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A big question I get all the time from INFJs and INFPs is about guilt.
It comes in different forms. Sometimes people feel guilty about a work situation, and sometimes it’s a family situation, but the theme remains the same.
The INFJ or INFP person feels guilty about something they want to do, or something they don’t want to do.
Sometimes INFJs and INFPs just have a vague sense of guilt, and they can’t really even pin it on anything. There’s this feeling that we need to be better, or do better, or…something.
Often, when we suffer from chronic feelings of guilt, we blame ourselves. That is, we assume that there is a reason we feel guilty, and that reason is linked to something we have done wrong.
We rarely pause and ask ourselves if this is really true.
That’s to be expected, though, because when a person is consumed with guilt, and they don’t know why, it’s very difficult to think clearly and sort things out.
What a lot of us don’t understand is that the heavy feelings of guilt we’re carrying with us are the result of trauma.
In fact, guilt is one of the major feelings that highly sensitive intuitive people with trauma carry with them throughout their lives.
I suffered from this myself, for many years. I was always trying to bend over backwards for others, put myself last, suppress my own needs, and spiritually bypass my own discomfort with personal desire.
I felt guilty for wanting or needing things, so I tried to ignore it.
I felt guilty that I had more than others, so I tried to make up for it.
I felt guilty for having negative emotions, so I tried to improve myself.
I felt guilty for taking up space, so I tried to make myself smaller.
I see this in a lot of INFJs and INFPs. It’s very common for us to be genuinely upset about something, or genuinely suffering, and then dismiss our own feelings by saying, “Oh, but other people in the world are suffering so much more than me. I’m an ungrateful person for even complaining.”
When we apply this kind of spurious logic to these kinds of situations, we invalidate our own feelings, we dismiss our inner child, and we cut ourselves down.
We make ourselves feel guilty, for even having emotions, for even having needs.
This is very, very common for empaths who grew up with trauma.
Early on, we learned to survive by not having needs. Or, at least, by presenting the appearance of one who didn’t have needs.
We learned to earn our worth through caretaking others.
We learned to value ourselves by being totally self-sufficient and never asking for help.
We learned to get along by not expecting anyone else to offer help, either.
And one of the ways we learned to keep the voice of our inner self—the one with needs, feelings, and desires—at bay, was to guilt trip ourselves into shutting up and staying silent.
In this way, we contributed to our own suppression.
The issue of constant guilt is something I’m going to be talking about in my new workshop, happening this weekend (November 8), called Empaths and Trauma.
You can find the details and register here:
EMPATHS AND TRAUMA
This is a two-hour workshop for highly sensitive folks who are consistently struggling with feelings of guilt and shame in their lives that are holding them back, and who maybe have not found the help they really need in mainstream therapeutic models.
If you’re planning to join this workshop and you have questions, please feel free to send those questions my way and I’ll include them in the class. And if you have any questions about the class itself, you can reply to this email.
Lauren
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