Dealing with Guilt, or How I Learned to Change my Thinking

I hurt those I love and wasted years. What next?

In my youth, I naïvely joined what looked to be an innocent Christian group, the Children of God. It soon devolved into one of the more notorious cults to come out of the 1970s. It took 31 long years for me to break free.

Leaving the Children of God came with an enormous jolt of horror. I had wasted years of my life. I had raised my children in a toxic environment. My belief system was shattered. I had lived a lie. My mind filled with a mist of shock and confusion. When that started to clear, the mist was replaced by a dark, blinding cloud of paralyzing, unshakable guilt.

I had always been prone to guilt. Perhaps it was due to my Catholic upbringing with its emphasis on sin, confession, and penance, but wherever it came from, it was nurtured and grew to overwhelming degrees in the cult. We COG members were conditioned to take the blame for anything that went wrong and give God the glory for anything that worked out. This is a doctrine that does not promote mental health or self-growth.

The greatest horror, though, in thinking of my cult years came through the realization that I had harmed those whom I loved the most. I felt I could never apologize enough to my children. Their childhoods could not be relived. Yet even their kindness, understanding, and forgiveness did not make a dent in my self-condemnation.

Negative Self-Talk

Each day was filled with self-recriminations. How could I have? I’ve ruined my life and my kids’ lives! It’s all my fault! I hate myself! My mind was stuck in a loop of self-loathing, and rightly so, I told myself.

Our brains have a negativity bias. This has evolutionary roots. If our ancestors had a happy experience, it did not have much effect upon their survival. Daily threats of predators were what they needed to attend to, remember, and learn from.

My negativity bias had been nurtured for years and was on overdrive.

In spite of my niggling self-talk, I studied and listened to audio courses and did what needed to be done each day. Like most ex-members of Christian cults, I had many children and constant financial need, so much of the day I was too busy to think. Finally, a phrase from an audiobook started a train of thought that led to the realization:

Guilt only shows that I am kind-hearted. Psychopaths do not feel guilt.

As absurd as it sounds, recognizing that I wasn’t a psychopath was my first positive thought about myself.

With that foot in the door, knowledge and understanding started to trickle in. Guilt is a waste of time. It does no one any good. It is not productive. I am paralyzed and wallowing.

Then came the hunger to learn and the resultant study to find out why I had joined a cult and why I had stayed.

I needed to get to work.

Play-doh Brains

Our brains are physically formed in childhood by our input and environment. Like play-doh dented and squeezed with each new experience, our thoughts literally change the material structure of our brains. As neuron connections develop and brain maps form, our perception of the world and the mental software of our culture are installed.

Just as my brain was inculcated with COG doctrines and behaviors over the years, after leaving I faced the daunting challenge of “unlearning.” This required extinguishing intuitions acquired over my 31 years in the cult and replacing them with new automatic responses. The “use it or lose it” principle of brain plasticity came to the rescue.

Using Brain Plasticity to Correct Negative Thinking

In order to undo the damage of the cult, I needed to create new brain pathways and let the old, well-worn mental pathways become overgrown. I had been walking down the paths of self-loathing, learned helplessness, and false beliefs for years. Those paths were so well worn they were nearly paved. Now I needed to make new pathways. I tore at the obstructing vines and beat out a new passage. As I repeated that thought, consciously fashioning a new pathway—a new mental habit—day by day, the old pathways gradually grew over and faded.

Learning even one new thing that requires disciplined study and focus invigorates the brain, no matter the age. Not only are new connections built to facilitate that new knowledge, but the whole brain is sharpened. This applies to both mental learning, such as studying a new language or developing new thought patterns, and physical learning, such as learning a new dance or sport.

Yet old habits die hard. It took conscious effort to not walk down the paths of self-loathing and recrimination. Deliberate work was needed to change my automatic self-flagellation after any perceived mistake into the more productive, I can learn from this and do better next time. And I had to forbid myself from saying, I hate myself.

That may sound childish and silly, but through all those years in the cult, I remained a child in many significant ways. Like an alcoholic turning to the bottle in times of discomfort or confrontation, I turned to the magic of prayer. No facing down problems, no dealing with issues, just “give it all to Jesus” and keep on. No planning for the future, just “trust in God.” There can be little maturity in such an approach.

Making Peace with my Past

Finally, I faced the obvious fact that I will need to live with myself for the rest of my life, so it behooves me to get along with myself. To be kind. To treat myself as I would a friend. To make peace with my younger self.

As the Dalai Lama has said, self-compassion is closely connected to self-acceptance. More than acceptance, it is actually having compassion for our human frailties and recognizing we are vulnerable and limited like all people.

We are, like the rest of humanity, only human.

This piece has been updated from the original, which was published on my blog as “Guilt” on October 22, 2017.

Mary Mahoney is the author of Abnormal Normal: My Life in the Children of God.

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