Unearned Guilt Part II

I am going to digress from the polished form of my usual posts for a moment, because this subject of unearned guilt is extremely personal to me and I feel like I should give it the attention that I feel it is due. I say this because I know that for many, many years I struggled with unearned guilt - up until three or four years ago when I got rid of most, if not all, of it.

Most of the problem comes from my upbringing - my childhood demanded guilt on a daily basis, a guilt that continued in many forms into my adult life. I got rid of this guilt fairly recently, but this isn't the guilt that I want to spend my time here addressing. I just feel that it is an important thing to include to give some background into where I am coming from.

A lot of my guilt also came from my religion. I was raised a Christian and went to church very regularly until I was 18 or 19 years old. I remember questioning my faith and Christianity even when I was a child, and those questions never stopped. I constantly felt like I was never good enough; I always had to do more and more to prove myself to God or Jesus or the preacher or the people around me. I suppose that I understood that Jesus saved simply because I asked him to, but I couldn't get past the biblical mandates to do more and be more. So I did. I worked hard. I ran a Sunday School program with fervor until I was so burnt out on it that I couldn't see straight. I sang, I prayed, I read my bible, and it still was never enough.

At this time, I remarried my ex-husband, which was another area of unearned guilt for me. Christians aren't supposed to get divorced. They are supposed to stay together and provide the best future they can for their kids. When we got remarried we switched churches because he didn't like the one I was at. Of course there was guilt  from that. I was leaving a church where I ran the Sunday school program - just leaving it hanging. But I wanted to do what I thought was best for my marriage. People at the new church didn't stop talking about how great it was that we had remarried.

Almost a year later he and I split up. The new church wouldn't understand this; everyone I tried to talk to about it recommended that I do what I could to make things better. But it was hard for me to do that when another woman and several lies were involved. I left the new church because of the lack of understanding from them and I didn't go back to the old church because I had burned bridges there. I was shocked at what I felt was the hypocrisy of the people around me, including my husband who read a bible daily but talked to a woman who wasn't his wife and lied to her about me and our children.  I even felt my own hypocrisy because I had left a church that I hadn't wanted to leave in order to make someone else happy. I had left a Sunday school program in the lurch. I was a hypocrite.

On top of this there were my friends. I have to bring this up, because I feel that there may be other people out there going through this situation and not being able to get out of it. Through my process of getting rid of the unearned guilt that I was carrying around,  I lost a lot of the things that I had in common with my friends that I always hung out with. Not that this was the total cause for my sudden lack of interest in my friends. Hanging out with my friends was always a stressful experience for me; I always felt like I was doing something wrong and was always made to feel not good enough. The same types of guilt that applied in my church experience were living themselves out every day in front of my friends. Through my journey to rid myself of all of this guilt, I decided that I didn't have to feel like that all the time. I began limiting my time with my friends and not calling them as much. My life has been much less stressful because of the decision I made to cut the drama and the negative feelings out of my life. Of course, through the process of getting all of that out of my life, I have had to hear a lot of, "How could you do this after everything we have done for you? You are so selfish!"

And to this I reply: Yes, I am selfish. My personal well-being is important to me, and I HATE feeling guilty all of the time for absolutely nothing at all! I do not owe you my life and my sanity; I do not owe you my time or my being. This goes for my "friends" as well as any god that may or may not be out there. This goes for anyone in my life that may be a catalyst for any unearned guilt that I may feel. I refuse to subject myself to the stress of such guilt any more, and I am glad that through my soul searching and self-discovery I became a strong enough person to be able to do everything that I can to rid myself of this stress.