My clearest lesson on entitlement came from a coworker in an earlier career. We traveled together for a work trip, and as we prepared to get on the flight she “expensed” a number of snacks, magazines, and a bottle of water for the trip. When I learned she planned to get the company’s reimbursement, I was a little confused and horrified.

Not saying I was without entitlement, though I might have claimed to be. I simply hadn’t encountered it in this way before. If it was for her own personal comfort and entertainment, to me it seemed separate from what the company should pay. Nor did I have a moral condemnation, I was simply worried about getting into trouble.

“Tony,” she explained. “When you act like you’re entitled to things, people let you have them.”

It was a revelation. On that trip, I didn’t go full out buying magazines and expensing them, but I did dare to get myself a martini with dinner that would go on the reimbursement receipt. And I didn’t get in trouble.

Entitlement is our sense of having a right to something, whether it’s legally conferred or a socially expected kind of treatment. At best, entitlement helps us walk through the world with confidence and a certain sense of safety. At worst, entitlement empowers us to act recklessly and harmfully toward those we consider less important.

As my coworker explained, when she acted entitled, people responded to confirm her sense of entitlement. If you’ve been alive in this culture for long enough you’ve likely seen or expressed the shadow of this—when that sense of entitlement is injured.

Not only is such disrespect discomfiting, people often seem to experience this as an assault of one’s sense of personal integrity and the natural order of the world. You are guaranteed to see self-righteousness, anger, and meltdowns. Entitlement and fragility walk together in the world. The person’s troubled sense of entitlement erupts in a display of child-like (meaning: big) emotion that causes so much discomfort to those around them that often others will simply cave in and try to tend and soothe that person’s distress. It’s an emotionally centered, mature person who is able to self-regulate and stay grounded during another person’s entitled acting out.

Power influences this, of course. If the entitled person has wealth, influence, or other forms of power, then the urge to soothe and placate them increases, with the risk of other costs if they are allowed to be unhappy. Without that power, the wounded sense of entitlement is more likely to be ignored, criticized, or punished. “Who do you think you are?” It festers, becoming self-righteousness, envy, jealousy, spite, or deep rage and powerlessness.

The worldview that frames and supports one’s sense of entitlement, or lack thereof, also informs one’s ideas of justice. Those who grow up believing they would be given a high-paying career by doing well in school, who then graduate with severe student debt and a minimum wage job, would have a wounded sense of entitlement. The world didn’t work the way it was supposed to, either the worldview was wrong or someone is to blame.

Other people might grow up believing that, as a member of a marginalized group, their hard work will not necessarily be rewarded and it’s not their fault. That person might graduate with the same situation and experience their own anger and hurt about it, but lack that explosively violent sense of outrage. They were prepared to live in this kind of world.

Self-righteousness, envy, jealousy, and rage are bright fires that eat up attention and energy. Even coming from a place of entitlement, they are personally disempowering. They focus our awareness on perceived slights and wrongdoings, on an overwhelming sense of “wrongness” outside of us that needs to be rectified and will not.

Most folks who’ve dated long enough have at least one ex that hurt them deeply, who still goes about life dating other people and having friends. Depending on our sense of entitlement and justice, this is infuriating. How can people like them when they’re so obviously a piece of shit? How can they be happy when I’m stuck with all my anger and woundedness over their behavior? How is this fair?

The aggrieved sense of entitlement comes from a place of genuine pain that needs grieving, feeling, and healing, but self-righteousness will not allow us to go there. It will instead fixate on the outer problem, blaming the perpetrator and blaming the deity or society that somehow set up this dilemma. If that self-righteousness continues to deepen and fester, perhaps fed by people around us or ideological terrorists finding this opportunity to exploit that naïve sense of unfairness, then it makes sense that someone would act out with violence or bullying.

What is intriguing is that self-righteousness often comes with a sense of rejection and refusal. People too identified with it often seem unable or unwilling to sink into acceptance and grieve the pain they’ve experienced. It is in this grief that they will find healing, release, and true freedom.

But in so grieving, they also experience a sense of defeat. The defeat is, perhaps, that their worldview was incorrect, or that they too played a role in the harm done, or that simply they live in a world where people can hurt each other and not always receive the punishment they expect. Without that grief, however, the self-righteousness and outrage are like marionette strings bound to our emotional systems.

Recently I found myself spending far too long reading the comment sections of particular Internet articles, working myself into a fuming anger about a particular person’s apparent unwillingness to be accountable for their actions, and all the ways their supporters dismissed and ridiculed the charges brought against the person.

After a while, I had to ask myself what good I was doing. I had no way to control these people or stop these dismissals and denials from happening. I was simply gorging myself on more anger and toxicity and letting myself become reactive—a reactivity that would undermine my ability to engage. All I could do was speak my truth from my perspective, and move on. Either people would listen, or they would not.

Anger, justice, and even entitlement are not intrinsically bad qualities, but they do become toxic when partnered with righteousness and blame. Expressing anger about harm done, holding people accountable for their words and actions, and insisting on a certain kind of treatment are necessary components to healthy relationships. There comes a point when I have to acknowledge that my efforts are failing, or hurting me more than bringing healing to the relationship. Working this wound means both feeling the pain of it and working through the spiritual implications of it.

“Spiritual implications” have much to do with beliefs about the cosmos and human purpose within it, even for those who do not think much about such matters. Even atheists in modes of self-righteousness or self-blame will make comments about how life “should be” or how things are “supposed to go,” as though there is an external authority who is intentionally organizing and influencing the world and has deliberately targeted them for harm. This does not disprove the person’s atheism. It seems, to me, a psychological artifact of an earlier stage in our development that we all need to face at some point. Our early experiences of infancy and childhood, when we did have caregivers who appeared to be organizing and influencing the world with personal attention to us, shape this view of the world.

In several pre-Christian societies, one could petition a god for help, and if the god failed to follow through on their end of the bargain, punish the god by refusing further devotions or burying their statues head-first in the ground. That is a deeply personal relationship to a god, an ego-to-ego relationship.

Some threads of monotheistic thinking shifts the dominant theology to a different framework, in which there is an omnipotent deity that is simultaneously concerned for our lives and remotely organizing the world according to a mysterious plan. Depending on one’s level of development and spiritual community, personal affronts are due to either you or someone else failing to adhere to the deity’s needs and expectations. Or they are simply signs that one must take responsibility for living the deity’s energies—that justice does not come from without, but rather comes from us behaving in a just way.

A related theological framework is something along the lines of us living in a nihilistic, meaningless world, yet also being surrounded and interpenetrated by a world of spiritual meaning and purpose. In this framework, it is the role of consciousness to bring that purpose and meaning into this empty world. Expecting the world to behave according to that purpose and meaning is a recipe for failure. Resenting the world for failing to live according to my dictates of justice only interferes with my work of becoming more spiritually connected and being a conduit of justice.

Yet another framework might be that everyone and everything is a facet of a grander divine being, that our personal struggles are no more or less favored that the struggle of the bacterium to survive its infestation of our bodies. We term that struggle an illness, because we prefer our own survival, but the bacteria may have their own gods they petition for favor, their own sense of entitlement to inhabit and hijack the functions of our bodies. In a sense, it is a world so filled with meaning that it is functionally indistinguishable from the other frameworks that do not rely on an omnipotent and personally invested god. We’re still essentially on our own, trying to survive and express our highest potential, perhaps with the help of some very strong allies.

What so many religious and spiritual traditions seem to offer is the insight that we have a veil between our experience and reality. H. P. Blavatsky, the esoteric founder of the Theosophical Society, said that, “The mind is the great slayer of the real.” In this aphorism, which is the contents of the mind—our thoughts, biases, analyses—are in some way actively opposed to our experience of truth and reality. Christian thought speaks of us living in a “fallen” world, divorced from its divine origins—or it may be that humans ourselves have fallen out of alignment with its innate divinity. Buddhist meditation practice trains the being to see past the veils of illusion.

In a sense, we do live in a constructed hallucination. Our brains automatically complete sentences, even with incomplete information—so successfully that at times we may receive only the information we expect to hear, and fail to understand or take in information that is unexpected. The structures of thought that shape our experience of life extend into the realms of behavior and social interaction.

In a sense, our brains create structures of order and predictability and attempt to impose them upon a world that does not have any obligation to live according to our beliefs about how things should be. This incongruity creates an ongoing friction and tension as we attempt to reconcile, integrate, or reject experiences that do not fit our worldview—a first order change, trying to keep up the structure in spite of evidence. A second order change—reconstructing the structure entirely—is much more costly and disorienting.

I see people in Recovery groups whose constant efforts to control, manage, and force life to happen according to their own expectations contribute to their painful and overwhelming feelings of self-righteous anger and addictive behavior. In the 12-Step community, surrender to a more powerful being is a step toward healing and recovery—connecting to a worldview in which we will be cared for and don’t need to control and manage everything is what brings liberation.

People who believe in one, many, or no gods may feel themselves equally to be at the mercy of larger powers outside of themselves, to whom they must entreat for beneficence or placate to avoid malevolence. At other stages of development, they may come to find more refined senses of nuance, justice, and causality. There are certainly Christians out in the word who believe their God has a very personal and precise influence in the world, rewarding and lifting up the righteous while condemning and punishing the unrighteous, even though one of their foundational texts reminds them that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).

Feeling entitled encourages us to advocate for ourselves, take up space, stand tall, be our fullest and loudest selves. Feeling entitled supports us in not allowing others to step on us, to dismiss or disrespect us, to use us for their gain or self-satisfaction. Entitlement also encourages us to accept, justify, and defend unequal treatment that benefits ourselves even when it hurts others. It discourages us from acceptance of difficult truths about life, which would allow for greater creativity and responsivity. It interferes with having open-hearted relationships with others, and it may disempower us into thinking that someone else’s gain is our own loss.

To grow out of our entitlement, both the way it limits us and the damages it causes, we must be thrust into a world that does not have a personal investment in our wellbeing. We must accept the possibility that this universe is not designed for us, but rather we are in a collaborative relationship together, and that we are surrounded by other agents that could help or harm us, and we may not know which. In this world, we may experience intense distress and want to be saved, or want to hurt and punish others for our own pain, but that is a false and destructive path. What we need is courage, containment, and help in meeting our distress and learning to tolerate and transform it.

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The Head

A physical object, a symbol. Insofar as it relates to the body, the word “head” encompasses that extremity that generally sits at the top when one is standing or walking. Before we become bipedal, the head is that part that guides our movement—we move toward the head, crawl toward the head.

The head contains four major sensory apparatuses—the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth—encompassing the majority of our interface with the outer world. Thus it is tempting to prioritize head-based information.

The head also holds the brain, which we understand currently to direct our primary capacities to organize and enact movement, direct internal autonomic processes, process information and language, and execute the will. In history, in other cultural contexts, the seat of the personality and will might be in another organ, but today we situation it entirely in the brain, in the head.

In a culture that further values analysis, thought, logic, reason, timekeeping, and language, and situate all these functions in the left hemisphere of the brain, the head becomes the most important part of the body. Everything else in the body exists to serve and support the head—though all the rest of the body requires its own maintenance, and has a lot of sensations to offer as well.

When the head feels unsafe in the body—due to perceive threats and overwhelming sensation—we retreat into these linear capacities of the mind. Anxiety is both process and result of this retreat—attempting to meaningfully construct security safety in a world that feels unsafe. We go up into the lighthouse tower and look down, trying to make a plan to make it safe to go back downstairs, but unable to execute it because it’s too unsafe to go downstairs.

At this moment, culturally and economically, head-based activity seems to be more highly depended upon and more highly rewarded. Tech developers spend hours in front of a computer in their heads, and at times struggle to remember they have hearts or bodies that need attention.

Organizationally, the head is the leadership, the organizing structure, the directing structure, that which coheres all the parts of the body into an integrated whole. Yet within this hierarchical metaphor, the head easily becomes detached from the conditions on the ground and might prioritize cold rational choices on issues of principle or profit. We do not have to look at the head for this purpose, we could easily (and informally do) look to what is the “heart” of the organization, or further we could contemplate the center of gravity. Both of these concepts, arising from named functions of the body, have qualities of organization and coordinating homeostasis.

The Enneagram is one system of personality, one arising from esoteric and contemplative traditions rather than empirical scientific analysis, that looks to these three organizing centers as predominant in the personality. There are nine personalities organized in three triads. The head triad—5, 6, and  7, all share fear as a predominant trait. Fear, again, in a relationship of circular causality with the mind. We retreat to the mind out of fear, our gaze narrows, we have a hard focus on what the head can perceive and mistrust in the wisdom and instincts of the body. Because the head removes itself from relationship with the body and environment, fear increases. Thus the fear compels one to analyze to death, run toward or away from the fear, or simply turn around and have as much fun as possible to drown out the fear.

8, 9, and 1 would be the triad most associated with the body, its center of gravity in the gut. In these, sensory information and instinct drive much activity. The predominant trait is anger, that which arises from frustrated impulses and unmet needs, the anger of wanting a thing right now and not being able to have it. Thus the anger compels one to push forward, numb out, or become rigid and exacting.

2, 3, and 4 are the triad associated with the heart. In these, image, connection, and relationship drive much activity. The predominant trait is shame, that which arises from feeling rejected by others and an innate sense of one’s badness and unacceptability while longing desperately for acceptance and inclusion. The shame compels one to create elaborate romantic fantasies and a unique sense of self that seems not to care about acceptance, to go the other direction and bend one’s self into the most successful and acceptable image in any community, or to make sure that one is needed by fostering dependence from others.

The trick with all personality systems is that we each have all the capacities and experiences within us, but certain tendencies and problems are exaggerated and imbalanced. Thus those whose personalities are centered in one particular organizing principle do well to get access to, develop, and align themselves with the other two. Rational analysis works well in connection to gut instinct and the heart’s reconciling and connecting wisdom.

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To feel guilt about causing harm is a healthy and productive emotion that leads us into healthy, self-responsible relationships. Without guilt, we would have no sense of ethics, no concern for the harm done to another person, no capacity for intimacy. Guilt tells us when we’ve fallen out of integrity with our values, and it leads us back to self-respect.

Unfortunately, guilt sometimes also serves to bind us in automatic deference, to make ourselves smaller, to sacrifice our needs and deep values for the comfort and well-being of others. Guilt makes us vulnerable to control, and at its worst makes us controlling of others.

When we feel responsible for all of another persons’ feelings and needs, any action we take that makes them uncomfortable, upset, or inconvenienced begins to bring up feelings of guilt. One person’s disappointment in me feels like a direct assault on my sense of self. I have to avoid it at all costs. That is when guilt becomes toxic and oppressive.

Strategies of control and dominance

If I cannot differentiate others’ feelings from my own, it’s inevitable that I begin to figure out strategies to manage or avoid feeling guilt. Often this comes out as efforts of control. I must manage myself so that I never hurt, anger, disappoint, or grieve another person—which quickly becomes overwhelmingly stressful, surrounded by people with wildly different responses. I might also try to control those around me so they don’t have those feelings, through bullying, placating, flirting, lying, double-dealing, or exploding in response to any kind of accountability.

To be in a healthy relationship, I need a clear sense of my self, my edges, and the edges of the other person. I need enough distance from their feelings and behaviors to soothe and know myself, so that I can meet them authentically. When I fear disappointing someone, I lack the distance to think about on these expectations. Who appointed me the job of keeping them happy? Is this what I honestly want, or something I’m doing to avoid bad consequences? Is this a task I gave myself? Are the expectations to which I hold myself, or to which they hold me, ones that I can live with?

Perhaps their expectations, hopes, needs are fully valid but still not correct for us. In the early stages of a romantic relationship—okay, in nearly every stage of a romantic relationship—these differences in expectation become clear. Our partners get upset at us for behaviors that are innocuous to us. In Elisa’s family, you ate whatever was in the fridge, but in Jacob’s family you never eat the last of anything without asking. Both expect this behavior of their partners because it’s normal to them, not realizing that family cultures are different. Then they clash, because someone has to be right. Eventually, perhaps, they arrive at the point of seeing these as different and equally valid beliefs, and find a compromise that works for both.

But if Jacob reacts with intense anger and shaming every time Elisa finishes something without asking, and Elisa feels guilty and believes she’s in the wrong, both become smaller and disempowered in the relationship. Elisa starts walking on eggshells, not sure what will set Jacob off. Elisa feels uncomfortable even asking Jacob what he’s upset about, thinking with Jacob that she should simply know and understand and something must be wrong with her for not getting it.

Jacob’s anger might run from a deeper wound. Perhaps he expects that Elisa should be able to know his desires without him needing to ask for them. He feels embarrassed about having wants and needs and shy about asking for what he wants. When Elisa does not magically know what he’s thinking, he feels a deep, years-old disappointment that he is invisible and unseen. While Elisa could spare him from this by being accommodating, in the long run it might be necessary for Jacob to feel this disappointment as his own. Until he begins to face how much this pattern of expecting his needs to be known without him asking for it, he will continue to feel disappointed, disempowered, and heedless of how much he sets up his partners to fail.

Rather than accepting responsibility for others’ feelings, I can focus on cultivating my ability to respond. This is separation that enables connection. Rather than internalizing another’s opinion of me as something threatening and needing control, it behooves us to work on making our inner experience a safe place to experience all of our emotions and thoughts.

When it’s okay to feel disappointed, hurt, angry, fearful, joyous, it’s easier for me to realize that other people can have these feelings without dying. And, indeed, maybe these feelings are necessary. Nobody’s feelings are “wrong,” they are information. When a person feels betrayed by my actions, that’s important information for them in deciding what they need to make this relationship work. If I feel remorse for my actions, that’s important information for me about what I’m willing to do to repair the relationship. If I feel that I was acting in integrity, that is information too.

Without this differentiation, we feel as though we should and must control someone else’s emotional experience. We feel bound to their feelings, that any upset or anger they feel toward us is another binding that keeps us from being ourselves or doing what we want. We have to stop everything and fix them, even if we don’t feel we did anything wrong. We feel reluctant to share our perspectives and act.  While this is primarily for our own comfort, to avoid the feelings that come up when there is anger or hurt directed toward us, it becomes a hook. This person’s disappointment, anger, or hurt develops its own power of control. Unconsciously or otherwise, the relationship becomes a struggle for dominance.

Liberation from guilt and oppression

Here is an important truth, emerging from social justice discourse: “You are responsible for your impact, regardless of your intent.”

Here is another important truth: “I can only be responsible for my experience.”

While paradoxical, both truths are valid. I like to joke and throw out random witticisms in conversation. When I’m lucky, people laugh. Other times people respond with irritation, upset, or anger. My intent was to have fun, my impact was that the person became upset. I might have made light of a topic that is sensitive and important for the person. I failed to meet them where they were, I took up space when they needed it, or I poked a sore spot. When I was younger and stupider, my humor had racist and sexist overtones. Even when I thought I was satirizing racism, the Black person who didn’t know me and didn’t need to hear that felt upset.

My impact did not line up with my intent. To know this is a gift. It helps me to think about what went wrong and how I can better align the two in the future. In the meantime, it is worth acknowledging that I caused harm and making amends.

Where privileged folk—white middle to upper class people in particular—get stuck is in toxic guilt. When we’re confronted or called out, we are in the dilemma discussed above. We do not fully understand the harm we caused and want to keep it at a distance

Being ruled by guilt is not healthy for anyone. It is stressful and narrowing. Marginalized people often experience pressure to contort themselves for the comfort of the socially, politically, and economically powerful, that the feelings of the powerful are more worthy of care and concern than their own. This reinforces fragility in the privileged, who do not have enough practice tolerating emotional stress. In these cases, the consequences of the marginalized not doing emotional labor for their oppressors tend to be more costly than feeling bad for disappointing someone.

In this writing, I speak of ”marginalized” versus “privileged” as relative positions rooted in how much social power one has. Young children are less powerful than their parents. Employees are less powerful than their bosses. In the United States, immigrants, Native people, and people of color are generally less powerful than white people.

The current moment of #metoo is rife with questions about guilt and expectation. As stories come into the light, we see more clearly how much the subjects of patriarchal violence have had to endure, swallow, and allow to poison themselves to get along. Now is a moment when the anger has broken this pattern of denial and minimization. Women and other victims of sexual assault, coercion, and harassment are sharing their stories and pursuing action.

This is the kind of behavior that a sense of toxic guilt would normally bind, and we see that guilt rising to meet the outpouring of anger. Repeated injunctions to think about the harm they may be doing to the men they are accusing. Redirecting the conversation to looking at how those who experienced the harm might have taken more responsibility to avoid it or stop it.

Privileged people struggle, I think, to step out of dominance relationship with regard to feelings. There is a sense that someone’s feelings have to be right and another’s wrong, so a white person working on being “woke” may look at being called out as a sign that they need to throw out all their feelings and perspective and wholly embrace the truth of whomever is calling them out. Complete submission, which is rarely asked for nor appreciated. 

My observation is that part of this is that dominance in relationship is so ingrained that the privileged person is unable to see the difference between engaging in honest conflict versus defensiveness or stonewalling. A person early in interrogating their own perspective gets feedback on their defensiveness or stonewalling and then assumes that means any kind of disagreement or difference of opinion with a person of color is racist.

Men regularly told they are “mansplaining” are unable to fully understand the difference between that and having a conversation. This naturally engenders some frustration which then leads to demands for emotional labor from the marginalized person.

As a white man, I’ve gone through phases where I’ve been called out by a woman or a person of color and responded with a conciliatory, “Thank you, I’ll go think about it,” response that did not engage the critique and mostly seemed to leave the other person feeling grossed out.

These days I practice staying in the conversation, staying with the discomfort and trying to understand what is being said to me while also standing in my perspective and experiences. I am in a place where I do not automatically agree with every person who calls me out or challenges me—but neither do all women or people of color agree with each other. One thing that I do believe, however, is that these folk know about what it’s like to live their experience than I do. There is something I can take in from their perspective that would enrich mine, even if I don’t agree with everything they say. And as I want to move toward my liberation, I would prefer to support others in seeking their own liberation and not thinking I know what they need to do.

As I explore my relationship with guilt, I find there is not a clear maxim that will guide me through each interaction gracefully. Nor do I want a carcereal model in which acknowledging guilt results in exile or imprisonment. What I seek is a way of working with guilt that brings justice to those harmed, reconciliation when possible, and liberation for all involved.

Having an emotional experience has material consequences for our ability to concentrate and be present in the world. If you’ve ever felt anxious, angry, or triggered, and tried to read, take a test, or do your job, you’ve likely seen how much your emotional state affects you. These consequences are mediated by how many inner and outer resources we have to experience and process the emotions without getting overwhelmed. We can deliberately harm someone by pushing their buttons, triggering them, lying about what’s happening, being defensive, being hostile and insulting, or going cold and not responding at all. 

The Restorative Justice movement employs strategies such as group sharing of stories and experiences to process the harm of a crime and lead both the perpetrator and victims of the crime to find a workable resolution. This model inspires me in its integration of healing and justice for both victim and perpetrator. I believe such a process would further help us to discern who is guilty but capable of returning to the community from those who lack conscience or remorse and will not respect community agreements. For such people, whether on a social or interpersonal level, we do need the capacity to set and defend our boundaries.

Working through hurt without someone being wrong

When I explore patterns of toxic guilt with clients, we often find deep wounds arising from childhood experiences in which disappointing, hurting, or angering one’s protectors and caregivers was experienced as a life-threatening risk. Children depend so much upon their caregivers for emotional regulation and basic needs of existence, and sometimes our experiences of learning are such that people internalize a belief that it’s literally dangerous for a person to be angry or hurt. This becomes a vulnerability in the psyche that activates even as adults when we are better equipped to deal with whatever life throws at us.

Stepping on an emotional landmine or triggering a trauma response are circumstances in which the paradox of “I am only responsible for my experience” and “My impact is more important than my intent” come into play. The person who is experiencing the trigger or emotional upset may want to blame their partner, but this leaves them disempowered and dependent upon their partner. The partner who stirred up trouble may want to dismiss or blame their partner, but this would be unhelpful and make the problem worse.

It is a difficult dance, but understanding this is our partner’s personal struggle empowers us to be more compassionate and emotionally supportive. When I am not struggling with my guilt and shame, I have more room to be caring and understanding, to acknowledge how they experienced my actions. I don’t have to agree with their interpretation of reality, but I can understand it.

In relationships, these kinds of negotiations are frequent and necessary for a healthy system. Perhaps Jacob tells Elisa that she’s allowed to do whatever she likes on her date with Rhonda. Then, say, Elisa decides to spend the night at Rhonda’s since it’s getting late, and texts Jacob the information before turning off her phone to go to sleep.

Jacob suddenly feels betrayed and angry. On some level he expected Elisa to come home after her date, and maybe he was not fully conscious of that expectation until now. Perhaps he thinks it’s “obvious” and that Elisa deliberately crossed a line. When Elisa comes home, thinking she’s been abiding by the “do whatever you like” rule, she suddenly finds herself being angrily insulted or berated for breaking an agreement that was never overtly made.

If Elisa feels a sense of toxic guilt, she might then stop seeing anyone and resenting John, because he’s so inconsistent. Or she might start hiding, skirting rules, or demanding legalistic rules and insisting Jacob cannot be upset if she follows the letter of the law.

Jacob could have handled things differently. Perhaps her coming home is actually not that important to him, it’s that he felt taken off guard by her texting him right before going to bed. Perhaps it touched on some old pain of his, fears of abandonment. Perhaps this experience has caused him to realize he does have a need to have Elisa home at night, though he’s otherwise okay with her doing anything else.

A way he could communicate that would be to own his experience and share it. “When you did this, I felt angry, hurt, and scared. I think I need you to come home at night, or I would prefer if you had called me so we can talk about it and not you deciding and then turning off your phone.” Instead of internalizing guilt over his feelings, Elisa could acknowledge his experience and feelings and share her own. “We had not talked about it, so I assumed it would be okay. I didn’t think I was going to stay until we found out how icy the roads had gotten.”

In this conversation, harm happened but no one did anything “wrong.” Both partners find a solution through understanding what happened and their own feelings. If they create a rule now, it will be one that works for both—“I will call if I want to spend the night,” or Jacob will realize it isn’t that important to him after all, he mostly wanted some reassurance that she considered his needs.

Safety and mutual accountability are necessary in working through these situations of guilt. Each person involved needs to have the relational safety that it’s okay to discuss their experiences and feelings about the event without being judged, shut down, shamed, denied support, thrown out, assaulted, or otherwise attacked. Each person needs to have the inner safety that it’s okay to experience all of their feelings—especially the painful ones—and to be honest about what they understand of their motivations. Each person needs to be willing to hear and say things that might be difficult.

This accountability is deeply helped by speaking from and of our own subjective experiences. We cannot control our partners, but there are many ways we can talk of our feelings and needs that decrease the friction of the conversation.

It helps to set up rules, such as one person shares their experience while the other person simply listens, quietly, without making a noise, giving commentary, or making faces, only asking for clarification and understanding. Then the other participants get their turn.

Rules for talking are as important as rules for listening. One thing that seems to engender the most defensiveness and anxiety is when one person makes accusations of the other. “You did this, you made me do this.” We’re all walking around in our own subjective worlds, privy to our own inner thoughts, feelings, and motivations, but only able to at best make an informed guess about another person’s. Most of us hate being misrepresented, too, and feel an urge to defend ourselves against any kind of impugning of character.

One strategy to defuse this is to focus on naming your observed behavior and then speaking of my experience. “When you sent me a text saying you were spending the night, I felt angry and hurt. I tried to call you, and your phone went to voicemail, so I figured you’d turned it off. I wondered if you were upset with me. I had a hard time sleeping, and I felt scared.”

For those of us with toxic guilt, these conversations may bring us into a deeper level of affect, the part of us that fuels the patterns of guilt and social control. We may feel terrified, for example. Rage. Some primal emotion connected to a childhood wound, an experience we’ve been trying to avoid since. Scared of being punished. Scared of being abandoned. Rage that our needs were unmet, or ignored. Feeling that is an opportunity to plant our feet on the ground, feel the steadiness that meets them. Breathe deeply, imagining that you can give space to those big feelings, that you can become big enough to hold them with ease. And then we get through the conversation and find that the worst hasn’t happened. Or perhaps it did, and it wasn’t so bad. Something needs to change, but our adult selves are able to manage it. We learned something deeply important that we’ve needed to learn to keep growing. We showed up and were held to account, and now we can be more conscious, more effective.

The path of transformation

Here people begin to have some discomfort. “What if we make a rule, or set a boundary, and my partner continues to break it?” The discomfort connects with deeper fears around addressing toxic guilt. What if we are truly honest about ourselves, and our partner cannot accept it? What if we stop placating or accommodating? What if our partner feels betrayed by our actions, and we have to admit we caused harm? What if I stop doing everything for my community, and our event fails because no one else stepped up?

Essentially: “If I stop controlling others, how can I control them?”

To be empowered, we must accept responsibility for our thoughts and feelings, and let go of the idea that we can control others’. To stop saying “you made me angry” and start owning “I felt angry.” “You made me” feel a feeling binds you to me, and me to you. I have to make you different so I can feel differently.

I’ve noticed a backlash to this wisdom, but I believe the backlash is to the abuse of this wisdom. Too often folks conveniently twist this insight to dismiss and belittle others for daring to have feelings. “You need to be responsible for your feelings.” That truth needs to be balanced by the truth of “I am responsible for my impact.” Feelings are valid sources of information about my needs and values. Anger tells me that I have a boundary you’ve crossed, or a need going unmet, and that needs to be addressed. My responsibility is to explore the feeling, figure out what need it’s pointing toward, and communicate that to you in a respectful way. If you think my responsibility is to never feel or express anger or hurt, you are welcome to go fuck yourself.

If we set a boundary or express a need and our partner persists, then we’ve learned a lot about what they’re capable of and what kind of relationship this is. You get to decide what to do with that information. You get to decide if you are safe to stay, and what you need to create more safety for yourself. You might have to find resources and allies. You might have to make some hard decisions.

This is often scary, and feels unfair, but it is the cost of personal power and freedom. When we accept responsibility for ourselves, and stop trying to control, we have so much room for greater honesty, deeper intimacy, more authentic alliances. If another person’s guilt tells them they are out of integrity, then they have all the motivation they need to do the work of coming back to you, working with you to repair.

We are bound to unsustainable patterns out of a fear of death. Not the death of our bodies, but the death of a way of life that is familiar to us, reliable, known. We can fear it like we fear our mortality, for too often we prefer the known misery to the unknown. To change our relationship to guilt will lead to other changes. Maybe the event fails. Maybe the relationship ends. Maybe people do step up and we find the community is able to hold us. Maybe the relationship deepens and becomes better than we’d ever imagined. Maybe things end, but we find something even better.

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As someone born in the earliest years of the Millennial generation with a lot of privilege, I’ve spent time mulling over the cultural message that I could do whatever I wanted with my life. During the Great Recession, as I coped with the loss of my last career and wondered what would be next for me, I realized I’d been given an incomplete truth. I might be able to do anything I wanted, given enough tenacity, support, and favorable life circumstances; but I definitely could not do everything.

The depth and richness I sought in life—the sense of meaning—meant I must commit to a course of action and give up other possibilities. And this is in some ways inescapable. Even refusing any kind of commitment to stay perpetually unattached requires sacrifice of the life I could have had if I’d stuck with a relationship, a career, a project.

When I was younger, I filled myself up with dreams about the life I imagined I wanted, ideas about how people should treat me and what would be my signs of success. The dreams inspired me and motivated me to move toward them, yet in the course of living I would begin to encounter ways these dreams and aspirations caused me suffering. My dreams of a different life tended to be attached to a deep longing that had yet to be met. Yet when I was stuck in longing for what I did not have in my life, I was caught between two worlds. I could not walk confidently in either.

Confronting this sense of limitation and the finite nature of my time, energy, and money brought me to a deeper confrontation of the relationship between dreaming and realizing. These dreams had become expectations, and life frequently fails to meet my expectations. My expectations were formed at a time when I had no real experience. By the time I met the real person who would be my partner, I already had these imaginations of what marriage was supposed to look like. Before I began working, I had these expectations of career.

Imagination and expectations, furthermore, are unchecked by any limitations except the ones shaping my mind. I can imagine that a lover will respond to my intimacy and vulnerability with completely intuitive, empathic accuracy—will say the exact right thing—will know just where to touch—will know how fast or slow to go without me needing to say a word.

But then I take the risk and share, and my lover has had a long day and their attention lapsed as I shared with them. They didn’t understand why what I said was a big deal. They go too fast, or too slow. Or, my lover actually does something I envisioned. They say the thing I’ve longed to hear for years. But something didn’t work about it. It didn’t touch me the way I imagined it would. It failed to heal the pain, lift the burden of my self-deprecation.

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