Rediscovering the power of being human.

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You have probably felt guilt many times in your life about many things you've done, said or even felt. I know I have. However, what if I told you that some of these things which you felt guilty about you were actually right about? Have you ever thought about them? Have you ever reexamined the basis of the guilt you felt and the guilt which you may still feel in some cases?

Experience and new knowledge can shed quite a different light on your past and present behavior. Things which you always thought were "wrong" and which you felt bad about could suddenly end up being quite justified or even good. Here are a few things which you probably felt guilty about, but which you might feel quite differently about if you reexamined them. I largely derive these from personal experience which I believe many people may share one way or another.

1. You didn't want to go to church on the designated day.

Remember those precious weekend days when you really wanted to sleep in after a week of getting up for school early in the morning yet were supposed to get up yet again to go to church with your family. You may have been grumpy and even protested, but your parents would probably tell you something about god being more important than your conveniences.

What is ironic about this is that many Christians would readily agree that a person should not force him or herself to believe or serve god and that it should be a voluntary decision based on true understanding and genuine desire to connect with god. Yet still that somehow doesn't prevent them from guilt tripping you into feeling obliged and compelled to go to these sermons and services, to do your prayers, to follow your parents every instruction and just in general "do what god commands".

I suppose the only way to reconcile this apparent contradiction is to say that guilt is an inevitable reaction of not genuinely wanting to serve god. Thus, if you go with them because you're obliged and not because you really want to and then feel guilty about that, good on you - you deserved it - because you really should want to. Can you begin to see how this puts you in a rather impossible situation? You're supposed to somehow be something you're not. You're supposed to not only follow somebody's else's values, but force yourself to share them genuinely. Yet what is genuine cannot be forced!

You don't have to be a non-believer to realize that there is something terribly wrong with this and I think there are Christians who do not, to their credit, necessarily act in such a manipulative way. After all, doesn't their religion describe god as someone who gave you free will? Sure, they say there will be consequences if you choose "wrong", but it is still your choice to make and feeling guilty is not the same thing as feeling fear of consequences.

So if you protested or felt rebellious in such instances it would seem that you were quite right to do so. You had the right to choose all along and they had no right to compel you.

2. You despised your school, teachers and studies.

You were told that education is important and that going to school is meant to provide you with one. Thus going against the school system in one way or another was typically interpreted as going against educating yourself. If you would not do your homework in time or had your grades too low or were just a troubled kid who seems to refuse to do as you're told you would get lectured about how you're ruining your future, embarrassing your parents, being an embarrassment of your self and so on.

Who wouldn't feel guilty then? Yet just like in a previous case you cannot force yourself to be "good", by any standards, especially by the standards arbitrarily imposed by other people. You cannot force yourself to love school, to love homework and to love behaving in a way that they consider to be good. Thus yet again a conflict is established. Good behavior and success meant not being who you are, but rather pretending.

They act as if rejecting or not playing well with the education system as it's been set up for you (probably without you having much of a choice in the matter) is the rejection of education itself. It's as if education cannot be provided in multiple different ways. There is a lot to be said about the typical western school systems and it would take an article of its own. I would therefore refer you to and strongly encourage you to read the following two articles:

• The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher
• Doing Something Very Different: Growing Without Schooling

You probably wont ever feel the same way about school and you will begin to see how your natural urges which may have given you so much frustration, guilt and possibly even depression were nothing evil or bad, but rather something you were right to express.

3. You had trouble fitting in and were told to either be more assertive or more respectful.

You could have been one of those individuals who just couldn't fit the fold. You might have been branded as either too shy or too disrespectful of authority and others. While I wouldn't necessarily defend these traits as desirable I would say that they are a symptom of a deeper cause. Often shyness is a result of a feeling of being misunderstood in previous situations or disallowed to express yourself freely without being dismissed by laughter, ridicule or threats. Similar thing could be said about being too assertive and rebellious except that instead of panning down your reaction was to loudly protest and become a "troublemaker".

In either case guilt or at least some sort of a deep frustration were probably the result, yet again you were not solely to blame. From parenting to social life to education and career modern society is ridden with norms which necessarily create outcasts of those who fail to curb themselves or successfully pretend to be who they're not. As I mentioned in "Dare to be extraordinary" even as being yourself is generally accepted as a good idea in a society, in practice being yourself seems quite a risky and possibly troublesome endeavor. I don't have to tell you that this is a very bad thing.

We're not supposed to be panned down. We're not supposed to be bad copies of each other in our behavior and beliefs. We're supposed be what we are. Anyone who ever told you to change in order to fit in a certain relationship or a certain group or a certain society, was following a backwards philosophy. You shouldn't repress who you are in order to fit in, but rather find where you may fit in just as you are. If you cannot fit in to a current social setting, than that social setting is not for you. There's nothing necessarily wrong with you.

4. You despised family gatherings yet pretended to be happy about them.

This is such a classic because these kinds of events tend to be with us almost through an entire life. These could have been family meetings in our childhood and teenage years, visitations of our parents in adulthood, family gatherings for holidays and so on. It often happens that we go to or participate in these gatherings not so much because we really enjoy them, but because we're supposed to and expected to and because we fear what others might think of us if we don't. So we go there, pretend to be happy, put fake smiles on our faces and try to engage in cheerful chit chat. And once it's all over we sigh in relief.

This is so typical that it's a constantly recurring theme in comedy series and movies. Just think of "Everybody Loves Raymonds" and Ray's oh so great relationship with his parents.

If you refuse to go and refuse to pretend you can almost assuredly expect to be guilt tripped, as if it's wrong to be honest and true to yourself and others. It's as if it's better for you to perpetually pretend that everything is just dandy between you and those you're supposed to gather with instead of being honest and frank with them and see if you can work out the differences, annoyances etc. We often think that our discomfort is a result of issues which are too trivial to bring up, yet no such thing really exists. Every conflict is a conflict. It doesn't matter how trivial it is. It says something about the health of the relationship.

The problem gets worse as time goes by because the unresolved issues no matter how small they may individually seem pile up as pretension perpetually replaces honest communication. It isn't too uncommon that the frustration piled up as a result one day comes out in a traumatic outburst of rage that nobody supposedly could expect.

Then you either have a total cut of all communication and/or outright hostilities which last for years if not decades before any actual and honest communication is initiated. Isn't this incredibly sad and dare I say even stupid? All you had to do was to be honest from the start and not give in to the petty guilt tripping.

5. You felt guilty for breaking the law.

I can almost guarantee you that you broke the law at least once in your life without even knowing it. In democratic societies and societies with big governments and bureaucratic structures the number of laws is so staggering that it is almost impossible for anyone aside perhaps those who went through years of law schooling to know them all. You basically learn as you go. It may sometimes happen that you only learn about breaking the law once you actually get caught or penalized for it or otherwise remain oblivious.

Feeling guilty about breaking the law you didn't even know about would be quite silly. But that's not all.

While many people seem to believe that the law reflects some sort of a morality or that following whatever is the law is a moral obligation this simply does not make any sense whatsoever. In non-democratic society the law is essentially whatever the minority that rule decree. They have any support solely on the basis of a collective delusion, akin to a religion, that considers these rulers as somehow more sacred than them.

In a democratic society things actually aren't too different. It is still a relative minority that decides what you may or may not do, but this time their decisions are supposedly justified as "right" by the fact that they've been chosen by the majority to make them. This isn't even exactly the rule of the majority, but even if it was would that really be the basis upon which you would equate laws to moral obligations or prohibitions? How come that the majority is so much wiser than the minority? How come that anyone can decide for anyone else what is or isn't moral behavior? Especially Christians and other god believers, how can you let other mere humans decide what is right or wrong? Wasn't that supposed to be god's decision?

And if you're a moral relativist who believes that whatever the majority says is moral must be moral how far are you really willing to go in your adherence to such a philosophy? What if the majority said you should never again have sex for instance?

The bottom line is that, no matter how you put it, morality is NOT legality. Laws can be wrong. They can even be so flawed that they're impossible to follow or that following one law contradicts adherence to another. The more complex and bureaucratic your government is the less meaningful their laws become.

Furthermore, as I mentioned above, good behavior cannot be forced, yet this is what laws essentially come down to. They're not so much about understanding. They don't necessarily tell you why you should follow them, just that if you don't there will be punishment. How can you feel guilty about breaking the rule you don't even understand or believe in?

There's finally a point to be made about the legitimacy of the law to begin with. If you ask yourself the question of what legitimacy actually is and what it rests on you might find that it's based essentially on consent or agreement. In that case the majority agreeing to something doesn't mean that you do. Shouldn't you be bound only by rules which you previously agreed to follow as you entered a particular relationship? Shouldn't your opinions matter as well? Shouldn't you be the governor of your own self? It's worth thinking about.

Conclusion:

If you should feel guilty about anything it is contradictions to your own self, when it is you who sets up a particular standard and then break or when you deny what you know is true or when you pretend to be who you are not. Certain prevalent social norms have put this on its head, however, and made it seem as if pretending is better than being honest and true to yourself. They use emotional tricks to make you feel guilty about being who you are, and it works because you've been subjected to such tricks from very young age when your options of rebellion against them were terribly limited.

I leave it up to you to decide if this is right and if you would agree with me I encourage you to not fear stepping out of that fold and free yourself from these entrapments.