How to Overcome GUILT & SHAME - Jordan Peterson

Well, sometimes people think they're guilty and they're not. That's tricky. You know, I saw that in psychotherapy all the time is people would convict themselves at a second's notice and I would look into it and I'd think, actually, you know, this wasn't nearly as much your fault as your, you know, because you think, well, you should take responsibility for your actions and fair enough, but there are errors in that direction too, is you should take responsibility for your actions, but the presumption of innocence also applies to you, even if you are inclined to be guilty. And so that principle that you should take on every client as a lawyer, it's a good principle. It's a very good principle. You never know what the story is until you get to the bottom of it. The goal of analyzing a piece of misbehavior, let's say if the goal is atonement, what that means is you have to know exactly where you stepped wrong right from the beginning of the process. And that means you also have to know where you're guilty, but about things that were actually peripheral to the event, or maybe you shouldn't have been guilty about them at all. It's like, no, this is the cardinal mistake. This is the mistake. This is the pathway. This is what you're guilty of, not these things. This is what anyone would have done in your situation because lots of times people will do something that looks terrible on casual glance and may even be terrible, but you listen to the full account and you think, oh, if I was in that situation, I would have done something far worse, right? And then that makes the whole notion of guilt much more complex. I also noticed as a clinician, you know, that I was often dealing with people who had been accused in one way or another, often by themselves, of some malfeasance. And I always took the case that my role as a counselor was to begin with the presumption of innocence and to investigate based on that presumption, but also to help my client, even in regards to themselves, to start with the presumption of innocence. So if someone was feeling very guilty and was depressed, for example, which is a very, that's a situation where the adversary is within and is eating you, eating your soul, so to speak, you have to mount a strong defense. And, you know, that means that you should take a very careful look at your weaknesses and your transgressions, but you should do that from the presumption, from the initial presumption of innocence. And so, and that's a hard thing to learn, too, when you're being prosecuted in the manner that you've been prosecuted, because in order to withstand that without falling prey to the trauma associated with derealization, you have to get your ducks in order so that you can justify to yourself your own claims of innocence. And that means you also have to learn to do that without a kind of careless self-righteousness and also without that proclivity to move toward more extreme views, which does also lurk as a temptation under such circumstances. It's like you did something wrong and it's hurting you. Fair enough, that hurts people. And what you have to do is you have to figure out what it was that you did wrong. You have to figure out how it was that you got there. You have to figure out how to change your life so that you won't go there anymore. You have to make amends for what you've done, not necessarily precisely to the people that you did it to, because maybe you can't, but you need to start to live your life in a way that makes amends for what you've done, and then you have to let it go, because people make mistakes. And torturing yourself to death because you did something reprehensible and stupid isn't as useful as using the experience to transform yourself into someone moral and useful. Now, you know, that's easier said than done, obviously, and I'm not in the least taking it lightly. I know that, you know, you can do things in your life that are very bad and that are very hard to get over. But adding your own misery to the misery of the world when you could be out there doing good is probably not the best way to atone for your past sins. So, you know, and people make mistakes. The trick is, once you've made it, to admit that you've made it, to learn why you've made it, to transform yourself so you don't make it anymore, and then to go out there and start acting like a proper person. Well, people are fallible in a profound way, but if they atone, they can be redeemed. And if they're penitent, I mean, that's where the word penitentiary comes from, by the way, if they're penitent, if they go over their conscience, if they confess to what they've done to themselves, to God and society, let's say, and they attempt to strike out on a better path, and that's all genuine. It's like the idea is, well, if you don't allow people who've made mistakes to move on, then you just have to dispense with everyone because everyone's made mistakes. Now, having said that, I know there's a difference between categories of mistakes, but, you know, forgiveness after repentance is a good moral axiom. Well, you should treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. And the first question is, well, why don't you? And the answer is, well, there's a lot wrong with you, you know? And it's hard to exercise enough love and care in a deep and non-naive way to care properly for something like that. But, you know, you do it for people that you love despite their inadequacies, and there is this idea that there is a spark of divinity within us, and it is possible that the fact that you have that spark of divinity within you also means that you have the capability to withstand that terrible vulnerability. That's what I was trying to get at in chapter one, which was to stand up straight with your shoulders back, that you could actually voluntarily accept the onslaught of the tragedy of being, and that you can constrain the proclivity for malevolence that's part of you and that's part of the world. And in that, you can discover your own value, your own intrinsic value, and your own nobility. And all of that might be more powerful than the forces of vulnerability and malevolence themselves, which I also happen to believe. And I think that that is in some sense the fundamental hallmark of faith. And so chapter two, and to some degree chapter three, which is to surround yourself with people who want the best for you, is an encouragement to assume, to act out the proposition that even if life is as difficult as it seems to be, and if you're as vulnerable and weak in a fundamental sense as you definitely are, and characterized by this terrible propensity for the infliction of voluntary suffering on yourself and others, and that destructive tendency that there's still something within you that's so remarkable and so aligned with order and being in the proper manner that you can climb above that, let's say like Abel, and that you can make the proper sacrifices and that you can set yourself right and you can set your family right and you can set the world right, and that the mere possibility that that might occur, that that might be within the realm of potential means that you have a moral obligation to exercise the responsibility to take care of yourself as if you're something that matters, and that if you did that properly, it might turn out that what you did would matter, that it would matter to you, that it would be meaningful in the way that things that matter are meaningful, and that it would matter to everyone around you. People have a lot of guilt. You know, there's a line of social psychology that claims that most people feel that they're better than other people. Like, I just don't buy that. That isn't what I've seen in my life, and maybe I'm a bit biased because I'm a clinical psychologist and I see more people who are overtly suffering, maybe, than people do in general, although I'm not so sure about that, you know, because you don't have to scratch very far beneath the surface of most people's lives before you find something truly tragic. So that tragic sense of being is there with people all the time, and it's also the case that, in my experience, I rarely meet someone who says, hey, you know, I'm doing everything I possibly can, I'm a hell of a guy, and I can't see how I could possibly improve. You meet someone like that, you think they're narcissistic, right? And you're right. But most people don't feel that way. They feel like they could do a hell of a lot better than they are, and they're quite acutely aware of their faults, and they don't feel that they're what they should be. And you see, what happens in the story of Adam and Eve as well is that when people become self-conscious, at least that's how it looks to me, they get thrown out of paradise, and then they're in history. And history is a place where there's pain in childbirth, and where you're dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad, like no other animal, because you're aware of the future. You have to work and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future constantly, and you know you're going to die, and you have all that weight on you. And to me, again, that's just, how can anything be more true than that? That's just, as far as I can tell, that's just how it is. Unless you're naive beyond comprehension. The existentialist said, well, people feel like they have a debt that they have to pay off to existence for the crime of their being. Something like that. And maybe it's because we're acutely aware that we have to offer something of value to the people around us so that they can tolerate us while we're going about our business.