Guilt: Whose Burden Are You Carrying?

How to stop feeling guilty begins with a question: feeling guilty is not always a sign that you are guilty, because sometimes a person carries a burden that is not theirs at all, so the first question is not how to get rid of the feeling but whose burden you are carrying. Perhaps you know the kind of guilt that cannot be traced back to anything you did. You have harmed no one, and still something sits in you that feels like a quiet, constant reproach. You apologise more often than the situation calls for, and after every no you feel as if you had committed a crime. This feeling is not a flaw of character. It is information, only a kind you have to learn to read.

In her introduction to systemic family constellation after Bert Hellinger, the philosopher Gwendolin Kirchhoff distinguishes two forms of guilt that are almost impossible to tell apart from the inside and yet ask for opposite things: your own guilt, which you face, and a burden taken on from someone else, which you hand back. Friedrich Nietzsche described a third source: the guilt that someone talks you into. This essay follows these distinctions through the questions people with guilty feelings actually ask.

#Where does guilt come from?

One source of guilt considered here is a perceived imbalance between giving and taking: the sense of owing someone something. Friedrich Nietzsche examines a related connection at the level of concepts. In the Genealogy of Morals, he asks whether the genealogists of morals before him had ever dreamed “that, for example, the cardinal moral concept ‘guilt’ (Schuld) took its origin from the very material concept ‘debts’ (Schulden)” (Nietzsche, 1887, Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, §4). His genealogical thesis connects the moral concept of guilt with the material concept of debt.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff distinguishes two orders of giving and taking. Between parents and children, giving flows in one direction; children may take fully and later pass it on to life, to the next generation (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Systemisches Familienstellen, 24:20–24:53). Between equals, by contrast, for example in a couple or in a business relationship, the rule is that “giving and taking want to be in balance. If they are not, an uneasy feeling arises.” (ibid., 25:03)

This uneasy feeling is the simplest form of guilt, and it is a healthy one. Someone who has received a lot and gives nothing back feels uncomfortable, and that discomfort keeps relationships moving. Gwendolin Kirchhoff even describes relationships that work as a small, mutual outdoing: you always give back a little more than you received (cf. ibid., 29:21). With this form of guilt, the question concerns the balance between giving and taking.

#What need lies behind feeling guilty?

A second need behind feeling guilty is the need to belong. Bert Hellinger, the founder of systemic family constellation work, observed that conscience is not a single moral organ. It is an organ of perception for belonging: it registers what I must do and avoid in order to be allowed to stay in a group. He calls it the conscience of belonging (Bindungsgewissen), and from there he defines guilt with sober precision:

A good conscience, Hellinger writes on the same page, is the reverse: the certainty that I am allowed to belong (cf. Hellinger, 1996, p. 47). Something uncomfortable follows from this. A feeling of guilt says nothing, at first, about whether I have done wrong. It says that I have broken the rule of a group I belong to, and every family, every company, every milieu has different rules. Someone who grew up in a family where nobody contradicts feels guilty when they contradict, even when they are right.

In a conversation about Romanticism, Gwendolin Kirchhoff speaks of an inner conscience in the context of Kundalini practice. She describes a willingness to be corrected: “If I now feel ashamed or guilty, maybe I did something wrong. It may also be that I am mistaken.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Boten aus der Zukunft, 36:29) And further: “But it is like an other within me that makes contact with me. And that is the instance of conscience itself.” (ibid., 36:41)

In this description, Kirchhoff leaves open whether the feeling of guilt points to a mistake or whether she is mistaken. She names the measure a little later: “Only the measure is not what some other, external authority says.” (ibid., 37:07) And: “Rather, the measure is the inner perception.” (ibid., 37:16) Comparing this with Hellinger’s conscience of belonging raises another question: am I following a group’s expectations or my own inner perception? How closely shame and guilt lie together, a theme of its own in the entry on shame, shows in the sentence itself, which names both in one breath.

#Why do I feel guilty for no reason?

If you cannot name the occasion for a feeling of guilt, what it refers to remains an open question. Gwendolin Kirchhoff offers a pointer: “And whenever I have a strange feeling of guilt, pay attention to it: as a rule, a burden is being taken on.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Systemisches Familienstellen, 32:49) Kirchhoff does not explain here how she identifies a strange feeling of guilt. She does describe what happens in such a case: someone has just put on a burden because they cannot bear something (cf. ibid., 32:58).

Nietzsche had already warned against confusing the feeling with the finding: “That someone feels ‘guilty’ or ‘sinful’ in no way proves that he is right to feel so, any more than someone is healthy merely because he feels healthy.” (Nietzsche, 1887, Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, §16) The sentence does not release anyone from guilt. It releases them from taking the feeling for the last word.

Kirchhoff’s distinction and Nietzsche’s criticism can be placed alongside each other as three questions:

#Why do children carry their parents’ burdens?

Children carry their parents’ burdens out of love, and that is exactly the difficulty: the movement is well meant and cannot reach its goal. Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls taking on burdens a central systemic motif and describes it from the child’s side: “Children, they love their parents so much.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Systemisches Familienstellen, 31:32) When a child sees that its mother is sad, or its father, it takes that inside “and thinks, I can solve this. I’ll carry it for you.” (ibid., 31:49)

She names the result plainly: “That is a classic entanglement, because the child cannot possibly resolve what it takes on.” (ibid., 32:01) Kirchhoff is describing a child’s attempt to carry something for its parents that it cannot resolve itself. The child can hold the burden, but cannot really do anything with it (cf. ibid., 32:05–32:11). How such bonds continue across generations is the subject of the lexicon entries on entanglement and resolution and on transgenerational transmission.

The burden may also come from someone who is no longer alive. In her lecture on death, Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes how someone who unconsciously looks towards a person who has died feels unconsciously guilty for that person’s fate and tries to make up for it without knowing what it is about (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Nachdenken über den Tod (1), 36:33–36:45). The real balancing, she says there, is an act of knowing: a seeing and an acknowledging (cf. ibid., 36:45–36:56). And she names a second way in which someone else’s guilt reaches a person: where someone refuses to take on their own guilt, it is often shifted onto another, who then feels they must pay for something they did not do (cf. ibid., 38:27–38:40).

#How do you hand back a burden that isn’t yours?

You hand back a burden that is not yours by honouring the other person’s fate and leaving it with them. Gwendolin Kirchhoff grounds this in a simple sentence about the limits of every human being: “for I cannot make another person’s fate my own.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Systemisches Familienstellen, 32:40) And she names the sentence that carries out the return: “the releasing sentence here is: I honour your fate and I leave it with you.” (ibid., 32:44)

In a constellation, she explains, this return can even be enacted physically. You take a heavy object, hold it until you can feel how heavy it really is, and give it back to the person opposite (cf. ibid., 32:11–32:37). In everyday life, the inner sentence remains, and it can be spoken again and again: “no, I truly honour your fate, I see what you are carrying, and I leave it with you, and that way I also stay free.” (ibid., 33:06)

The sentence holds two movements, and both are needed. The first is respect. It takes the other person’s suffering seriously without belittling it and without taking it from them. The second is freedom. Whoever hands the burden back does not abandon the other person. Bert Hellinger described a related stance towards people caught in their entanglements, and he calls it explicitly a fruit of insight, not of love: “I can leave him where he is, and respect and honour him, without intervening” (Hellinger, 1996, p. 48). Kirchhoff connects respect for the other person’s fate with the freedom to leave it with them.

#How do you deal with guilt over something you did?

You deal with your own guilt by facing it, and there is a sentence for this whose plainness is almost disappointing. Gwendolin Kirchhoff: “When there is guilt within a system, the resolving sentence is: it was me, I did it.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Systemisches Familienstellen, 40:06) She concedes that people hardly take this for the solution, “but that is the solution.” (ibid., 40:17) The sentence applies explicitly to everyday things too: when I feel guilty about something and it is not a burden taken on from someone else, and also with mistakes. It can be spoken inwardly.

The sentence is the plainest way of taking responsibility. She describes what it does through two negations: “I don’t push it onto anyone else, and I don’t close myself off from myself.” (ibid., 40:38) The first rules out the excuse, the second the denial. Whoever lets go of both stands in their deed, and there they find a strength they lacked before: “That has a very powerful aspect, which is why Hellinger kept saying: where the guilt is, there is also the strength.” (ibid., 40:42)

Bert Hellinger sharpened the thought in Anerkennen, was ist. He considers the readiness to incur guilt a condition of acting at all: “Without readiness for guilt there is no capacity to act. Those who want to remain innocent remain weak.” (Hellinger, 1996, p. 168) That is a hard insight for people who above all want to do nothing wrong. Whoever acts takes on guilt, and whoever wants to stay innocent at any price ends up no longer acting.

The sentence “it was me” differs fundamentally from remorse. In his Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza judged remorse soberly: “Repentance is not a virtue, that is, it does not arise from reason; but he who repents of a deed is twice wretched or powerless.” (Spinoza, 1677, Ethik, IV, Proposition 54) Twice, he explains, because the one who repents lets himself be overcome first by a wrongful desire and then by the pain over it. In the accompanying note, Spinoza also says that repentance can do more good than harm because people rarely live according to reason (cf. ibid., Note). Kirchhoff’s sentence directs attention to responsibility for one’s own deed. What amends might follow is a further question.

#Is it okay to say no if it hurts someone?

Yes, you may ask another person to bear your no, even when it hurts them, and the guilt you feel afterwards is no proof that the no was wrong. Gwendolin Kirchhoff attaches saying no directly to the sentence about handing burdens back: saying no belongs to it as well (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Systemisches Familienstellen, 33:14). The connection is close at hand, because whoever cannot say no takes the other person’s disappointment upon themselves. She does not deny what a no sets off: “When you say no, for example, the other person is hurt. I can’t prevent that.” (ibid., 33:16)

What matters is what happens next. Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes the systemic stance like this: “In systemic work this is not fought against; instead, I ask you to bear my no.” (ibid., 33:21)

A second step belongs to it, and it separates this from coldness: “I acknowledge that I am asking something hard of you right now.” (ibid., 33:27) The no is not glossed over, and the other person’s pain is not overlooked. Then comes the sentence that holds the relationship: “And I stay connected to you.” (ibid., 33:33) Hellinger’s concept of the conscience of belonging opens a question here: after saying no, am I afraid of losing my belonging?

#Can someone make you feel guilty?

Yes, guilt can be talked into a person. In the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche described how the feeling of guilt only took shape in the hands of the ascetic priest, “that true artist in feelings of guilt” (Nietzsche, 1887, Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, §20). The priest persuades the sufferer that the cause of his suffering lies in a guilt, in a piece of the past. Gwendolin Kirchhoff took up this mechanism in her conversation with Jochen Kirchhoff about Nietzsche. She describes the priest as someone who seeks, out of resentment, to plant feelings of guilt in another person in order to make them do what he wants (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit, 23:05–23:29).

If someone makes you feel guilty, you can ask what they want from you. What rule are you being asked to follow, whose rule is it, and do you consider it right? Hellinger’s account of the conscience of belonging shows that different groups have different standards of belonging (cf. Hellinger, 1996, pp. 46–47).

#How do you stop feeling guilty?

To deal with feelings of guilt, you can first ask what they refer to: something you did, a burden you took on, or an expectation someone places on you. A burden you took on, you hand back; your own guilt, you face; guilt talked into you, you examine. If you only want to get rid of a feeling of guilt without placing it, you look for freedom in the wrong place: you numb a piece of information you have not yet read.

In her lecture on death, Gwendolin Kirchhoff proposes a thesis about the death drive: behind it lies an unconscious wish to start afresh and be born again. As an example, she names the wish to unload guilt one has incurred and be born anew as someone who is no longer guilty. In this context, she also interprets Christian baptism as a birth ritual through which a person can grow beyond their guilt (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Nachdenken über den Tod (1), 23:28–24:25). The thought belongs to her picture of life as a sequence of births, which the entry on the birth process unfolds.

Perhaps you are carrying a feeling of guilt right now that fits none of these three forms cleanly. Perhaps it remains unclear at first what you have done yourself and what you are trying to carry for someone else. The distinction is then no formula but a question you ask with patience. Some people ask it in a family constellation (Familienaufstellung), where it can become visible whose burden is standing in the room. When that is a fitting path and when it is not is the subject of the essay Is a family constellation right for you?. Others prefer to think the question through in conversation, in a philosophical consultation. Gwendolin Kirchhoff works in German and in English. Both paths begin at the same place: with the willingness not to push the feeling of guilt away, but to ask it whom it belongs to.

#Sources

Hellinger, B. (1996). Anerkennen, was ist. Conversations with Gabriele ten Hövel. Munich: Kösel. Quotations translated by us.

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Boten aus der Zukunft — Romantik, Leiblichkeit und innere Gewissensinstanz” [Video, German]. Cosmic Cine TV, YouTube. Timestamps 36:22–37:19: https://youtu.be/uRWfepxBrWE

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nachdenken über den Tod (1) – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, German]. YouTube. Timestamps 23:28–24:25, 36:33–38:40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSltRJB88jg

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, German]. YouTube. Timestamp 23:05: https://youtu.be/XS8vCl4BkvI

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Systemisches Familienstellen (nach Bert Hellinger), eine Einführung – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, German]. YouTube. Timestamps 24:20–25:07, 31:26–33:36, 40:02–40:47: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwd1x1RzNoE

Nietzsche, F. (1887). Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann. Quotations translated by us.

Spinoza, B. de (1677). Ethik. Part IV, Proposition 54 with proof and note. Quotation translated by us from the German edition.