Overcoming guilt day six

There are some destructive by-products when we carry guilt. Depression, anger, low-self esteem, and increased stress just to name a few. Most of us measure our self esteem by what we imagine that other people are thinking of us. Many times I have been around someone who thought they were just all that. In their mind, they thought others admired them or was jealous of them. The truth was no one really liked them because of their arrogant attitudes. Often we formulate our self image by what we imagine that others think about us. Most of us know someone like the person I mentioned above. When we have low self-esteem it works in a similar way. In our mind we imagine that we do not measure up and we are confident that others see us as not measuring up as well. Guilt is like adding a heavy weight to that assumption. If we take our low self esteem and add a heap of guilt on top of it we live in a constant inner reminder that hinders our every step. We have a hard time overcoming these things because we live in constant fear that our past failures will eventually out weigh our present success.

Isolation can become a problem as well as we often begin avoiding everyone that could remind of us our past failures. We can grow so inward turned that our guilt has us bound up and crippled, lost and afraid. We feel like we are failing as a father, so we hate to come home to the wife and kids. It isn't that we don't love them, we do, it is just that seeing them reminds us of our areas of failure and guilt. We don't feel like we are making the grade at school so we want to skip class and stay home. We feel like mom and dad aren't exactly excited about who we are and what we have become, so we try to avoid calling home. We feel like we let God and the church down, so, we don't bother getting dressed to go anymore. When we face a situation in which we feel we have failed, we accumulate guilt. The guilt that we feel will drive us away from others, and often those are the very places that we find the people who really do love us. Sometimes we feel like the people that love us are just all about yang, yang, yang, lecture... yada, yada, lecture ...uncomfortable yes, but, something that we should not avoid. Why not listen to the people that love us. Wouldn't we like to do better in life? Most of the time the people who really love us, like our families, are the ones that can see exactly where we are messing up the most. What we are told by them often isn't what we want to do, but, life isn't about doing what you want to do, it is about doing what is required of you. When we do what is required of us our life will breed success. In the long run the good fruit that comes with success will make you feel good about yourself.

As an example look at the movie 'It's a wonderful life' He thought that he would lasso the moon. But, when faced with choices he always picked what was required, he made the responsible decision instead of doing what he really 'wanted' to do. He thought that he was losing out, but in the end, he saw the fruit of his decisions actually made him the richest man in town. Look at the state of America today many have not done what was required. Too many people have used their finances unwisely. Instead of doing what was required and living within their means they have instead did what they wanted to do with their money and have gotten in bad debt. In the end those who did not indulge in fantasy living- but rather acted responsible with their money are now in much better circumstances than those who did not and they can be thankful that they made the wiser choice.


If we are carrying guilt and low self esteem because of past failures we can expect that we will be required to change. If we don't like ourselves, we don't like our past, we want to do better in the future, it should be obvious that we have to change. The only way we could justify not changing would be blaming our past failures on someone else. Now, here is a can of worms just opened. If someone treated you unfairly and you endured it, that will make you stronger, not weaker. Yes, it will make you feisty, perhaps controlling, but it will NOT make you weak. The thing that makes us weak is when we continually mess up and people around us keep making excuses and blaming others for what we did. The school bully often has parents that think their kid does nothing wrong. Most people that were bullies in school grow up to be prison inmates, while the ones that got picked on often grow up to be productive citizens. Conflict always makes us stronger not weaker. If you are a parent and you are always making excuses for your child's performance and behavior you are making your child weak. They are likely to grow up to be a weak adult that is constantly needing mom and dad to clean up their messes. If a bully picks on my kid and they back down they eventually learn how to use their wits to get around the bully. No, they might never knock the bully down, but they learn to cope and do well in spite of a bully. What does the bully learn. He learns that no matter what he does he can get away with it. In the long run who is better off, the bully or my kid. My kid is better off because he learned to succeed in the face of trials. I just used the bully as an example, but their are many more.

Drugs is another good example. If a person learns at a young age that they can escape their emotional trauma with a snort or two they have never learned to face their emotions and cope with them successfully. Then if they ever start selling drugs they learn to acquire large amounts of money without having to work. They are going to grow into one of the weakest people on the planet. They may look and act kool, and may be really wealthy and have material status, but in the end, it is just rotten fruit. They will see just how weak they are when they try to change their ways and make an honest living with their hands or their mind. When we indulge in that kind of weak living and then proclaim, "the policeman was just picking on me" or "I couldn't find a good job that I didn't want to quit within a week," (How many of us found a job that we preferred to quit the first week but didn't because we understood our responsibilities) these are just more weak excuses. Even lawyers play in on the con act. Lawyers will ask a judge to be less severe on a convict because they came from a bad environment. Well, there are plenty who come from a rotten environment that do quite well in life. There are no excuses,we are self deceived if we continue to put the blame onto others. We need to change. One of the worst excuses of all, "my wife drives me nuts, that is why I have to do this." If you want to blame others your life will never get any better. If you want to start taking responsibility and embrace change then you can do better, you can be more than you ever thought that you could be in this life.

A big step is looking in the mirror and realizing, hey, I need to change. Once you make that decision the hard part is over. Change is going to be hard. I have seen many people decide that they want to change. But, as they begin trying to change it is just really hard. When it gets hard they fall back into their old line of excuses. Make up you mind that you are going to embrace change even if it is the hardest thing you will ever do. In the end it will be hard, but, just like in the show 'It's a Wonderful Life' you will start seeing good fruit. Rotten fruit is no good, we just throw a rotten apple away, whose going to eat that? That is why so many are in prison today. It was their rotten fruit.