Guilt Trips

A story about guilt trips and manipulation

A father's guilt trip on his daughter, and its effect on her

Another page on guilt and guilt trips - with some parts in Spanish

Feeling frustrated with myself for laying a guilt trip as a joke

The other day I got a letter from someone who wanted me to feel guilty. Looking back I can say that I was guilt-tripped, but at the time this wasn't so clear to me. I felt depressed most of the day after reading it. This made me think that guilt trips kill your motivation. Maybe this is because when we feel guilty we start to think we are a bad person. And if we are a bad person then we don't deserve to live. So if we don't deserve to live, then we have no motivation to even try to meet our survival needs.

This morning I feel frustrated with myself for not talking about feelings. For laying a guilt trip on three people yesterday in a joking way. Here is what happened. I was wating to meet three university students. They came about 20 minutes late and someone asked me if I had been waiting long. I joked and said "Yes, hours, days even!" They were a bit confused. They couldn't tell if I were serious and actually felt upset with them or if I were joking. I guess that they don't use this kind of humor much in Argentina.

There was then an uncomfortable moment of silence and I then changed the subject and started asking them about their days.

Now though, about 18 hours later I am thinking about all of this again and feeling frustrated with myself. I regret not saying something more direct and honestly like, "Are you afraid you kept me waiting or that I was feeling impatient?" This would be about the most direct way of starting to talk about all of our feelings but they might or might not have given an honest answer. Or I might have said "No, thanks for asking. Did you have some trouble getting here?" This would have helped them feel relieved and then given them an opportunity to tell me of any little problems they had. Actually I feel kind of impressed that three people showed up so close to the agreed time. They all came together. This means they had to all meet somewhere else first. Possibly two of them met in one place then picked someone else up. At any rate there had to be some planning and scheduling involved. And probably they had to send a few text messages back and forth to get it all arranged. I will ask them about it later. And apologize for joking and leaving them feeling a bit guilty or unsure.

I learned to lay guilt trips on people in these kinds of ways and I don't like it. I would like to unlearn it.

They might think I am over-analyzing or over-sensitive or just generally weird, but that's ok. I will show this to them and ask them to tell me what they think, how they feel and how they actually did orgainize things yesterday and whether they ran into some problems.

Then I will feel better for trying to correct a mistake I made. And possibly help raise their awareness, too, as well as possibly bringing us a bit closer together. In any case, even it none of that happens, I know that this little article will help someone, somewhere.

A guilt trap is something you fall into or get led into which is hard to get out of. It implies you are really stuck there. It is similar to a guilt-trip because it is usually created when someone else makes you feel undeserved and unhealthy guilt. But it is harder to get out of.