havior in the past may unconsciously motivate you to repeat the be-
havior in order to justify it.
Unresolved guilt may be affecting your financial life by:
- Lowering your sense of what good you deserve.
- Stopping you from asking for what you want.
- Stopping you from knowing what you want.
- Stopping you from taking those risks that would get you what
you want. - Causing you to say yes when saying no is much more to your
benefit. - Causing you to attract people who drain your energy and
money with no hope of benefit to you, resulting in justified re-
sentment on your part. Such a dynamic may cause you to view
your success as the result of good luck and others’ failure as
the result of bad luck. - People stealing from you.
- Inexplicable losses of money.
- Making decisions for you in other ways.
No one would want to be completely free of guilt. If you were to
behave in manner outside of your own morality, you would feel
guilty. This sort of guilt is healthy. Healthy guilt provides a window
to our conscience. For example, it is probably natural to feel guilty
for breaking agreements, intentionally deceiving others, telling lies,
and the like. Anticipation of such guilt actually aids us in avoiding
destructive behavior. A person without such a sense of guilt is with-
out a moral compass; consider recent events with famous politi-
cians, professional athletes, and others. Complete lack of awareness
of guilt renders a person psychopathic.
Actually, the origin of the unresolved guilt is far less important
than our being aware of that guilt and changing it. Nevertheless,
some of its possible sources are:
- Societal guilt about money
- Parental guilt
- Religious guilt
- Survivor’s guilt
SOCIETAL GUILT ABOUT MONEY
Guilt about money and its backlash, which can be called class envy
or resentment of rich people, is so intense in our society that rea-
How Unresolved Guilt May Be Affecting Your Financial Life in Unknown Ways 115