I’ll start out with combat veterans to illustrate a point.  Some combat veterans will come to feel intense feelings of guilt about something that they did or didn’t do while in combat conditions. 

“My buddy was about a foot away from me when he was shot.  I should have done something.”

“There was shooting all over.  A guy was running towards us.  I yelled for him to stop, but he kept running toward us.  I shot him.  I later went out and looked and it was a 12-year-old boy who was unarmed.”

“I commanded my men to go on patrol that day.  Half of them got killed.  I should have known better.  It’s all my fault.  People died because of my mistakes.”

Research shows that people generally make the best decisions they can at the time with the information that they have.  After the outcome is seen, people will often come to believe that they should have forseen the negative outcome.  They look back and judge themselves based on what they know NOW, not based on what they knew THEN.  Most of the time, intense feelings of guilt involve a distortion of responsibility.  It fails to take into account actions of others and unpredictable occurences.  So, the reality is that a person often bears some degree of responsibility, but they take 100% responsibility.  Their actual degree of responsibility may be more like 30%, or some other percentage, but it is rarely truly 100%.

I’m all for taking responsibility, but this intense guilt involving a distortion serves no useful purpose for a person.  If you’re a Christian, you ask for God’s forgiveness.  The hardest part for folks is often forgiving themselves.  If you’re a Christian, you have no right to judge yourself.  That’s God’s job.  Ask for forgiveness, and trust.  It’s really…really…hard sometimes I know.  But that’s the place you want to get to with your guilt.

So, when thinking about guilt you want to truly consider what you knew THEN, not NOW.  The fact that you feel intensely guilty implies that you learned something after the fact that you did not know at the time.  So, it’s good that you know that now.  All you can do is take what you have learned and go forward.  Learn from what happened.  That serves a purpose.  Intense guilt does not…