Regain power over guilt

In this article, Valérie Hill and Mélanie Montpetit, psychosocial workers at the Groupe des aidants du Sud-Ouest, present three action steps to explore in order to equip yourself to deal with feelings of guilt in caregiving situations. This is all aimed at encouraging you to be kind to yourself, recognizing the efforts already present in your daily life to better live with guilt, and to help you navigate your caregiving relationship in the calmest waters possible.

1. Learn to distinguish responsibilities

To regain control over guilt, we suggest replacing guilt with responsibility. If we deconstruct the word responsibility, we can make the following wordplay: RESPON/ABILITY, meaning the ability to find new answers. This reminds us that a person does not have to do everything alone and that the ill person also has a share of responsibility. By distinguishing what belongs to us and what belongs to the other, it is possible to step out of the reflex of guilt.

To help you distinguish responsibilities, we propose using the “I YOU CONTEXT” analysis grid developed by Michelle Arcand and Lorraine Brissette.

In this tool, the “I” corresponds to what belongs to me in the situation; the “YOU” to what belongs to the other, to the other's needs; the “CONTEXT” refers to the family, social, economic context, etc. In a situation, use this grid to recognize the share of the I, the YOU, and the CONTEXT. This helps reduce feelings of guilt by assigning part of the responsibility to the ill person, to others (the family), or by relying on community resources.

“I am mostly responsible for myself, sometimes for others, for certain things and for a certain amount of time, not under any condition, and especially not at any cost to my physical and psychological health.”

2. Continue living despite guilt

We invite you to question your relationship with guilt: Has the struggle you have waged so far against guilt worked? If yes, continue what you are doing.

If not, we suggest starting a different relationship with guilt by completely accepting it; the goal will not be to control guilt, but to change our relationship with it. In this idea, guilt remains present, but we abandon the struggle to act with it. This proposal seems illogical, doesn't it? Why accept such an unpleasant feeling?

Here’s why: When we stop resisting an unpleasant feeling, it gradually loses its impact on us; it no longer controls us. One of the negative effects of guilt is the impression that it controls us. Thus, we perform actions that are not really what we want or need.

Guilt grows when the motivation behind our actions is to avoid it. We spend an enormous amount fighting this emotion. Consequently, we propose not to wait for it to cease before taking meaningful actions for yourself. This exercise requires a lot of tolerance for discomfort and patience, as it is counterintuitive. The invitation is to start engaging in activities important to us even if guilt is present, without aiming to make it disappear.

A little secret: its impact might diminish when you are no longer as motivated to make it disappear. Guilt is not necessarily our enemy; it informs us about what is important to us. Nonetheless, there is no need to love this feeling for it to lose its power over us.

3. Give yourself permission to be human

We often tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to act in a certain way towards the person being helped or to achieve an objective that does not solely depend on us. We therefore invite you to give yourself permission to be human.

Being human implies that we do not always have the same level of energy. Thus, it is logical to adjust one’s expectations towards oneself according to the level of energy we have each morning. Take, for example, a day when you feel very fit and available. You decide to plan several important tasks for the person being helped the next day. However, when assessing your energy level the next day, you notice you lacked sleep and are in a lower mood. In this situation, it would be entirely legitimate to postpone some tasks according to their priority and focus on your well-being. In this example, we can clearly see the contrast between what was planned and what is present in the reality of the moment.

Here is a linguistic trick to reduce the feeling of urgency related to a task: try replacing “must” with “it would be preferable” or “I would like”. If you feel less pressure to accomplish a task, you are likely to feel less guilt when you are not able to do it.

As humans, it is normal to feel discomfort in the face of error. However, it is helpful to remember that a situation is never fixed forever. Options will systematically arise following an event. These may not be the ones we are most comfortable with, but they exist nonetheless. Throughout our lives, we will be called several times to experience imperfect or unsatisfactory situations. We can therefore take a global view of the difficult experiences that have shaped our life journey and realize that we have developed resilience through these trials.

To grant yourself more kindness and a similar degree of empathy that you offer to your loved one, try to complete the following sentences as automatically as possible... and surprise yourself!:

If I were 5% less hard on myself, I would...

If I allow myself to be a simple human, I would...