Ive been finding that I havent answered certain fundamental questions about the way things work. Specifically, how do you react when you realize youve made a mistake?

This is really about guilt. Is guilt ever justified?


Take the following situation for example:

A father tells his child not to eat cookies. The child knows he shouldnt eat cookies but does anyway, and the father finds out. The child knowingly made a mistake. He knowingly did something he knew to be wrong. How should the father react? How should the child react?

Knowingly doing something wrong feels "bad' to me. Something that you dont want to do. Its like you are inconsistent, you are insane. It seems like something to be feared, something to be resisted. If you look at it deeper, knowingly making a mistake is tantamount to saying "yes" to something you know to be false. Believing in something you know not to be true. Its insane. And then there is guilt from having done such a thing. But at times a powerful desire to do something may overcome you and even though you know you shouldnt do something, you do so anyway (take addictions for example). How to react?

Taken from a higher perspective, I dont think its possible to really make a mistake in the first place. Who is making a mistake? The mental idea of "I". I have an idea of myself as a person who doesnt make mistakes, who does what is right. I believe myself to be that--the idea of a person who shouldnt make mistakes. If I make a mistake, that threatens my self image and causes me pain/suffering. But really there is no mistake being made. You act and your actions cause responses. If your actions were out of alignment with the situation and your intended goal was not reached-- that is not a problem, thats the way it is. You acted and produced this response. If I acted on an impulsive emotion and did something I knew to be wrong-- thats not a problem, because thats just what happened, it is how it is. I shouldnt feel good, because I know I am acting foolishly, but there is no guilt because it is just YOU who is responsible for having acted this way and produced this consequence. There is no blaming your "self" or anything because YOU acted the way you DID. It is how it is. The idea of myself as a person who doesnt make mistakes is shown to be illusory. Thats not really who I am. The REALITY of who I AM in this moment is someone who acted on an impulsive emotion and did make a mistake. I DID eat the cookies. To resist that fact is to want reality to be different from how it already is right now. Which is insane.

What do y'all think? Does guilt make any sense when you realize that every moment is how it is and to resist that is insane. If your insane.. should you feel guilty?

2012 is shaping up to be prettyyy crazy so far.

Your example of eating cookies when Daddy said not to is to me a poor choice of an example. It is a conflict of wills between a father being controlling, perhaps for the good of the child, perhaps just to be in control, and a child who wants something good and is not capable of going through the thought convolutions to possibly make a better choice than to just do what he wants. When you are an adult, I do not see value in accepting a feeling of guilt. This is something that others so often try to use to control you. "You did not do what I demanded of you (you ate the cookies) so you do not love me." "Are you not ashamed of being bad that you do not love your Daddy?" I don't like to see this done to a child, essentially a threat to take away the love and protection of Daddy. An overwhelming punishment for a child.

For an adult, you have your own free will. You can evaluate rules and decide if there is justification for breaking them. You should not allow yourself to be controlled by others who are violating your free will unless there is good social reason to be following those rules. If there is over riding reason to break a rule, you should learn to refuse to accept guilty feelings. You might try to look through this posting originally by Tom. http://wiki.my-big-toe.com/index.php/Mo ... D_-_Part_I This is a moral code write up by Tom's son as a college paper which is based upon the concepts from MBT. Perhaps reading through it will be of value to resolving your thoughts on and problems with guilt. To see thinking based upon MBT principles applied to common moral questions.

Ted

It is not uncommon to have mixed feelings about any particular item. In fact, most or possibly even all feelings are 'mixed'.

An easy way to get a feel for it is to consider how societies evaluate and make choices: Once the choice is made there are almost always parties that are dis-satisfied with the choice and the result. Human consciousness (unless it is a really simple case of it) is a federation of drives and interests and habits and sub-personalities, frequently with different objectives: inevitable these will be at cross-purposes sometimes, and so some one part or another is going to be grumpy and complaining. The thing for the executive function (aka 'you') to do is to act like Ron Reagan and act like everything is just fine, but also to address those parts of yourself to see how their needs can be fairly met as well.

In the particular case of the child and the cookie, it is a simple matter just to talk over the matter with the child without insinuating guilt or judgment: really, the child needs to simple consider all the angles of the facts "I wonder how mommy would feel, thinking that she had X many cookies and when she went to hand them out found that there were only X-5 cookies?" "Did having the cookies feel more better than having mom feel happy?" The child reasons it out and weighs it out and feels like shit (if not, there is a more serious problem here, beyond this post to deal with). Then you offer support: "Oh well, I guess we won't do that again that way! (Here the plural is used to lend strength to the child's courage to deal with it.) We can't undo what's been done, but what can we do now to make mom feel better this time?" The child will then come up with his or her own solutions, and be better suited to deal with these sorts of issues in the future.

Montana

I can't read everything written here I'm not feeling well but I am calling BS on if the kid doesn't feel like shit something is wrong. That's the old paradigm and it is evolving where we are not being taught we are bad sinners (we aren't that's all moldy myth) and guilt (being made to and being expected to feel like shit) will not be a weapon anymore. It started NOW.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

I look at it as first order, second order and third order drives, competing with each other.

The initial tension in life is between first order impulse and second order discipline, and for a child, the frontal cortex of the parent is responsible for constraining the impulses of the child, with greater or lessor intent, with greater or lessor effectiveness.

At some point, the additional tension of third order empathy comes into play.

An effective FWAU quickly dismisses second order slips, and more reluctantly dismisses third order slips, but you shrug your shoulders and accept that you are fundamentally an asshole, and try to do better next time.

You have to keep trying, because regardless of the mental gymnastics you do, feedback on your third order mistakes is inescapable.

I can see myself make a third order error, brace myself for feedback, ride it out, don't paper over the pain with vice...just take it like a man, try harder next time

Eyes forward, not in the rearview mirror

12 step thinking applies to this. The framework for AA apparently was conceived by Jung.

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Hmm, I continue to find usefulness in bit'n pieces of that AA paradigm related to MBT.

thanks for the clarification - I knew that Jung figured into it in some way

I think the main take-away is that at the bottom of AA is the theory that higher ruleset violations->guilt->pain->escapist vice->addiction

so if you trace the problem to source, fix the higher ruleset violations, you remove the instigator of the problem, and then you only have to deal with the PMR problem of physical addiction

Tom's model jives with this perfectly as he says...negative intent leads to negative feedback

QoC->Intent->intent->decision->action->result->feedback-> A & B

A- self modification at the mental level...values ->decision making process...
B- QoC tick up or down at the IUOC level ->Intent->intent...

Decision->action pertains to perseverence and overcoming barriers to acting on intent

Action->result pertains to PMR effectiveness, which is much secondary to intent

intent->feedback and jumps over the actual decision->action->result

we are an intent->feedback->QoC machine, with decision->action->result being secondary, perhaps even trivial

such that even a 911 suicide bomber who believed he was doing good, is in better shape delta QoC wise, than the investment advisor in the Tower who was intentionally stealing from widows and orphans

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Mistakes? I don't make those.

Believe me when I say that every bad thing I do is on purpose - please be patient with me.

It's so hard to know surface, sub-surface, underlying, secondary, and tertiary reasons for behavior that I mostly ignore them and just check my intent and go.