A guilt trip, which is simply an interaction with someone else that makes you feel guilty for something, can be hard to deal with. People give guilt trips for a variety of reasons. A mother may feel hurt and give her son a guilt trip for causing her pain. A coworker may not want to take responsibility for an error and may cast blame on another staff member by giving her a guilt trip. A girlfriend may have injured feelings and give her boyfriend a guilt trip for hurting her feelings. The trick to dealing with guilt trips is to neutralize them.
Instructions
1. Recognize the cause of the guilt trip. A person who feels the victim of an attack might want to get back at you for supposedly victimizing him. A person who feels guilty, herself, for doing something wrong might want to deflect blame by making you feel guilty. If you recognize what's going on psychologically in the person who gives you the guilt trip, you're well on the way to neutralizing it.
2. Stop feeling guilty. Guilt is not productive when it is the result of a guilt trip. You may have done something wrong or you may not. But feeling guilty will do neither you nor the guilt-tripper any good.
3. Ask the person who is giving you the guilt trip if he is feeling bad. This will give him a chance to stop looking to you for the solution and start focusing on himself.
4. Listen to the guilt-tripper talk about her feelings. Often a person who gives a guilt trip has hidden anxieties, and talking about them will help her.
5. Ask the person if he really means to make you feel guilty. Ask this in a non-hostile way. You can say, "I'm not sure you realize it, but I'm sensing that you want me to feel guilty for X. Is that true?" A guilt trip is a form of passive aggression. When you gently nudge the guilt-tripper into awareness of what he is doing, you give him an opportunity to use more assertive methods. If all goes well, the guilt-tripper will tell you what the real problem is at this point.
6. Help the guilt tripper deal with the problem, now out in the open, constructively. This will show her that she gets better results from not giving you a guilt trip. And now you've truly neutralized the guilt trip.
