Coping with guilt is a common experience for adult children of narcissistic during recovery. Guilt is a normal response to your experiences, and often a challenging one to explore. In this article, we’ll explore strategies and insights for coping with and breaking the cycle of guilt in parental emotional abuse recovery.
What is Guilt?
Guilt is a common emotion experienced when an individual believes they have violated a moral or ethical code. It often results from a sense of responsibility for causing harm or damage to someone else. Guilt can be an adaptive emotion that can prompt individuals to make amends for their behavior and strive to be better people.
However, it’s important to distinguish guilt from shame, which is a deeper sense of unworthiness that can lead to feelings of hopelessness and despair. Shame often stems from a belief that you are inherently flawed, bad, or not good enough.
Why do Adult Children of Narcissists Feel Guilty?
As an adult child of a narcissistic parent, you may feel guilty for a variety of reasons, including:
- Internalizing the Blame: Your narcissistic parent may have blamed you for their own shortcomings. This may have led you to feel responsible for their problems.
- Betrayal: Your narcissistic parent may have broken promises, lied, or failed to meet your needs, leading you to feel guilty for not being good enough to elicit better treatment.
- Fear of Abandonment: Your narcissistic parent may have used threats of abandonment or withdrawal of affection to control you. These tactics can lead to a fear of being rejected or abandoned. This fear can manifest as guilt for wanting to distance yourself from your parent.
What is Guilt Masking?
- Anger: You may feel angry toward your narcissistic parent but find it difficult to express, leading to feelings of guilt instead.
- Grief: You may mourn the loss of the idealized parent that you never had, leading to feelings of guilt for wanting to separate from your actual parent.
- Shame: You may believe you are somehow responsible for your parent’s behavior or believe you are flawed or deficient, leading to feelings of guilt.
How Can You Cope with Guilt?
Here are some tips to help you cope with feelings of guilt:
- Validate Your Emotions: Acknowledge your feelings of guilt and recognize that they’re normal and understandable responses to your experiences. Also explore the emotions underneath guilt.
- Challenge Negative Self-Talk: Challenge negative thoughts that may be contributing to your feelings of guilt. Reframe your thoughts in a more positive and self-affirming way.
- Identify Triggers: Identify situations or people that trigger your feelings of guilt and work on strategies to manage those triggers.
- Practice Self-Compassion: Treat yourself with kindness and understanding, just as you would offer to a friend.
- Seek Support: Seek support from friends, family, or a therapist to help process your feelings of guilt and work through your experiences.
By understanding the roots of guilt, what it might be masking, and how to cope with it, you can transform your recovery journey.
If you need support coping with your guilt, I’d be happy to provide a consult to see how I might be able to help. You can book that here. For those living in Arizona, I offer individual and group counseling. For those living anywhere, I provide educational, supportive, and experiential wellness services.
