Christopher Moore

Or, you know, to take a case of, which is a little bit, you know, an unfortunate situation, in things like intimate partner violence, right?

It's quite often the person who's been violated may feel guilty.

right even though of course they did not do anything you know they were the one that was harmed or violated um but they may still feel guilty because the relationship that they had was harmed and they may feel like well what if i did do something what if it is my fault somehow right and my point is that that the guilt is a is a gut reaction to the relationship being harmed not necessarily because you had any responsibility for it

Yeah, and I think what you're taking there is a sort of a, in a sense, analyzing the responsibility.

But in the moment, what we find is that when that happens, people do get a twinge of guilt under those circumstances, right?

Now, if they might then analyze the situation and say, well, you know, it's nothing to do with me.

I have no responsibility.

But often guilt doesn't work that way.

Guilt works, as I said, as an emotional reaction to circumstances where quite often it's not awful at all.

No, it's true, and it can be devastating.

And that's the kind of guilt that can go on forever, can confess to forever.

And under those circumstances, it is important to be able to find ways to resolve the guilt oneself, even without forgiveness.

One of the things that I think is very important here is to recognize that self-forgiveness can play a role.

And what I mean by self-forgiveness is the ability to recognize that you did something wrong,

you feel bad about it, you've done everything you can to repair any relationship that was harmed or damaged.

And even if forgiveness was not forthcoming, there's nothing more you can do.

And therefore, you can forgive yourself.

it's almost like saying you know if somebody did that to me and they did everything that they could in their power to make things right would i forgive them right so in effect turn the tables and if you if you can say to yourself yes i would forgive them under those circumstances then it's only natural that you should forgive yourself for what you've done

Yes, exactly.

We need to have those kind of psychological mechanisms, those guardrails, as you put it, the emotions that do keep us on the straight and narrow.