt. And like I said, it can be adaptive. But I think there are different expectations on men. And among those expectations, there are different emotions that men are socialized to experience and are allowed to experience without anyone kind of looking at them strangely. For men, I don’t think that guilt is one that’s as acceptable. Maybe it’s anger, or frustration. Maybe there are other ways that they cope with not believing they’re meeting the expectations that they set.

Importantly, though, they also don’t exist in the same environment where the expectations are that they should be taking care of everyone else in addition to themselves because that’s the natural order. This “natural maternal instinct” or “womanly instinct” tells us that “My needs are put last and I take care of others first.” So I don’t think that it’s fair to say men don’t experience guilt, but I think this constant and intense maladaptive guilt is something that women have been taught to experience throughout our lives.

Another reason I think that guilt can become so common in women’s lives is that it does protect us from some other more difficult emotions, such as grief, sadness, anger, fear. I’ll talk more about this in a future episode. But for now, I just want you to keep in mind that through socialization, we’ve been taught to experience guilt. Some guilt can be adaptive in small amounts, in the right situation, but most of what women are experiencing is this feeling of constant guilt demonstrated by words like “always,” “never,” “should.”

It’s important to know that this is not something we’re creating in ourselves. In future episodes, we’ll talk more about the specific types of expectations that women seem to face.

If you’re interested in learning more about Guilt Free, it’s available broadly (including the ebook and audiobook). My favorite website, bookshop.org, allows you to purchase through independent booksellers in your area. Your local library may also carry it.

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Dr. Jennifer Reid is a physician, the host of A Mind of Her Own, and the author of Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations — available at major retailers.

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