what is guilt?? what exactly is it?

Question

how are you suppose to feel when your feeling guilty what does it mean?? what example would you give of guilt....

Answer 1

Physically, people feel it in different ways. But guilt itself is a little more complicated, as it seems to me to be more of a mental thing with physical symptoms. A queasiness in your stomach or headache or something like that isn't the actual feeling of guilt, just the physical symptom. When the mind suffers but can't get it out, the body cries out for it.

So to deal with the physical problems, you must deal with the mental problem. Some people call it a conscience, but I disagree with it being a specific part of the mind. Rather, guilt seems to me to be what your mind feels when it cannot balance the logic of your thinking with the action that you did to make you "feel" guilty. If you believe stealing to be wrong, but you stole (even if you justified it in some way in your mind), the logic your mind requires for the situation wasn't satisfied and is repeatedly trying to get you to fix the situation so it can reconcile the logic and the action. It is this subconscious attempt by your mind to get the conscious part of your mind to go back and fix the situation that creates the feeling of guilt.

Your mind requires a certain balance of logic, faith, and action. That is how it is constructed, and you can't really go against it. So in essence, with enough thinking you can justify anything you want to do (good or evil), but if it doesn't fit within the boundaries of logic/faith/action that you have set up (and to a point, what others have helped train you in, like your parents or teachers or religious leaders) as a necessary part of mental health then your subconscious will attempt to restore the balance; even going as far as to make you physically and/or mentally ill (throwing off your mental balance even further to get your conscious mind to realize something needs to be done to fix what is out of balance) to get you to fix the situation.

And I suspect that is why we feel better (lose guilt) when we correct the situation. We have restored our mental balance, and therefore restored order to our mental "world."

Answer 2

Guilt is a feeling of remorse after doing something which one feels in one's heart was wrong, or alternatively failing to do something which one should have done. It is common for people to feel guilty after the death of a loved one, as there nearly always seems to be something which they could have done before it was too late -- such as pay a visit, make a phone call or write a letter.

Answer 3

I was told that true guilt is the feeling you possess when you have done something that hurts another person and you enjoyed it just a little too much.

Answer 4

For ex: You had sex with your bestfriend's girlfriend. You know it was wrong you feel ashamed, gross, not happy, and possibly become depressed because u know it was wrong and you scooped to the level of someone with no morals and just feel horrible about it.
There are different levels of guilt I guess depending on what you did wrong.

Answer 5

Any act you perform that makes you wonder if it was wrong or not afterwards. Your conscience is your guilt-meter. You get a feeling of uneasiness when you do something you know may have been wrong.

Answer 6

suicide, over compensating, actions to feel guilt one assumes one is guilty.

Answer 7

a feeling of culpability

remorse... example... taking something that belongs to someone else.