The Current - Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about feeling guilty

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

We all feel guilt at some point in our lives, and for all kinds of reasons. It seems natural to feel guilty for what we've done, or not done, or should be doing. But can guilt be good for us? Chris Moore, the author of “The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal,” tells us why he thinks guilt has an "image problem.”

For years, I've sounded like a broken record. I do not want kids. I do not ever want to have kids. I don't want to have a kid. Don't want to have a kid. Don't want to have a kid. I'm in my 40s now. The door is almost closed. And suddenly, I'm not so sure. The story has always been, no. I'm just wondering to what degree it's just a story.

From CBC's personally, this is Creation Myth. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. You know, guilt is one of those emotions that we all feel at some point. I had this friend, and we had a really big fight, and I, I kind of like, I was very immature, and I glued her book to her desk. But she was calling me like really mean names.

We were both really mean to each other, and we were basically both bullying each other. And so we contacted, and her parents were really mad at me. And I apologized many times, but a year later, she came up, and she apologized to me. And I was like, you're apologizing to me? And I was like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. Like, I did a lot of bad things, and I'm really sorry.

And she was like, no, I feel the same. And so now we're good. Yeah. It's a great story. Can I just say also people will tell you the most amazing things on the radio, including stories like that. Guilt doesn't always end, resolved in those sorts of ways, though. It is one of those things that can get under your skin for any number of reasons,

even in our closest relationships. Coming from an immigrant family, when you know your parents gave up so much and not whining, I feel like I should do more, but sometimes I just don't want to when I'm tired. but yet, oh no, they need this, so I'd better go over, I'd better do this. So taking time for yourself and putting yourself ahead, and that's bad, because they're your parents and you have to help them. Most of the time, it makes me do what I don't want to do, but I know I should do. Right now I'm actually looking for work, and I feel guilty that my partner,

she's working so hard, and when she sees me either reading news or doing, something leisurely, I feel bad that there's a difference in how much we're putting into the relationship to make our goals meet. Seems natural to feel guilty for what we've done or not done or should be doing. Chris Moore, though, thinks that guilt has an image problem. He has spent his career exploring guilt after a traumatic experience of his own, which shaped his personal and professional life. Chris Moore is a professor of psychology at Dalhousie University.

His new book is The Power of Guilt, why we feel. feel it and its surprising ability to heal. He is in our Halifax studio. Chris, good morning. Good morning, Matt. I would like to begin where you begin in this book, and that is the story of what happened when you were a student at Cambridge University. Tell me that story. So it was the end of my second year as an undergraduate. I'd been studying psychology for the first time and was captivated by the subject and knew that that's what I wanted to do with my life. but it was the end of the second year. Exams had just finished.

We went to a party a little way out of town. All of us had finished exams, celebrating, had a little bit too much to drink. And when it was time to go home, it was too far to walk. And there just happened to be a car, not ours, in the driveway of the house, with the keys in the ignition. And four of us got in the car. I was in the front passenger seat, promptly fell asleep. and the next thing I knew, I was by the side of the road, blood coming down my forehead. We'd been in an accident.

I didn't know the extent of it until the next morning when I woke up in hospital and had learned that the car that we were driving had plowed into a group of cyclists also traveling back to the city, and they'd been injured and one of them had been killed. And I spent the next week in hospital, obviously devastating. by what had happened, trying to figure out what it meant for my life, for my relationships. But what I learned during that week has stayed with me for really the rest of my life, which is that when we feel guilt, it's fundamentally about harming people relationships that we care about. And perhaps more importantly, that guilt can be removed, let's say, or dissipated by forgiveness from the people that we've harmed.

And really the most telling episode was that some of the students, friends of the student who died, and in fact one of the other cyclists came to my bedside that week and offered their forgiveness for what we'd done. And I can't emphasize how profound an experience that was in that moment. But what was most telling was that the guilt that I was feeling, the profound guilt that I was feeling dissipated to some extent because of that. that action on behalf of those other students. Your parents also forgave you, right? My parents also forgave me. Of course, I felt terrible about, you know, what I'd done for my family.

But my parents also came to my bedside the next day after the accident and essentially told me that, yes, I'd done a terribly stupid thing, but that they still love me. And that form of forgiveness also was extremely moving. What was the guilt that you felt when you woke up in that hospital? Because one of the things that you talk about is that there are different manifestations of guilt. There's legal guilt, there's personal guilt. What was the guilt that you felt? The guilt was very much an intense feeling, you know, an emotion.

But I think what I noticed at the time is that it was almost subtly different depending on who I was reflecting on. So when I was thinking about my parents, it was more a form of shame. I just felt a terrible person that how could they love me. When I felt guilt, I felt guilt in relation to my friends, you know, had I been the instigator to some extent of what we'd done. And that was really guilt that came about as a result of feeling that those friendships were now threatened. And then, of course, the guilt about the damage that we'd caused to the other students. And that was really a much more profound feeling of guilt that, sort of what I call an existential guilt,

that perhaps I would never be the same person again. What did you learn about yourself and about guilt through that experience? Yeah, I think what I learned is that because the guilt manifested a little bit differently in terms of the different relationships that were potentially harmed by that action, I came to the realization that guilt actually is the result of not necessarily doing something wrong. course we'd done something wrong in that case, but it was more about harming the relationships that we care about in our lives. A social relationship. A social relationship in our lives. And when we damage those relationships by something that we've done, that's the trigger for guilt. And then I also

learned that the antidote to guilt, if you like, what relieves guilt is forgiveness by the other. And what that tells you is that the relationship is no longer harmed, that relationship is okay. Do you think that just the last point on that incident, do you think you could have been forgiven, that the family members that forgive you, but also the friends of that person that was killed, that they could have forgiven you had you not expressed guilt? Yeah, I think they could have done, but I think that's because of their profound generosity. What I didn't mention is that those students were all members of what we called in Cambridge, the Christian Union, which is the society of Christian students. And they explicitly said to me when they came to my bedside that only God can judge. And our duty on earth as followers of Jesus Christ, this is what they said to me, is to forgive. And so for them it was a duty.

So I think they would have forgiven me, you know, whatever the circumstances because they felt that was their duty to forgive. I said in the introduction that there are people who have issues with guilt and you say that guilt has an image problem. In this book, and coming out of that incident, you say that guilt is a positive force for healthy relationships. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So what I mean by that is that the main, the core function of guilt or the core purpose of guilt is, as I said, to signal to us that in some way we've damaged relationships. relationships that are important to us. And of course, you know, humans are incredibly social species. Everything that we do revolves around our social relationships. And so we need to have ways

in which, or mechanisms that allow us to keep those relationships healthy. And guilt is one of the most important mechanisms for doing that because it signals to us that we need to work on our relationships. It's that something's wrong, that perhaps we've harmed a relationship, and we need to do something to heal it in some way. So that's the, that's the, that's, that's, That's the important function of guilt, if you like, the reason why we have guilt. That doesn't mean that it always works that way. But that's the core purpose of guilt. What's the image problem then?

Well, the image problem is that we think of guilt is a bad thing. You know, I mean, if you think about or if you, you know, you look at definitions in the dictionary or anything like that, it's always that guilt means that you've transgress some moral rule, right, that you've done something bad. you know, it may be sinning in a religious context, it may be legal guilt that you've transgressed a societal law. So guilt means you've done something bad and quite often that moves even further into you are a bad person. And so, you know, what I'm trying to do to some extent is resolve that image problem and say that fundamentally guilt is a good emotion. It's about caring for other people and caring for the relationships that we have. That doesn't mean that, as I say, it always works, but that's its core purpose.

Are there some of us who are more prone to guilt than others? Yeah, you know, we have this thing in psychology that we call guilt proneness, and it is a tendency for some people to feel more guilt than others. You can think of feeling guilt across different situations, you know, in more or less intensity as a spectrum, and at one end you have people who feel no guilt at all, and we have a word for that, and that's psychopaths. And then we have people who feel a tremendous amount of guilt and perhaps can feel too much guilt in certain situations. They're always feeling guilty.

And that isn't a good thing either. You know, it's good to have a balance. Guilt should be appropriate. It should be the emotion that tells us that we have done something to harm a relationship and that we need to resolve that. But we shouldn't be feeling guilt all the time about everything. Is the title of psychopaths actually how we clinically refer to somebody who feels no guilt about their actions? Well, psychopathy or the psychological condition, let's say, personality disorder that we call psychopathy, one of the diagnostic features is a lack of empathy and guilt. And empathy and guilt are very closely tied together.

Is it just us that feel guilt that you raise issues about pets? I think of my dog. If my dog eats something off the table or destroys a pair of shoes and then has that look, you know what that look is. I know what that look is. Does that mean the dog feels guilty? Yeah. And so it's a great question, Matt. And, you know, what I try to show in the book is that guilt didn't arise from nothing in humans.

Guilt has as precursors, if you like, in other animals, particularly other animals that value their relationships. And dogs are in very close relationships with their human partners. And so dogs do care about whether their partner is crossed with them. their human partners cross with them. They can read those signs. They can read those signs, exactly. And they're sensitive to that. And then they show those expressions or those postures.

Sometimes we call them appeasement postures. Now, whether they actually feel guilt in the same way that we do, of course, we can't really tell that. My guess is that they don't. But what they are is very sensitive to the state of the quality of the relationship between them and you as their partner. And when they detect that something's off, you're angry with them, for example. example, then they will show those behaviors that show that, you know, they want to appease you in some way. PIN those ears back and have that kind of sad hangdog look. That's right.

What about gossip? What does gossip tell us about guilt and our love of, or I say our love, the love that some people have for gossip. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, gossip is, is universal. It's, it has been argued by some authorities to be part of the glue that keeps relationships and society. ticking over because, you know, it helps you understand, you know, what's going on in relationships in your network. So gossip is a very, you know, kind of broadly found phenomenon in human societies. Some people call it a form of verbal grooming, you know, you want to make sure that your relationships are all well cared for. The problem with gossip, of course, is that sometimes we may end

gossiping about somebody and it may get back to them and then you know then that puts us in a whole different set of problems right and so then we have to resolve that and you know people quite often feel guilt about when they've gossiped about somebody that they care about fits and arch are back st pierre has a serial killer hell of a start to a day on a new case with an old pattern why am i getting the feeling that you guys have seen something like this before because yeah and to uncover the truth they put everything on the line. You are my partner. If you win, I win.

If you go down, I go down. That's how it works. Trust me. San Pierre, new season. Watch free on CBC Gym. There are also people who will apply guilt to others. And this is the guilt trip. Yeah.

You should do this. Well, I don't want to do it. All right, fine. Then you're not doing it is going to lead to these terrible consequences. Yeah. How do you understand the guilt trip and how people use it? Yeah. So I think the way to understand the guilt trip is to recognize that when people feel guilty, they will do something to try to make the other person feel better.

Remember, guilt is about keeping your relationships healthy. And repairing those relationships. Exactly. So you're going to try to do some form of reparation for the other that you feel you may have harmed. Now, of course, that reparation is a benefit to the other person. And so people who perhaps are a little unscrupulous may recognize that, well, if they keep you feeling guilty, then they're going to keep getting benefits from you, right? And so the guilt trip is the way that people in a relationship may use to manipulate other people into continuing to get those benefits from them.

Which can actually be, I mean, if this is about repairing a relationship, that can be one of the more corrosive parts of a relationship. Definitely. I mean, we talk about that as really a toxic part of relationships because, you know, relationships should be based on, you know, equality and two-way street, right? That they should be, ideally, that people do things for each other, and they value the relationship as equals. But quite often, of course, one person can take advantage of the other person. And the guilt trip really is a way to do that. You have an entire chapter about parental guilt. And I think there are a lot of people who are parents who would feel that they could add something to that chapter because they felt that guilt. Here are a couple of parents that we spoke with in Vancouver. Have a listen.

With my little one, if I'm scrolling on the phone for five minutes and she's just like going crazy and I'm like, hold on, I'm working on my phone. I'll be like, no, no, no, the work can wait a little bit. My little one is there in the moment. I need to be present with her. If you feel guilty, you need to change something about that. I think as a parent, I feel guilty about so many things. You know, mistakes I made when my kids were little. Those reflections come every day. And every day it motivates me to be a better parent to them in their adulthood. You know, it moves me to be more open and more honest and take more responsibility for my impetuous actions. And, you know, I made lots of mistakes. And I'm trying to make up for it every day. Chris Moore, why is guilt so much a part of being a parent? Yeah, it's a great question.

And, you know, I said before that relationships, you know, should be a two-way street, and that's true. But it's not always true. And it's not true when there is a clear asymmetry in, you know, if you like, the capabilities of the members of the relationship. Now, in a parent-child relationship, the parent is the one that's doing pretty much all of the caring for the child. The child isn't doing much caring for the adult. But also the child is vulnerable, right? It's easy to cause harm to children. So the parent-child relationship. is sort of an ideal one for causing guilt because on the one hand, the child is vulnerable, and on the other hand, the parent has all the responsibility. So it's very, very easy to feel guilt as a parent about the way you're treating your children because there's always a chance that you're doing something wrong. You know, parents worry all the time. Am I being a good parent, right? Am I giving my child too much screen time? Parenthood is arguably, you know, perhaps one of the most common forms of guilt because of that asymmetry in the relationship and because the parent has all of the responsibility for the care of the child, particularly when the child is young.

But we heard that mother carrying guilt for decades over mistakes, and I say mistakes in quotation marks that she thinks she made with her children. That's not helpful, is it? To hang on to that for, and it's not about her, but just broadly, that idea of guilt over things that may or may not have happened in the past. That's not helpful to hang on to that for a long time, is it? No, I certainly don't think it is. And I think, you know, guilt can certainly go too far in the parental relationship. One of the things that I talk about in the book is, you know, I mentioned much earlier in the interview that forgiveness is the antidote to guilt. And the way that we achieve forgiveness is apology.

We apologize to the other person and one of your interviewees said that right at the beginning of the show. And so the question is, does a parent feel that they need to apologize to their child? for how they, for how they parented. And I think in many cases, the answer would be no, right? You did your best as a parent. You were always doing your best. Give yourself some grace. Give yourself some grace.

You cared that much about your child, but you still feel guilt because maybe you didn't quite do enough. But if there is no need to apologize, then you really need to let go of the guilt. You know, when I was reading your book, I came across another book about guilt and was reading a little bit about that, and it's guilt-free, reclaiming.

your life from unreasonable expectations. And the author of that book talks about how guilt can be excessive, can be unhealthy, can lead to anxiety and anger. And this book is essentially strategies for escaping guilt and getting away from guilt. Do you understand why people would gravitate to a narrative like that? Oh, absolutely. And that has been the more common narrative, to be sure. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to write this book to kind of let people know that ultimately guilt is a good emotion. But it can be bad when it's too much. And that book, Guilt Free, certainly takes on those cases of feeling guilt excessively. And when guilt is felt excessively, you do need to have strategies.

You do need to have techniques to help yourself let go of the guilt because nobody should be walking around feeling that burden of guilt all the time. What are those techniques that you might use? I mean, you went through this in your own life. But what are those techniques that you might use to free yourself from unreasonable, if I can put it that way, guilt? I just go back to my own experience and sort of reiterate that I was very, very lucky because I was forgiven essentially in the moment, at least in the next few days. And forgiveness is the key element.

But when you feel unreasonable guilt, I mean, it's really important to do a couple of things. So one is to really assess your responsibility. So I want to emphasize that guilt is a, guilt is an emotional, really a cocktail of emotions. And it's a gut reaction. Emotions are gut reactions to things that happen. We feel them automatically. We need to, when we feel those emotions, it's always good to, you know, take a breath and say, is this justified? Am I really responsible for what I may feel guilt about, right?

Do I have responsibility here? And if you don't have responsibility, then, you know, the guilt is inappropriate and, you know, you probably need to let it go. Responsibility is interesting when you talk about collective guilt. This is another part of your book in which you use the examples of the Holocaust and of residential schools. Yeah. What is collective guilt? Yeah. So collective guilt is really two sides to collective guilt.

So there's what we might call objective collective guilt. that is, that's sort of like a legal concept of guilt. It's like when one society or one culture or one group of people harmed another group of people and that's an objective fact, like the Nazis, you know, harming the Jews in the Holocaust, right? There is an objective guilt there on the part of the German people at the time or the German nation and, in fact, Germany recognized that objective guilt and paid reparations on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust to the state of Israel for many years. But then there is also. This idea of subjective collective guilt and subjective collective guilt is the guilt that you feel as an emotion

When you identify as a member of a group that caused harm to another group So this is the idea of say German guilt that people feel even in the generation born after the war The Germans who could not have had or had no direct personal responsibility for anything that happened in the war in the Holocaust But feel guilt because of their association with that group by being German. And you see the same thing, you know, the term white guilt, for example, in relation to the harms of slavery and racism. Some people refer to settle a guilt or the idea that some people have in Canada

about, you know, the harms to indigenous peoples caused by the country of Canada. And if you identify strongly with the harming group, that collective, then sometimes you feel guilt for the harm that was caused to the other. group, even if you had no personal individual responsibility for it. Do you think there should be a statute of limitations on that? And this goes back to the issue of responsibility. To your point, there might be people generations on who don't have a direct tie to what happened in the past and yet they are swept up in that collective guilt.

Should that extend in perpetuity or should there be a limit to that when it comes to how responsible people feel and how guilty people feel for those other people? It's a really, really important question, Matt, and, you know, I think a very contemporary question as well. My own view on it is that there is responsibility of, let's say, the group that harmed. And, you know, as I said, the nation of Germany recognized that responsibility that, you know, Canada has paid millions, billions of dollars to the survivors of residential school, you know, in the last few years. And so that is taking responsibility for those harms, that objective guilt that was caused. the problem with the subjective guilt side of it is that there is no clear way to resolve that collective guilt. And the reason is there is nobody on the other side, if you like, who can actually allow forgiveness, right, who can forgive you.

So if you're as a Canadian feeling to settle a guilt for what happened to the indigenous people in the nation of Canada, how could that ever be resolved? because there is nobody that can speak for the indigenous peoples as a whole and say, we forgive you for what you did. And yet that is important because, as you've been saying throughout the conversation, forgiveness is a crucial part of guilt. Exactly. So I do feel it's somewhat counterproductive, that subjective feeling of collective guilt. But that doesn't mean it's going to go away because of that identification with the group that did the harm.

So it's a very, very tricky issue. How should we learn to live with guilt? If it is a positive, healthy emotion that repairs relationships, and as you say in the book, a necessary part of the human condition, for people who are uncomfortable and they might want to flee from guilt, they might want to bury it way down in some pit in their belly, how do we live with it? I think we ideally should not live with it. I think in everyday life, in the kinds of relationships, for the most part, we've been talking about, Those everyday relationships, I think it's good to face up to guilt and to say, you know, obviously, as I said before, to assess responsibility.

But if there is responsibility and if harm has been done, then to apologize and to make reparation and to work on those relationships to make them healthier. Because, you know, in the end, those personal relationships are the most important aspect of our lives. And so keeping them healthy is one of the most important things we can do. But there are other aspects of guilt, as we've talked about, where, you know, we might want to reassess the extent to which we, you know, we need to dwell on our guilt. And in some cases, I think it is right to be able to let it go. It's a book really about relationships. It's absolutely a book about relationships. And that they take work.

That they take work, but they're important in the end. That work is worthwhile. Glad to have a chance to talk to you about this. It is really interesting. Chris, thank you. Thank you, Matt. Chris Moore. is a professor of psychology at Dauhausi University in Halifax.

His book is the power of guilt. Why we feel it and its surprising ability to heal. How do you cope with guilt? What has guilt given you? It's a strange thing to ask in some ways because it's an emotion that many of us try to remove ourselves from. But what has guilt given you and has it in your life being the conduit, the pathway to forgiveness? If you have stories about how you have dealt with guilt and then kind of absolved yourself of it,

you can let us know. Email us, the current, at cbc.ca. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.