Cognitive Dissonance and Dealing with Guilt
Cognitive dissonance: when a person's behavior is in conflict with his or her attitudes (convictions, values), the attitudes change to reduce the dissonance.
This is a very important concept to understand. Usually, we control our behavior so that it matches our inner self - our attitudes. When (no matter for which reasons) we cannot control our behavior and do something "wrong" (according to our own convictions), some interesting processes start to occur, both consciously and unconsciously. First of all, we feel the dissonance - the guilt, the inner conflict. We feel bad about what we've done. Then our mind tries to reduce the negative feelings; in particular what might happen is: denial and/or rationalization. We use selective perception to enhance the positive memories and to downplay/correct the negative ones so that we appear in more favorable light to ourselves (that's denial); or we try to convince ourselves that the behavior didn't really contradict our convictions - and we allow ourselves to be satisfied with explanations which we ourselves would find inadequate had the matter been about someone else (that's rationalization).
But the worst thing, in a sense, that might happen is that at some point we start to wonder: "Come on, was it really that wrong?" Usually, this is accompanied with feelings like "I should really see this is proportion" or "There's very little reason, if any, to be upset over it". These feelings in reality mean "I'm tired of feeling bad about myself, I need to feel better" and they are dangerously confused with defending the wrong behavior as being right. Our mind simply retaliates, in essence; but what follows is that our attitudes change, and the behavior that seemed very wrong to us before seems more acceptable now, after we ourselves have engaged in it.
One might think that this "change" is very local, i.e. it applies only to us, and we will still condemn the behavior in question in other people. Wrong! On the contrary - from now on, we will be especially tolerant to such behavior in other people, since it retroactively justifies our own, and supports our good feeling about ourselves. Moreover, it's very easy to rationalize such tolerance by basing it on tolerance in general as a positive value - as in "judge not, that ye be not judged", etc. And even more importantly: there's a positive feedback loop involved - the more tolerant we are, the more acceptable the action seems, and we get even more tolerant. So as a result, when this process converges, we might get to the point when our position on the issue has dramatically shifted.
This process, from what I read, is relatively well studied in psychology. It has to do with the principle of consistency - a conscious and unconscious desire to be consistent in our thoughts, feelings and deeds. People have learned quite well how to deliberately trigger this process in other people - influencing people's actions in order to influence their attitudes is one of the forms of mind control (I read about it in Cialdini's "Influence" and Hassan's "Releasing the Bonds").
Anyway, one of my personal conclusions is that prolonged feelings of guilt can be unexpectedly harmful. I mean, I knew intuitively that guilt, as other negative feelings, can be very unhealthy in the long term. What I didn't realize is the powerful potential for unconscious shift in attitude as a result of guilt - and not necessarily for the good! This is the important conclusion: feeling guilty might not cause us to become better people - it might cause us to become worse. This is a deep and non-trivial thing to understand. Both influences exist - guilt helps us to assign importance to acting better in the future, no doubt about that. But it is vital to remember that no matter what we do, we cannot change the past. If we keep thinking about what happened over and over, knowing that we are helpless to change it - we lead ourselves into a trap. Our frustration has no way out - and eventually, it will find a way out by damaging our integrity. At first, the damage will appear little - like a small hole through which the steam can get out… But with time, the hole will grow. I believe that this is one of the most common ways for a good person to become bad with years - to simply let his guilt gnaw through his moral integrity. A sad thing about it is that people almost never realize the actual process that resulted in this change - they will say "Hey, I was an idealist, but I just grew up. I realized no one is perfect, the world is a complicated, cold, tough place, and we all have to make concessions". Rationalization.
Now, an important question is what to do to avoid all this mess. It is a very difficult question - aside from the fact that it is hard to control our guilt, one might also question our moral right to attempt it. After all, people expect us to feel bad after doing a bad thing (especially if they were the victim of our actions). And if the action was very wrong, people expect us to feel very bad for very long time. If we stop displaying bad feelings, people will perceive it as a sign that we find our actions acceptable. It is an issue we have to deal with, if we wish to be understood.
The issue of controlling our guilt is not at all an easy one as well - technically, how do we stop feeling bad?
And finally, it should be noted that it is sometimes normal for a person's values and convictions to change over time - we might indeed grow and learn. Sometimes, the conclusion that our action wasn't indeed as bad as we felt is quite justified.
How to navigate through these issues? First, for me, is to note that, in light of the cognitive dissonance processes described above, I do not wish to rely on my subconscious mind in this task. I should do my best to "turn off the autopilot" - if my values are to be changed, I want this decision to be as conscious as possible, in order to apply critical analysis to the best of my abilities.
I will try to understand the situation as well as I can. I will experiment with it in my head, change the setting of the problem - try to see it from different angles, use analogies, imagine different people in my place, change other contributing factors, etc. The goal is to understand, as well as I can, what made my behavior in the given context wrong.
The next step is to understand, as thoroughly as possible, how I should improve in order not to repeat the mistake next time in a similar situation. The goal is to learn from the experience; I should try to find ways to test how well I learned, so that I can both acknowledge the positive change and improve further.
The next step is to apologize to the people I hurt. The goal is make them acknowledge that I indeed understand how they felt, and I am indeed very sorry, and I have indeed changed, and the new me wouldn't do the same thing (only then, I think, they can truly forgive me).
And finally, after all this, I myself should accept the fact that I am a slightly different person than I was before, and so I shouldn't feel guilty anymore.
I know that all this is, to say the very least, not foolproof. I'm not dogmatic about it. But it is the best rule of thumb that I could find.