An Armchair Psychologist's Thoughts About Guilt

Many of my clients are innocent people who have been injured. Some have been in car wrecks. Others are hurt in accidents at work. Some are good employees who’ve been fired.

Regardless of the type of problem they are facing, I’ve noticed that most of these folks spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they did to cause the mess they are in.

A woman who was rear-ended at a stop light tries to figure out how she could have avoided getting hit by a speeding truck. “Maybe if I’d been looking in the rear view mirror, I’d have seen him coming and blown my horn. Then he might have stopped.” Another woman who was attacked by a man lurking in a park said, “If I had looked behind that building before I walked by, I might have seen him hiding there.” Yet, another client said, “I should have known my boss was going to falsify those reports. I could have avoided all of this if I had taken a copy of the originals home with me.”

Society has conditioned us to “blame the victim.” Shortly after the earthquake in Haiti, I read an article claiming that geologists had warned the Haitian government of an impending quake. Apparently, the Haitians brought all this misery on themselves by ignoring the scientists. They should have just moved out before the quake. After all, we would have welcomed them here in the U.S.

But there is more to this than an ingrained knee-jerk reaction to disasters. We want to think that our behavior caused our problems. Because we can control our behavior, we can prevent impending doom by changing our behavior. This way, we gain a false sense of control over our future.

It seems that the more damage a person has sustained, the more drastic steps that person will take to gain a sense of control over the future. Rape victims I’ve represented turn to psychics to predict, and thereby control, the future. Abuse victims join cults whose leaders assure them that their obedience to cult rules will protect them from future harm.

We can’t seem to acknowledge the fact that, no matter what precautions we take, none of us is getting out of this alive. Bad things will happen to us no matter what we do. We need to quit blaming ourselves when things go wrong and spend more time focused on doing better and helping others. C’mon, folks, give yourselves a break.