自尊与内疚

Have you done mistakes in your past you still regret and cannot forgive yourself? Did you harm other people or your own chances? Do you feel chronic low-level guilt without a good reason? Do you sometimes feel you don’t deserve to be happy?

许多人破坏自己的幸福，是因为 罪责.有时，人们会自觉或不自觉地、 惹苦 在他们的生活中，试图 赎罪 的过去。但这很少能改变什么，当然也不具有建设性。我们能找到更好的办法来弥补过去的错误吗？

当然，内疚有时是健康的：它教会我们与他人合作，为他人着想，这样我们就能互相帮助，共同生存。但是，许多人在成功地吸取了这一教训、不再需要内疚感之后，仍然怀有内疚感。

Let’s start with defining 三种基本的内疚或自责:

1. 所 现实的 并基于有意识的自私和恶意决定
2. 在以下情况下犯的错误 不成熟的情感或错误的判断但并不是有意识地怀有恶意和不良企图
3. 基于 夸大我们的错误，承担过多的责任。 

当然，这 3 个类别是相互重叠的，因为世界上没有任何事情是那么简单的。有时，最困难的事情是确定自己的错误到底属于哪一类。

很少有人会完全属于第一类人。自私和恶意通常潜藏在人们心中，如果我们感觉到强烈的情绪，我们可能会找到借口让它们浮出水面。即使是恐怖分子也常常认为他们的目标值得诉诸暴力和死亡，因为似乎别无他法。许多人深信 如果某些行为 有利于自己的家庭或部落, it’s justified or at least forgivable – even if they would be livid with anger if such behavior was used against them (this is the most obvious in politics lately). This is more about tribal instincts, egocentric value system and lessened ability to empathize with “others”, than finding pleasure in others’ suffering.

Once when (and if) such people reach a higher level of maturity, change their value systems and recognize the pain their decisions caused to other people, they might become better people – but the price is usually feeling guilt about their past. Many people 避免长大 并让他们的潜力得到更好的发挥、 聊以自慰. But without facing guilt, they cannot grow into a person they’d respect – and so they remain trapped in their “lower self”.

更常见的情况是，当人们表现出恶意时，他们的行为实际上是被助长的：

a) 担心 (例如，因害怕混乱而试图控制他人，或因缺乏安全感而产生贪婪）。

b) 有毒的早期行为模式 (例如，扮演受害者，或因文化观念认为同情和善良等同于软弱，而变得粗暴和冷酷）

c) 一些奇怪的，但 普通人都希望，伤害别人会让他们认识到并理解我们自己的痛苦。

With these explanations, my intention is not to justify or relativize toxic behavior; of course there have to be consequences, but consequences don’t have to be extreme and life-long.

这些行为通常反映出 幼年时被压抑的情感和童年时形成的防御策略太糟糕了，很少有人了解成年人的幼稚情绪是如何被激发出来的。当幼稚的情绪再次出现时，它们可能是如此强烈和令人信服，让人很难接受它们可能并不现实。如果我们允许自己更深入地了解这种情绪，也许会惊讶地发现它们的真实来源以及它们的片面性。如果没有这种意识，我们很容易做出不健康、冲动的行为，事后可能会后悔。在我看来，大多数有毒行为都属于这一类。

We can regret such behavior a few hours later after the emotions subside, or a few years later, when experience teaches us to see another perspective. Regret and guilt can lead us into unproductive self-contempt, or even depression, rather than motivate us toward constructive efforts to repair damage and achieve a lasting change in behavior. Depression doesn’t help anybody, including people you might have hurt. If some of that guilt and self-criticism are also childish and overlapping with healthy guilt, we might feel stuck and emotionally paralyzed.

在 第三次 这类人 努力做到最好，但总觉得不够. They always feel like they’ve made a mistake, or they might 一失足成千古恨 他们最终会感到麻痹或夸大其词。或者，他们遇到了一个永远不会让人满意的人（这样的人在周围已经够多了）。

Considering that people’s individual interests overlap and we are constantly in one another’s way, it’s impossible not to be in conflict with others every now and then – from small things like who will take the last item from a shelf in a supermarket, to big ones like promotion at work or property boundaries. Healthy people will negotiate and seek balance, but if we were trained to feel guilty, the very fact that such conflicts happen might make us feel something must be wrong with us. We might be ashamed of our natural needs and have a belief that if we were good enough, such conflicts wouldn’t happen. Thus even small, everyday conflicts might cause such people to sink back into self-blame.

当然，如果这些人遇到喜欢批评和操纵的人，他们就会 为了取悦他人而伤害自己，甚至可能伤害周围的人 这样的人。例如，他们可能会为了取悦亲戚或邻居而忽视自己的家庭。当然，这样的错误可能会导致更多的内疚和自责，如此循环往复。

这种内疚感几乎总是童年时期有毒环境造成的。这些人也许是在父母的操纵和批评中长大的，或者他们目睹了虐待行为，或者是虐待行为的受害者，或者他们被逼着承担了太多的责任（比如通过情感乱伦，见 "情感乱伦"）。 这里). 那些天生就更富有同情心、更敏感、更善于合作的孩子通常最终会感到最内疚。 因此，最容易内疚的人往往是最不应该内疚的人。

Do you believe you aren’t a particularly good person? 自我批评和自我检查已经是你想要合作和负责任的标志 – in other words, you keep other people in mind and have high quality values (or at least higher than you had in the past). Which means you already are a better person you believe you are, or a better person than who you used to be. Truly bad people don’t question themselves; they believe kindness is weak and that “strong” people have the right to exploit the “weak” (in another words,”might makes right”). The more you question yourself, the more likely you are a good person – and the opposite – just like insecure people are more often right compared to the overconfident ones.

给这类人的建议是：当你感到内疚或羞愧时、 不忘初心. Empathetic and cooperative people, when they make a mistake, often identify with others’ judgment of them – often the worst type of judgment. We might believe such one-sided, sometimes malicious perspective over our own knowledge. In childhood, this instinct helps us socialize. But if we experience a lot of overreaction and criticism as children, we may start to expect it and automatically 认同预期批评 – something like “I’ll punish myself before they punish me.”

你需要从这种判断中解脱出来，回归自我意识，回忆起你做那件让你感到内疚的事情时的感受和动机。如果你属于这一类，那么你的初衷是好的，即使你所掌握的信息并不完整，或者你被童年的情绪所驱使。还有 it’s your intentions that describe your character而不是最终结果或外界的偏见判断。此外，要认识到你的负罪感更可能来自童年而非当前发生的事件。

如果你在过去真的伤害了某人怎么办？你承认并认识到了自己的错误，并为此感到后悔，这意味着你已经改变了自己的价值体系，这意味着 你已今非昔比.为什么不爱这个全新的、更好的自己，给它一个幸福的机会呢，即使你仍然会批评过去的自己？

Many people have much higher expectations of themselves than of others. We might expect ourselves to not make mistakes, while accepting others’ mistakes as normal human imperfections. (Of course, some people have the opposite attitude, but that is often a defense mechanism and compensation for hidden fears, too.) We often forget that 错误是最好的学习方式, and that in this complex world there is a lot that our relatively simple minds cannot understand without enough experience. If someone you like told you about their mistakes, wouldn’t you be understanding and find mitigating circumstances? Could you apply this approach onto your own mistakes? If not, why not? What beliefs come up? 想象一下，一个友善、富有同情心的人会如何看待你的错误.这样的人会给你什么建议呢？

The more extreme your guilt, and the more resistant it is to different perspectives, the more likely it comes from your past. Even if your parents weren’t overly critical, perhaps you expected too much of yourself as a child if there were difficulties such as illness of an important family member, or parental fights and divorce. Or one of your parents might have been a role model for exaggerated self-criticism and guilt, so you took it up as normal.

自私的一个很好的定义是 如果你的行为给他人造成的损害/麻烦比你不做会造成的麻烦还大, then it’s selfish. For example, if you cut somebody off in traffic just because you don’t feel like waiting your turn, it’s selfish. But if you cut somebody off because you’re late for your plane, or you are hurrying to help a sick family member, then your need is (likely) greater than theirs and such behavior can be excused (even if other drivers might still swear at you). Of course, this too is simplified and not always applicable, but it can be a vague guidance. However, if as a child you have learned to dismiss your own needs while exaggerating other people’s needs, it might be difficult to recognize balance.

探索你的负罪感有多少可能是由于 童年时认为错误是不可饶恕和无法弥补的. Recognize that this belief comes from your past, that it’s exaggerated and unrealistic. Connect to your inner child which is suffering because of all the guilt and help him/her adopt a different perspective and accept making mistakes as a part of human life.

Certainly sometimes you have some mean thoughts and feelings, or you entertain a thought to commit a crime. It doesn’t mean you are bad – it’s just a combination of some residual primitive instincts (which we all have) and normal human thought process of considering alternatives and choices. It’s not an occasional thought or mental image that defines your character, but the decisions you make and the behaviors that follow.

Finally, if you have wronged somebody in the past, consider how you can fix the damage or make up for it, even if belatedly. More about this in the article “如何真正宽恕和被宽恕“. Instead of obsessing over your past, focus on building yourself up into a person you want to be. The more you do things you can be proud of, the less your mind will get stuck on things you did in the past.

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