this notion of how your thinking and feeling have created your state of
being and your environment.
Every time you think a guilty thought, you’ve signaled your body to
produce the specific chemicals that make up the feeling of guilt. You’ve
done this so often that your cells are swimming in a sea of guilt chemicals.
The receptor sites on your cells adapt so that they can better take in and
process this particular chemical expression, that of guilt. The enormous
amount of guilt bathing the cells begins to feel normal to them, and
eventually, what the body perceives as normal starts to be interpreted as
pleasurable. It’s like living for years near an airport. You get so used to the
noise that you no longer hear it consciously, unless one jet flies lower than
usual and the roar of its engines is so much louder that it gets your
attention. The same thing happens to your cells. As a result, they literally
become desensitized to the chemical feeling of guilt; they will require a
stronger, more powerful emotion from you—a higher threshold of stimuli—
to turn on the next time. And when that stronger “hit” of guilt chemicals
gets the body’s attention, your cells “perk up” at that stimulation, much like
that first cup of java feels to a coffee drinker.
And when each cell divides at the end of its life and makes a daughter
cell, the receptor sites on the outside of the new cell will require a higher
threshold of guilt to turn them on. Now the body demands a stronger
emotional rush of feeling bad in order to feel alive. You become addicted to
guilt by your own doing.
When anything goes wrong or is awry in your life, you automatically
assume that you’re the guilty party. But that seems normal to you now. You
don’t even have to think about feeling guilty—you just are that way. Not
only is your mind not conscious of how you express your guilty state by
way of the things you say and do, but your body wants to feel its
accustomed level of guilt, because that’s what you have trained it to do. You
have become unconsciously guilty most of the time—your body has
become the mind of guilt.
Only when, say, a friend points out that you needn’t have apologized to
the store clerk for giving you the wrong change do you realize how
pervasive this aspect of your personality has become. Let’s say that this
triggers one of those moments of enlightenment—an epiphany—and you
think, She’s right. Why do I apologize all the time? Why do I take
stevenselfio
(Stevenselfio)
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