The gnawing pain of guilt is an essential if awful part of each person’s life.   We often say the phrase, “you shouldn’t feel guilty about that,” or its complement:  “Why don’t you / they feel guilty about that?”  There are aspects of guilt that everyone experiences that are rarely fully explored outside of novels, theater and other artistic creations.

But it is a fact that we, i.e. more or less everyone, feel guilty about some things we ”should not feel guilty for” and that we don’t feel as guilty as we “should” for some others. Our mechanisms for understanding ourselves are faulty. We condemn ourselves for things that we should stand up straight and acknowledge our responsibility without guilt, perhaps even with pride. And there are things we’ve thought or done that require our guilt, require us to feel remorse, require us to accept the pain of our more than fallibility, our complicity, our willing choice to do wrong to another or to ourselves.

Religion and law act as though the question of what we should feel guilt or, alternatively, should absolve ourselves are clearly delineated right or wrong, sacrament or sin, but psychologically its rarely simple. Unnecessary guilt hounds; necessary self-reckoning is evaded.

Randy Newman said it better.