If you go to a good friend and tell them that you feel really guilty about something you did, most friends try to tell you not to feel guilty. While well-meaning, I think that’s frequently bad advice.
You should feel guilty about certain things! That’s a calibrated moral compass at work, trying to steer you to make amends. You shouldn’t wallow in your guilt. You should take action to reverse whatever you’ve done to cause you to feel this way, if indeed it’s something you should feel guilty about.
Too often we try so many ways to stop feeling guilty other than fixing the issue. But getting into that habit is also a great way to calibrate that moral sense. If the only way to undo the thing that made you feel guilty is to take an action that you don’t agree with, then you feel false guilt. For example, some people feel guilty for taking their own PTO time. So run that through the test: are you willing to permanently give up your PTO in order to not feel guilt? Hopefully not! So that means that’s false guilt, and you shouldn’t feel it. But if you feel guilty because you lied about a friend in order to gain some social status, then you can fix that by coming clean and making amends. Since you should do that, the guilt you feel is real.
Guilt is a guide, if trained correctly. Don’t suppress it; engage with it as a trusted advisor.
