The Guilty

My husband and I just finished up the fourth season of “The Sinner.” It’s a great show. I highly recommend it. Without giving too much away, a character in this recent season tells the detective, Harry (who is the protagonist in all seasons of “The Sinner”) that his guilty feelings are coming from his ego. This perked my ears. When we feel guilt, we often like to believe that this guilt comes from the most holy part of our conscious, but this is not necessarily always the case. Appropriate guilt energizes us to make amends and to do better, but many of us walk around with quite a bit of unsubstantiated guilt, which isn’t doing anything for anyone. This kind of guilt veers dangerously into the territory of shame.

We love to say that “so and so” made me feel guilty. Yet, we all have heard and intellectualized the statement that no one can make us feel anything. Our feelings are ours to own. Our reactions to other’s actions, are all our reactions to deal with, and to explore. People can be manipulative and conniving and they can try to play on our emotions, but it is up to us to explore our emotions and reactions, in order to understand where these emotions and reactions are coming from. These emotions are all ours. It is up to us to decide whether pleasing or disappointing someone else is really our responsibility and further, are their reactions to our choices really our responsibility, either? Appropriate guilt is when you have done something morally wrong and against your code of character. Inappropriate guilt truly does come from an oversized ego that believes that it is responsible for all the happiness in the world. Inappropriate guilt keeps us feeling responsible for living for other people, making us believe that we must be who they want us to be, and do what they expect us to do, in order for them to be happy. Our ego says that we have the power to make other people happy, but the hard truth is, none of us are that powerful. Happiness is an inside job for each individual. People getting what they want may bring a temporary relief to them, and a temporary relief to our sense of “guilt and responsibility”, but in the end we all are in control of our own feelings which come from our thoughts and our perspectives on what is happening in our own lives.

Sometimes we think that feeling guilty makes us better people, but guilt is really a useless emotion if it doesn’t inspire us to make healthy changes in our lives. Wallowing around in guilt, doesn’t help us, nor anyone else. We think that carrying around guilt is a form of punishment for what we have done, but this carrying around guilt is not doing anything for anyone. This act is useless. And with this realization, it becomes interesting to explore the tie of ego to guilt. We must really think that we are big, important stuff if “we are guilty” for all of the pains in the world, or even for all of the pains in our small corner of the world. Ego loves to make us feel more important and significant than we really are, in the overall scheme of things.

Those of us who feel a lot of “guilt”, like to believe that we are good caring people who worry about everyone’s feelings. We like to believe that we are “good” people who feel connected to all of those around us. I remember the first “aha” moments, when my “saintly side” was figuring out that she was more tied to her outsized ego, than she would like to believe herself to be. I started to come to realize that I was personalizing others’ rude behavior towards me. I believed that others’ nastiness was all saved up for me, until I started noticing that most other people were also at the receiving end of these same damaged people’s mean and nasty and passive aggressive, underhanded behavior. In other words, their behavior wasn’t all about me. I wasn’t the center of the universe. Mean people’s meanness is about them. I’m not a special target.

So, in this same light of understanding, this kind of “aha moment” came back to me watching “The Sinner” the other night. Feeling guilty and responsible for other people’s happiness and their feelings, is much about my own ego. It makes me feel powerful to think that I am in control of how other people feel. Ewwww. Once again, reminder to self: I am not the all-powerful, center of the universe.

To distinguish between appropriate guilt and inappropriate guilt, ask yourself these questions: What have I done wrong? Is someone feeling disappointed truly my responsibility? What would I expect of others if the roles were reversed? Am I responsible or even capable to make anyone feel anything?

If you come to the conclusion that you have actually done something harmful and wrong, apologize, make amends where you can, accept the consequences to your actions, and let it go. Carrying around a big bag of guilt is not going to do anything helpful and positive for anyone. And if you realize that you are feeling inappropriate guilt, remind yourself to tame your ego. You are not the grand wizard of fixing everyone’s feelings. Simply put, you are not that powerful. Put the focus back where it should be, on the only person’s feelings and perspectives you have any control over: your own.

15 Guilt Quotes ideas | quotes, inspirational quotes, me quotes
21 Guilt Quotes, Inspirational Words of Wisdom

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Form of Fiction

I’m sorry to be delayed again, with the post. All week, my husband and I have been binge watching Season 3 of The Sinner. (GREAT show!) Anyway, we both fell asleep last night, towards the end of the final episode and we had to re-watch it, this morning. We tend to turn into pumpkins after midnight, my husband and I.

During the show, my husband noted that it was nice to see “normal” settings depicted. The peoples’ homes in the show, aren’t artfully staged or in-congruent to what befits the character. (How many movies do you watch, do you find yourself questioning, how does a maid afford to live in a Brownstone with designer furnishings?!? This line of questioning, gets one distracted from the meaning of the movie and the depth of the characters.)

Anyway, that got me to thinking about how this whole quarantine thing, has brought us all down to a level of “realness” that is really refreshing. While having a closer peek into peoples’ private lives, with Zoom meetings and broadcasts from peoples’ homes, we see that even our exalted celebrities have sloppy shelves and clothes hanging on doors and gray roots and straggly ends on their hair. Even our experts have naughty dogs and get exasperated with their kids sometimes. It’s real “reality TV” and it has made me feel closer to humanity, in a sense. It’s one of those hidden gems that has been uncovered below the blanket of this coronavirus nightmare.

Quotes About Reality Tv. QuotesGram

You So Funny

My daughter loves the TV show America’s Got Talent.  Thankfully she has much more wholesome and uplifting tastes in TV shows than her parents who stayed up past their bedtime to finish The Sinner last night and recently binge-watched the entire second season of Ozark in two days.  Occasionally, I would sit down with my daughter and watch AGT when there wasn’t anything dark and disturbing to watch instead.  This season I was utterly rooting for the comedian Vicki Barbolak to win.  I think that she is hilarious.  Vicki is warm, self-deprecating and has great natural timing.  She didn’t win, but she got far enough to guarantee a bright future in all sorts of comedic opportunities, in my opinion.  When I looked up Vicki on the internet, it turns out that she took her first comedy class when she was 38 years old.  What an inspiration for us Second Halfers!!

During AGT, one of the judges, Mel B who is a former Spice Girl band member, dressed as a unicorn and read from a joke book.  That brought me back to the days when my kids still had book fairs at school.   I gave my kids money for their book fairs with the insistence that they only buy books with that money.  They had better not come home with stuffed animals, 4-foot pencils or whoopie cushions . . . only books.  Invariably, at least one of them would come home with a joke book. (Retrospectively, I should have put joke books on the “DO NOT spend my money on this at the book fair” list.)  Now, I don’t know if the teachers still do this, or if kids can just read to Alexa or Siri now, but back then, their teachers required their students to read to a parent for at least 30 minutes every night.  So usually one of my kids would start reading their joke book to me.  That is when I would don my noise cancelling earplugs.  Okay, not really, but after 18 knock-knock jokes in a row, when I was ready to knock-knock my head into the wall, I would decide that this particular child was an excellent reader and really didn’t need anymore practice reading.  Looking back, I am wondering if the whole “read the joke book to Mom” was a well-thought-out scam to get out of reading.  My kids are clever like that.

Jokes are a funny thing. (no pun intended, seriously, I just reread that line and I had to laugh that I even wrote it.)  We have a love/hate relationship to jokes.  And humor is a very personal thing.  What I think is hysterical could easily fall flat to you.  Spontaneous humor is great, but it often never fails that in social circles, a joke telling session starts up and my palms start getting sweaty.  Everyone should have a few good jokes in their pockets for times like these.  I have a couple jokes that I have worn out so much that anyone who has ever met me, stood behind me in line or glanced at me funny, probably has heard me tell it.  I don’t like long jokes, because I always get so nervous telling them that my mind freezes and the punch line disappears into the thin air.  My friend once taught me a really short, corny easy joke that is so short that it’s impossible to forget the punchline and even though it’s a groaner, you get your joke-telling turn over fast.  I’m going to share it with you, because I love you guys and I want to give you something.  It goes like this:  “Two men walk into a bar.  Don’t worry, they have bumps on their heads, but they’re okay.”

Thank you, guys!  You’ve been great!  Give it up for Adulting – Second Half!! Woo-hoo!!!  See you tomorrow for what you’ve been waiting for all week, Favorite Things Friday!!!