Guilt After Betrayal

Guilty feelings are pervasive, lurking beneath resentment, anger, or depression.

Reviewed by Davia Sills

Key points

• Guilt permeates the initial hurt of intimate betrayal and insidiously undermines recovery in hidden ways.
• If someone has suffered intimate betrayal, most of the guilt they experience is irrational.
• Identifying guilt is the first step in healing after betrayal.

The greatest obstacles to healing and growth following intimate betrayal—abuse, infidelity, or deceit—are also the cruelest because they seem so unfair. Guilt is a primary example.

In hidden and overt ways, guilt permeates the initial hurt of intimate betrayal and insidiously undermines recovery. It affects all areas of life, especially other family relationships.

The reason that those who suffer intimate betrayal are likely to experience overt or hidden guilt has less to do with personal psychology or relationship experience than with the evolved function of guilt in close relationships. Most evolutionary anthropologists agree that early humans would not have survived without strong emotional bonds that made them cooperate in food gathering and predatory defense. Not surprisingly, modern humans are endowed with highly developed, pre-verbal, pre-rational, automatic reactions to behaviors that threaten emotional bonds. Guilt is primary among these.

In close relationships, guilt acts as a distance regulator. Get closer, and guilt disappears; put up walls, no matter how justified, and it strengthens underground.

The evolutionary function of guilt has nothing to do with moral judgments of right or wrong. So we cannot moralize our way out of it. Neither can we escape it by blaming it on others, as in the immature appraisal of a “guilt trip,” an invention that has its roots in toddlerhood when we felt “punished” by guilt.

Guilt Is Motivation, Not Punishment

If guilt feels like punishment, rather than a motivation to reinvest in attachment bonds, there is an impulse, left over from toddlerhood, to blame it on the person stimulating it—“Bad Mommy!” The impulse to blame is rarely interpreted for what it essentially is—a tool to reduce guilt or shame. To that end, blame is self-validating.

If I feel like blaming you, you must be bad, so I will only consider inculpatory evidence and disregard anything that might be exculpatory. Blaming guilt on those who remind us of it does nothing to relieve it. Rather, it makes us more powerless and, therefore, more resentful and angry.

The association of guilt with anger is inevitable for non-psychopaths. Guilt induces a state of vulnerability, which makes the brain hypersensitive to possible threats. (The more vulnerable mammals feel, the more threat they’re likely to perceive.) The threatened ego shifts into defensive resentment or anger within milliseconds, far too fast for conscious awareness, much less deliberate regulation.

We may know we’re resentful (usually not) or angry (usually) but are unlikely to fathom that we also feel guilty. Other people are even less likely to see beneath our displays of resentment and anger, much less be sympathetic to the vulnerability that lurks there. (They’re far too busy defending themselves against the sharper edges of our anger and resentment to notice what lies beneath.) Guilt cannot function as a motivation to love better when obscured by blame. Instead, it becomes a fuel for the eternal flame of resentment.

If you’ve suffered intimate betrayal, most of the guilt you experience is irrational, mere remnants of the early days of species development when preserving attachment bonds—no matter how bad they might have been—was necessary for survival. But you will also have some rational guilt about simple human mistakes you made and a few personal failures of the sort everyone occasionally commits in intimate relationships. Even though unrelated to your partner’s betrayal, these will prevent healing and growth if ignored, explained away, or blamed.

The best strategy for regulating guilt is to convert it into compassion, first for yourself and then for the significant people in your life.

OK, that’s good advice, but guilt is usually concealed by resentment or anger, so how are you supposed to know when you feel guilty? The purpose of the following exercise is to discover the guilt that may lurk beneath your anger and resentment. Once you identify causative guilt, you’re free to follow its motivation to heal, improve, and connect. At that point, anger and resentment become unnecessary.

Briefly describe an event in your recent past that triggered your anger or resentment. (Example: My ex implied to our children, yet again, that I’m no better as a father than I was as a husband to justify leaving us for another.)

I’m angry, but what do I also feel guilty about? (Example: I make the same kind of aspersions about her, sometimes by saying them and other times by just thinking them, which I know hurts my children by dividing their loyalty.)

This is what I will do to improve, appreciate, connect, or protect. (Example: I will focus on the best interests of my children, in recognition that my behavior toward them—not what their mother tells them—determines the quality of our relationship in the long run.)

If you do the above exercise, you should notice that regulating the hidden guilt lurking beneath most anger and resentment empowers you to move forward in healing and growth. When you feel empowered, anger and resentment are unnecessary.