Why do I feel guilty when I know I shouldn't?

Guilt is a funny thing. I’ve started to think of it like a rubber band that tethers us to our relationships and social communities. If we do something wrong and stretch the band, the person on the other end pulls us to rectify it.

If I spill my coffee on a stranger sitting next to me, guilt will pull at me to correct my behaviour. It will make me apologise, try to help clean up or offer to pay for any damage. In this circumstance, guilt is positive; researchers even call it pro-social. It keeps us collaborating, correcting, and ultimately trying to get along.

But guilt doesn’t always feel this way. I meet many people in my practice who suffer from guilt that goes beyond what we would usually think of as useful and who feel stuck or trapped by this feeling and want to get rid of it. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t always as simple as learning to set better boundaries. We all know we should be able to “say no,” but if it were that simple, we would never feel guilty for anything we were not responsible for.

For a lot of my clients, the issue isn’t guilt per se. Guilt doesn’t feel pleasant, but we arguably need it to function as a community of people who have to live in confined, highly regulated spaces. The issue is how strong and how inflexible those rubber bands that tether us together can become and what we end up feeling guilty for. One thing that most women I see in my practice feel guilty for is how other people feel. And that’s where the problems start.

The pull to fix

There is a version of guilt that inflates it beyond the useful feeling that makes me clean up my spilt coffee. It’s the kind of guilt that makes me want to fix my children’s feelings because I feel responsible for making sure they are never unhappy. In the first instance, I made a mistake; guilt propels me to fix it. In the second, I didn’t make a mistake. I am reacting to something outside of me that I feel is my responsibility (even though it isn’t), and guilt is pulling me to fix it.

But if I feel responsible for other people’s feelings, I will spend a lifetime trying to fix everyone’s fluctuating and random bad moods. A Sisyphean task, if there ever was one and one that is ultimately fruitless. I can distract my child from feeling unhappy, buy them sweets, try to make them laugh, but I cannot stop the world from making them unhappy sometimes. All I can do is show them that I’m here for them when things get tough.

Rationally, I know this, and a lot of my clients do too. So why might I still feel responsible for other people’s feelings? Researchers suggest that this so-called “omnipotent responsibility guilt” may develop as a result of difficult or parentified child-adult relationships. When a parent comes to the child for support, or the child is put in a position of responsibility or the subject of projected blame, the child will often interpret the parent’s unhappiness as their problem to fix, thereby creating a thick and very short rubber band of guilt that ties them to the parent.

Over time, this tendency to feel guilty when others have unpleasant feelings can generalise to other relationships until the grown-up child feels guilty whenever they assert their own needs because it might hurt someone else.

On the face of it, for many women I see, guilt is often felt as a motivator that keeps them going, functioning and being the kind, calm and reliable woman they want to be. Letting go of guilt then, even if it’s strangling them, is a very big ask.

Iris’ story

“But if I don't do it, she'll be really upset. It's easier to just do it.” Iris is talking about her mum. Her mum is 71 and has become increasingly demanding over the last few months.

“It is easier.” I agree with her. “But you know it will cost you, long-term.” Iris looks down and sighs. She’s annoyed, I know, because we’ve been here many times before, but she doesn’t want to acknowledge her anger. She’s angry with me in this moment because I’m putting her in an impossible position – do you look after your mum or do you look after yourself? For Iris, looking after her mum means neglecting her frustration and her own needs. But the guilt of putting herself first is eating at Iris; it’s strong, and it overshadows almost everything else.

The rubber band between Iris and her mother was very thick and incredibly short. Growing up, Iris had been her mother’s only confidant. Her father left when Iris was very young, and Iris learned to cheer up her mother when the loneliness and overwhelm became too much. Iris’ mother called her her “little sunshine” and grew reliant on her for emotional support. She would also become angry, loud and scary whenever Iris tried to stretch the rubber band, which taught Iris that it was better to listen to her guilt and appease her swiftly.

Iris came to me originally because of depression and anxiety. She would go through cycles of feeling very low and trapped, and then a severe anxiety attack would pop up whenever she dared to celebrate her independence. When she first started therapy, Iris had just moved to a city an hour away from her mother. The guilt she felt for her move had resulted in daily panic attacks. When Iris got angry with me in our sessions, it was because I reminded her of the costs of her guilt that she couldn’t ignore anymore. The depression, the panic attacks, unexplained physical symptoms that had been plaguing her for years. But breaking free from the pull of guilt isn't easy, and it isn't without cost either.

Over the course of our sessions, Iris slowly made decisions that benefited her, and that exposed her and her mother to the reality of an evolution in their relationship. It changed something in their bond, which Iris had been afraid of. Her mother's anger increased for a while, their closeness dwindled, and her sense of feeling special and needed lessened.

In that gap, Iris had to find out who she was and wanted to be, without guilt guiding her behaviour. It made her realise how many of her relationships followed a similar pattern, built on her making sure everyone around her was OK. It felt uncomfortable and scary, and Iris spent a long time, in and out of therapy, questioning whether sitting with or giving in to her guilt feelings was the better choice.

Living with guilt

For Iris, while guilt made her miserable, it also defined who she was in many of her relationships. Giving that up was as frightening as acknowledging that guilt isn’t always bad. It’s in the extremes that most things become confusing, when in real life, nothing is ever only one thing.

Iris’ relationship with her mother changed when Iris started building her own life, which meant losing closeness that Iris mourned for a long time. It also meant letting go of an identity Iris had built around being helpful, kind, giving and responsible. This was the only version of herself that she knew; changing it seemed annihilating. Setting boundaries had to happen slowly, with lots of time to reflect on how she and her relationships might react.

The guilt pull doesn’t go away when we decide to change things; if anything, it will probably get worse for a while. The point is not always to cut the rubber bands, because guilt exists for a reason. But we might need to replace them with longer, stretchier ones.

Iris eventually became better at sensing when her guilt feelings were justified and when they were an echo of old patterns that were not serving her anymore. It was the flexibility of being able to notice the rubber band and choosing the response that made the biggest difference for her, and that’s the best outcome we can hope for.

Your guilt might never fully disappear, but you can get to a place where you can choose what to do with it, and that can give you freedom to be who you want to be.

References

Gazzillo, Francesco, Eleonora Fiorenza, Marta Rodini, and Marshall Bush. ‘Omnipotent Responsibility Guilt: Theoretical, Clinical, and Empirical Features’. Psychodynamic Psychiatry 54, no. 1 (2026): 76–96. https://doi.org/10.1521/pdps.2026.54.1.76.

Julle-Danière, Eglantine, Jamie Whitehouse, Aldert Vrij, Erik Gustafsson, and Bridget M. Waller. ‘The Social Function of the Feeling and Expression of Guilt’. Royal Society Open Science 7, no. 12 (2020): 200617. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200617.