Christopher Moore

So guilt proneness means that you tend to feel a lot of guilt.

You're very sensitive to other people's feelings.

It tends to be in people who are very empathic, for example, who are very sensitive to other people being upset about things.

And so people who feel who are guilt prone tend to feel guilt in a lot of circumstances and a lot of relationships that they have.

The other way in which guilt goes wrong is when sometimes it fails to achieve its purpose, if you like.

So we may feel guilt, but we do not successfully resolve the guilt through making up with the person that we might have hurt.

And then the guilt festers and becomes debilitating.

And you see that in a variety of mental health disorders, including things like depression, to some extent in PTSD, and so on.

Guilt tends to exacerbate or make depression worse and it tends to prolong it.

So if you're constantly feeling bad about yourself,

uh then um you know the depression can can just continue um so i wouldn't say that guilt causes depression but it's certainly a factor in how how depressed you feel and perhaps for how long the depression can go on so when you feel guilty if you've done something that gee you really wish you hadn't done it and it's hurt a relationship and you do your best to you know apologize

So I think the way to understand that is that there are different levels or layers to guilt.

So part of guilt is stimulated by doing something.

Let's say you've done something to hurt somebody that you care about.

And you may feel guilty because of that.

Now, if that person, let's say you apologize to that person, that person forgives you, then your guilt does tend to dissipate.

So at the sort of most basic layer, guilt is dissipated by forgiveness from the person that you care about.

But then there is another layer of guilt which we connect to this idea of conscience.

So conscience is the set of standards or norms that we hold for ourself, which we think means that we're a good person or that we behave well.

And sometimes we hold ourselves to a higher standard perhaps than even other people would.