Therapy has been a part of my life since the early 80's. There was a bit of therapy having to do with my marriages before then but my real therapy started in the 80's.
Being born a women in the 40's, the middle child of a large catholic family, the only girl with 5 brothers till the age of 15 when my sister appeared, and a product of a twelve year catholic education, which my parents worked extremely hard to provide, I accumulated a lot of guilt for things that i was told were bad but which i did anyway. I was not even aware that the feelings inside for doing those venial things was called guilt till i was older. All i knew was the twisted feeling of a knot in my stomach.
Most of us have guilt at least to some extent. I don't believe we're born with it but that we're taught. Most of what we were taught, i'm sure, was with good intentions. To some, guilt can be a good thing--or that's what we're told.
The thought came to me at one particular point in therapy when i heard of guilt as a habit. OMG the light dawned. What if i practiced, for one minute, half hour, hour, or even a day, not having guilt. Okay lets try a day at a time. One day a week. I picked sunday as my guilt free day.
Before i knew it i could make a whole day of not feeling guilty. No more should's. Just live my day, and do, work, play, waste, rest, live and have no guilt. It took a while. Guilt still creeps in--but not as often and when it does i have to examine why it's there.
Some people might think that having to practice being not guilty is crazy thinking, but guilt is a habit, and i believe my guilt led me to some unhealthy habits in living and guilt was part of that pain.
My ritual of "guilt free sunday" (now a part of my everyday life) is my simple reminder of living a life of conscious actions out of love and humanity and not out of guilt. Most of the time it works.
6 comments:
Gary says "You can't get off that easy... You need to recite 3 Hail Mary's and 3 Our Fathers". Lol! He's too funny.... Good job Ma! I posted a comment before and it didn't take... This is a little confusing. Trying to post again. Again, I love your writings! And THANK YOU!! Very helpful indeed...
I do the best i can.
I'm still trying to get past the lower case "I" I can't figure out how to become a follower. I've posted too but can't seem to find them. Oh well, dear sister rest assured will forever "Follow follow follow" you.
Oh, this is so fun to find you on the 'net with your own blog. And so filled with wisdom. Is this what we get with "older" age? Wise? You always did seem ahead of me in that department.
Keep writing and I will follow. :)
Finally got published on your wonderful blog, but it was weird getting here. The site didn't like my name. Said Ursula Carron Bates wasn't real, so I had to use ursulacb@aim.com. Then I became real?
Okay, enough of this. Let's see if this gets published.
thank you all for indulging me in my renewed passion of putting words together.
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