Unload your guilt

Guilt is often a hard emotion to release. There is always something about it that lingers. One of my therapists used to tell me how useless guilt was. I'm sure there are certain instances where guilt is useful, however, for many of us, it only causes more anguish, feelings of less worthiness, and sadness. Then, we just continually beat ourselves up about it.

Psychcentral had an interesting post from blogger Therese Borchard of Beyond Blue. She talks about the difficulty of letting go of guilt, especially in attribution to her OCD tendencies. She made a youtube video of a visualization her therapist gave her. The visualization is a backpack full of rocks representing all the things you feel guilty about. The rocks are different sizes depending on the amount of guilt you feel.

The idea is that when you are feeling guilty about a certain issue that you visualize taking that rock out. After you take out the rock(s), things will feel lighter, and hopefully some guilt is released. Therese does make the realization that the backpack may always be there, but it won't contain so many heavy rocks but maybe just a few smaller, lighter ones.

Take a look at the video and see what you think. Sometimes, visualizations can be helpful to expressing our emotions. It's one reason why I did the feelings in a bottle post recently.