关于内疚的英文文章

内疚感是我们每个人心中的成年人，是父母，是那些维持标准的人。它是我们内心的指导者，反对我们一直以来徒劳争辩的“其他人都这么做的”。下面小编为大家整理的关于内疚的英文文章，希望对大家有用!

关于内疚的英文文章

Feeling guilty is nothing to feel guilty about. Yes, guilt can be the excess baggage that keeps us paralyzed unless we dump it. But it can also be the engine that fuels us. Yes, it can be a self-punishing activity, but it can also be the conscience that keeps us civilized.Not too long ago I wrote a story about that amusing couple Guilt and the Working Mother. I’ll tell you more about that later. Through the mail someone sent me a gift coffee mug carrying the message “I gave up guilt for Lent.”My first reaction was to giggle. But then it occurred to me that this particular Lent has been too lengthy. For the past decade or more, the pop psychologists who use book jackets rather than couches all were busy telling us that I am okay, you are okay and whatever we do is okay.

In most of their books, guilt was given a bad name—or rather, an assortment of bad names. It was a (1) Puritan (2) Jewish (3) Catholic hangover from our (1) parents (2) culture (3) religion. To be truly liberated was to be free of guilt about being rich, powerful, number one, bad to your mother, thoughtless, late, a smoker or about cheating on your spouse.There was a popular notion, in fact, that self-love began by slaying one’s guilt. People all around us spent a great portion of the last decade trying to tune out guilt instead of decoding its message and learning what it was trying to tell us.With that sort of success, guilt was ripe for revival. Somewhere along the I’m-okay-you’re-okay way, many of us realized that, in fact, I am not always okay and neither are you. Furthermore, we did not want to join the legions who conquered their guilt en route to new depths of narcissistic rottenness.

At the deepest, most devastating level, guilt is the criminal in us that longs to be caught. It is the horrible, pit-of-the-stomach sense of having done wrong. It is, as Lady Macbeth obsessively knew, the spot that no one else may see…and we can’t see around.To be without guilt is to be without a conscience. Guilt-free people don’t feel bad when they cause pain to others, and so they go on guilt-freely causing more pain. The last thing we need more of is less conscience.Freud once said, “As regards conscience, God has done an uneven and careless piece of work, for a large majority of men have brought along with them only a modest amount of it, or scarcely enough to be worth mentioning.”Now, I am not suggesting that we all sign up for a new guilt trip. But there has to be some line between the accusation that we all should feel guilty for, say, poverty or racism and the assertion that the oppressed have “chosen” their lot in life.

There has to be something between puritanism and hedonism. There has to be something between the parents who guilt-trip their children across every stage of life and those who offer no guidance, no—gulp—moral or ethical point of view.At quite regular intervals, for example, my daughter looks up at me in the midst of a discussion (she would call it a lecture) and says: “You’re making me feel guilty.” For a long time this made me, in turn, feel guilty. But now I realize that I am doing precisely what I am supposed to be doing: instilling in her a sense of right and wrong so that she will feel uncomfortable if she behaves in hurtful ways.This is, of course, a very tricky business. Guilt is ultimately the way we judge ourselves. It is the part of us that says, “I deserve to be punished.” But we all know people who feel guilty just for being alive. We know people who are paralyzed by irrational guilt. And we certainly don’t want to be among them, or to shepherd our children into their flock.

But it seems to me that the trick isn’t to become flaccidly nonjudgemental, but to figure out whether we are being fair judges of ourselves. Karl Menninger once wrote that one aim of psychiatric treatment isn’t to get rid of guilt but “to get people’s guilt feelings attached to the ‘right’ things.”In his book Feelings, Willard Gaylin quotes a Reverend Tillotson’s definition of guilt as “nothing else but trouble arising in our mind from our consciousness of having done contrary to what we are verily persuaded was our Duty.”We may, however, have wildly different senses of duty. I had lunch with two friends a month ago when they both started talking about feeling guilty for neglecting their mothers. One, it turned out, worried that she didn’t call “home” every day; the other hadn’t even chatted with her mother since Christmas.We are also particularly vulnerable to feelings of duty in a time of change. Today an older and ingrained sense of what we should do may conflict with a new one. In the gaps that open between what we once were taught and what we now believe grows a rich crop of guilt.

Mothers now often tell me that they feel guilty if they are working and guilty if they aren’t. One set of older expectations, to be a perfect milk-and-cookies supermom, conflicts with another, to be an independent woman or an economic helpmate.But duty has its uses. It sets us down at the typewriter, hustles us to the job on a morning when everything has gone wrong, pushes us toward the crying baby at 3 A.M.If guilt is a struggle between our acceptance of shoulds and should nots, it is a powerful and intensely human one. Gaylin writes, “Guilt represents the noblest and most painful of struggles. It is between us and ourselves.” It is better to struggle with ourselves than give up on ourselves.This worst emotion, in a sense, helps bring out the best in us. The desire to avoid feeling guilty makes us avoid the worst sort of behavior. The early guilt of a child who has hurt a younger sister or brother, even when no one else knows, is a message. The adult who has inflicted pain on an innocent, who has cheated, lied, stolen, to get ahead of another—each of us has a list—wakes up in the middle of the night and remembers it.

In that sense guilt is the great civilizer, the internal commandment that helps us choose to be kind to each other rather than to join in a stampede of me-firsts. “If guilt is coming back,” said Harvard Professor David Riesman, who wrote The Lonely Crowd, “one reason is that a tremendous surge of young people overpowered the adults in the sixties. You might say the barbarians took Rome. Now there are more adults around who are trying to restore some stability.”Guilt is the adult in each of us, the parent, the one who upholds the standards. It is the internal guide against which we argue in vain that “everybody else is doing it.”

We even wrestle with ethical dilemmas and conflicts of conscience so that we can live with ourselves more comfortably. I know two people who were faced with a crisis about their infidelities. One woman resolved the triangle she was in by ending her marriage. The other ended her affair. In both cases, it was the pain that had motivated them to change.It is not easy to attach our guilt to the right things. It is never easy to separate right from wrong, rational guilt from neurotic guilt. We may resolve one by changing our view of it and another by changing our behavior.In my own life as a working mother, I have done both half a dozen times. When my daughter was small and I was working, I worried that I was not following the pattern of the good mother, my mother. Only through time and perspective and reality did I change that view; I realized that my daughter clearly did not feel neglected and I clearly was not uncaring. Good child care, love, luck and support helped me to resolve my early guilt feelings.Then again, last winter I found myself out of town more than I was comfortable with. This time I changed my schedule instead of my mind.

For all of us, in the dozens of daily decisions we make, guilt is one of the many proper motivations. I am not saying our lives are ruled by guilt. Hardly. But guilt is inherent in the underlying question: “If I do that, can I live with myself?”People who don’t ask themselves that question, people who never get no for an answer, may seem lucky. They can, we think, be self-centered without self-punishment, hedonistic without qualms. They can worry about me-first and forget about the others.It is easy to be jealous of those who go through life without a moment of wrenching guilt. But envying the guiltless is like envying a house pet. Striving to follow their lead is like accepting a catatonic as your role model. They are not the free but the antisocial. In a world in which guilt is one of the few emotions experienced only by human beings, they are, even, unhuman.Guilt is one of the most human of dilemmas. It is the claim of others on the self, the recognition both of our flaws and of our desire to be the people we want to be.