by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
A Guilty Conscience Can Hold You Back From Growth & Living Your REAL Life
One thing that often gets overlooked on a “healing journey” (or whatever you want to call the it) is how having a guilty conscience can affect our capacity for presence and real growth:
This is unfortunate because we can spend years doing shadow work, exploring our childhood trauma, understanding the patterns that motivate us to live in unreal ways as adults, meditating, journalling, going to therapy, reading books, and creating elaborate visions for the person we want to become but just end up wasting all our time because we’re secretly carrying things on our conscience that weigh us down.
The bottom line here is that if you’re carrying something on your conscience and refusing to deal with it then you can do all the ‘healing‘ work in the world and still feel like something is missing…because it is: your REALNESS!
The truth is that, sometimes, the only thing standing between you and your next level of real growth isn’t another childhood wound that needs analysing but in admitting to yourself that you’ve done something you know wasn’t real, learning the relevant lesson(s), and then making necessary change and stop doing whatever it is once and for all.
I’ve seen quite how this plays out with people quite a few times now and the fundamental lesson is always the same:
If we harbour secrets that we feel guilty about then we can never be fully present in ourselves and our lives which makes it difficult to grow in the ways that we want to grow and so we’ll always be held back from our real lives.
This article is about how we can clear a guilty conscience and put ourselves back on the real path that we already know deep down we belong on.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Is Guilt Always a ‘Bad’ Thing?
In general, I’m of the opinion that guilt can be a pretty unreal emotion because a lot of guilt doesn’t actually originate from our own deepest sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and instead comes from some arbitrary external standards that we’ve absorbed throughout our lives and hypnotised ourselves with.
This could be from any source, really, but the most common are:
- Parents.
- Teachers.
- Dogmatic religious teachings.
- Society.
- Partners.
- Cultural expectations.
- Etc. etc. etc.
(You can also add anything else that completes the endless collection of “shoulds” that get installed in our brains and cause us to start judging ourselves according to somebody else’s operating system).
In all of these cases, then ‘guilt’ really just serves to be a form of psychological imprisonment that causes us to keep living in the past, deciding that we’re a ‘bad’ person because of it, and then spending the next decade or more punishing ourselves internally.
Getting caught in a cycle like this isn’t growth’ – it’s just an old program running in the background that causes you to stagnate and to lose touch with reality and flow.
On the other hand, there is a more ‘positive’ kind of guilt which is something that doesn’t linger and which is actually just emotional feedback telling us that we haven’t learned an important lesson yet.
Usually, breaks down like this:
- Something happened.
- We know we were responsible for it.
- We know, somewhere deep down, that the way we acted wasn’t aligned with the person we want to be when we’re being REAL.
- This uncomfortable feeling is telling us to pay attention and then course correct.
In this sense, ‘guilt’ functions almost like an inner compass that gives us important us feedback about how authentically we’re living:
If we listen, learn the lesson and change our behaviour, the guilt can disappear but if we don’t, it lingers which is when it becomes a problem because if the same guilty feeling keeps returning after we’ve supposedly “dealt with” something then we’re forced to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question:
Have I actually changed or have I simply become really good at explaining why I shouldn’t feel guilty about something that needs correcting?
The Difference Between Guilt and Realness
Deep down, we already know whether we’re being real or unreal with ourselves – we just aren’t always ready to admit it.
In many ways, this is one of the strange things about being human being:
We can lie to everybody else and become ridiculously talented at lying to ourselves but – underneath all of the rationalisations, justification, and storytelling in the service of the ego, there’s always a deeper knowing that can’t and doesn’t go anywhere.
Really, we just know:
We know when we’re avoiding something, we know when we’re betraying ourselves, we know when we’re taking a shortcut, we know when we’re saying one thing and doing another, and we know when we’re performing instead of being PRESENT.
The main problem here is that there’s a battle inside all of us between the ego and realness – between who we are when we identify with the little fragments of ourselves and who we are when we stay grounded in a place of wholeness.
The ego wants what it wants now and with the least amount of effort or action and so it’s always looking for shortcuts and this is diametrically opposed to our realness which knows that at the most basic level life operates according to the law of cause and effect.
All this really means is that:
If we want a particular effect then we have to become the cause of it.
For example:
- If we want the effect of health then we have to create the causes of health by eating well and working out.
- If we want the effect of being trusted by others then we have to create the cause of acting in a way that’s trustworthy.
- If we want the effect of a meaningful relationships then we have to show up and serve our partner.
- If we want financial abundance then we have to create genuine value for the right people.
- If we want peace then we have to stop creating unnecessary chaos.
- Etc. etc. etc .
This is just the way that things work in reality but – because the ego is the opposite of reality – it’s always looking for shortcuts and ways to get the effect without allowing us to grow into being the cause.
Understanding this can help us to understand a lot of the behaviour that leads to us loading up our conscience with ‘guilt’ instead of flow:
The Two ‘Shortcuts’ That Weigh Down the Conscience With Guilt
There are two particularly common ways that the ego tries to bypass reality by attempting to overcome the law of cause and effect (and both of them ultimately lead to a guilty conscience – even if we ‘only’ carry it in the unconscious):
1. Immediate Gratification
The first ‘shortcut’ that ends up weighing us down is immediate gratification and it looks like this:
We want something NOW, and so we do something that satisfies the need in the short-term even though we know it contradicts our longer-term vision for the kind of person that we know we can be and become.
Some common examples:
- We cheat on our partner because we’re horny.
- We say something cruel because we’re angry.
- We spend money we don’t have because we want the dopamine hit.
- We lie because telling the truth feels uncomfortable.
- We drink, eat, scroll, gamble, buy, sleep around, or seek validation because we want to escape an uncomfortable internal state and alter our mood in the short-term.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The specific behaviour varies but the underlying mechanism is based on the same underlying drive:
“I want relief now no matter the cost”.
This always leads to consequences that are unreal because the person who’s genuinely committed to their actual realness has to be willing to tolerate short-term discomfort in service of long-term truth.
2. Something for Nothing
The second shortcut is in trying to get something for nothing and it also goes against the natural law of cause and effect that applies to all of us at all times (with “cause” being the price we pay for the effect that we want in ourselves and/or the world).
Here are some common examples of what this looks like:
- We want money without creating value for others.
- We want success without doing the work.
- We want admiration without becoming admirable.
- We want great sex without intimacy.
- We want power without responsibility.
- We want the result without becoming the person capable of producing the result.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The ego’s quest of getting something for nothing is what can lead to people stealing, cheating, scamming, skimming money, manipulating people, or exploiting situations.
Again, the details differ between people but the underlying principle doesn’t:
We attempt to bypass cause and effect and so, eventually, reality sends us a the bill.
The Debt We Build Against Reality
Every time we repeatedly choose immediate gratification or something-for-nothing behaviour, then we create a kind of ‘debt’ against reality because we know, deep down, that we’re not being REAL.
This knowledge that we’re going against our own realness always serves to create inner friction which ultimately creates unnecessary stress and this stress just causes us to choose resistance and avoidance instead of facing reality and this causes the cycle to continue and for the burden we carry to get heavier and heavier.
There are at least three reasons why things continue to way down on us with increasing heaviness as we get lost in this cycle:
We know we’re being unreal:
Even if nobody else knows, we know and so we have carry the heavy knowledge that we’re not showing up as the person we could and want to be (because what we all really want is to be real).
We become afraid of being caught:
Carrying any kind of secret creates something to protect and so, suddenly, we find that we’re monitoring what we’ve said, who knows what, what ‘evidence’ exists of our transgressions, whether somebody might discover the truth, and what would happen if they did.
In short, we become hypervigilant and so instead of being present in life, part of our attention is constantly scanning for threats and so we can never relax because our nervous system goes into fight-or-flight mode.
We judge ourselves:
Acting in a way that’s unreal always tends to bring judgement into our inner experience and so we end up looking down at our own behaviour and knowing that we’re not proud of it.
This just adds a burden to the original problem (of being unreal) and now we also have a tarnished relationship with ourselves because of what we’ve done.
This is why going against our own realness creates so much unnecessary friction and just leads to us trying to move forwards while simultaneously dragging a weight behind us.
The Secret isn’t Just the Secret
There’s another important layer that comes into play here which is that sometimes the behaviour we’re guilty about isn’t actually the deepest problem:
What’s actually causing us to get lost in these cycles and to keep adding ‘debt’ and weight to our conscience is the compulsive energy behind our behaviours in the first place.
Why did you need to do it? Why couldn’t you stop?
Why did you repeatedly choose something you knew wasn’t good for you? Why did the short-term reward become more important than the person you wanted to become?
The answer to these questions is always compulsive energy and this kind of compulsion is often a sign that we’re unintegrated and have things within ourselves hiding in the shadow self that we need to face and own again.
The bottom line is that if we keep acting in a compulsive way then we’re living in the Void which means that we’ve become disconnected from truth and so we’re attempting to fill this sense disconnection with something external (when the only thing that can actually fill it is returning to the truth by embracing our realness instead of judging it).
When we’re living in the Void and we don’t know that it’s because we’re disconnected from the truth then we try to overfill it with something that we think can serve as a kind of ‘substitute’ for the truth (even though literally nothing can).
This ‘substitute’ could be literally anything but some of the more common things that we tend to use are:
- More sex.
- More money.
- More attention.
- More food.
- More achievement.
- More stimulation.
- More control.
- More distraction.
- More [whatever].
These ‘substitutes’ can only help us in the short-term and so the more we attempt to use them to escape the Void, the more fragmented we become and the more lost to the Void we end up becoming.
Because it’s ultimately unreal, then eventually the behaviours we use to try and fill the Void just become another thing weighing on our conscience.
This is why the solution isn’t simply to “Stop feeling guilty” but to try and understand understand what the guilt is trying to teach you so you can integrate it and move on with your life in a more real way.
The Path to Realness: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
If you’re carrying a guilty conscience, the way forward is to carry yourself through the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.
This is the transformational process I walk my coaching clients through and it’s effective with any transformational journey you’re trying to go through in life.
Let’s break it down in relation to what we’ve said about carrying a guilty conscience:
Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)
The first step is to allow yourself to be brutally honest about whatever you’ve ‘done’ with excuses, elaborate psychological gymnastics, blaming your childhood (or anything else) or pretending that because you understand why you did something that you’re no longer responsible for doing it.
Understanding your conditioning is useful but using your conditioning as an excuse to avoid responsibility isn’t.
To raise some real awareness of what might be going on then ask yourself some questions about your behaviour, motives, and methods:
- What did I actually do?
- What was I trying to get?
- What was I trying to avoid feeling?
- What shortcut was I taking?
- How did I betray my own realness?
In answering these questions then you need to try and be as specific as possible so that you don’t create a miasma of vagueness for the ego to keep hiding behind.
Awareness brings things into the light of truth and that’s ultimately what you want to use these questions for in relation to finding out the truth about yourself.
Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)
The next stage is to shift into Acceptance which doesn’t mean ‘approving’ of what you did but getting to the point where you can actually accept that you did it.
There’s a huge difference between ‘approval’ and ‘acceptance’ because you can only change something once you have a foundation of acceptance on which to start building again.
Accept things as they actually are – even if they go against your desired self-image and who you normally try to see yourself as being:
You may have behaved badly, you may have hurt somebody, you may have betrayed your own values, and you may have made a decision that you’re deeply ashamed of – whatever the case may be, it’s fine as long as you own it and learn the lessons that this has to teach you.
You’re not required to spend the rest of your life identifying as the person who made that mistake (that’s the kind of ‘useless’ guilt that’s actually just outside programming) but you do have to stop pretending that the mistake didn’t happen.
When you shift into this stance of acceptance then you can start to integrate your shadow self because instead of of saying “That’s not me” and pushing it away you can start to say something like “That was me when I was disconnected from myself. I understand what happened, I understand the lesson, and I’m choosing differently now because I’m going to act in a REAL way instead“.
That’s integration and it puts you back on your real path.
Action (Trust Yourself and Life)
Finally, you have to take real Action:
This is the part that people most often skip but the truth is that you can’t think your way out of a guilty conscience and so – at some point – you have to start showing up and behaving differently (which shows you learned the lesson your ‘guilt’ had to teach you).
The lesson will be different depending on the situation but action shows you’re committed to integrating it:
- If you’ve been dishonest then become honest.
- If you’ve been taking something that isn’t yours then give back where appropriate.
- If you’ve betrayed somebody then take responsibility.
- If you’ve been living beyond your means through deception then change your relationship with money.
- If you’ve been compulsively seeking validation then learn to tolerate the discomfort of not receiving it.
- If you’ve been repeatedly choosing short-term gratification then start making long-term decisions.
- Etc. Etc. Etc.
Sometimes, real action will involve making amends, sometimes, it will involve telling the truth, and at others it will involve changing the form of a relationship or walking away from something.
Whatever it is, the most important thing is that you learn the lesson and grow more REAL.
If you’re ready to go deeper into building flow and uncovering your real life then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Unloading Your Conscience
A simple test you can use when it comes to what’s weighing down on your conscience is to ask yourself another simple but powerful question:
“If I knew nobody would ever find out about this then would I still want to keep doing it?”
If the answer is “Yes” then maybe there’s something deeper that needs to be understood and so you need to keep raising Awareness so you can acquire Acceptance of what’s really going on at a deeper level.
If the answer is “No” then you can go to the next level:
“What would the real version of me do next?”
Then go and do whatever the answer tells you to do!
The purpose of guilt isn’t to make you suffer for the rest of your life but to give you information so that you can put yourself back in touch with your life – once you’ve received the information, learned the lesson, and changed your behaviour, you can let it go.
If you’ve genuinely changed but the guilt keeps returning then you might be dealing with something different and you just have an old external script playing repeatedly in your head even though the behaviour that originally triggered it has been resolved.
You don’t need to keep paying a debt that you’ve already repaid and can work on releasing this so you can move on.
In all cases, the end result is to put yourself back on the real path that you were ‘supposed’ to be on all along.
The Final Word: Overcoming a Guilty Conscience to Get Back into the Flow
Realness is about becoming whole so that we can experience the flow of life which is what naturally becomes available when we’re not constantly fighting ourselves:
“Fighting ourselves” like this is usually what occurs when we’re carrying secrets, contradictions and unresolved guilt because all of these things lead to at least a part of our energy always being diverted into maintaining the split between one ‘part’ of ourselves having real standards for our growth and becoming but another ‘part’ that keeps bringing our attention back to “But what about that thing you did?”.
The answer isn’t necessarily more ‘healing’ (because there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with you) but more honesty with yourself to you can return to yourself in wholeness:
Pause, listen to your real self and life, learn the lesson that’s being offered, take responsibility, change your behaviour, make amends where necessary, and then move on.
Until you’ve unloaded your conscience, it can be incredibly difficult to grow real and so no amount of vision boards, affirmations, or even shadow work can completely compensate for repeatedly acting against what you already know to be REAL.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to drop the mental and emotional weight and grow real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you step back onto your own real path.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
