17.07.2015

One of the most obvious misunderstandings about our faith has to do with guilt. Almost all "outside" people (and, alas, some Christians) say that a Christian must live with constant guilt. This is exactly the opposite - the Good News is just the news of the forgiveness of sins. About the fact that through Jesus Christ God delivers us from guilt - not even from feeling, from the very fact of guilt.

As Scripture says, “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” (Rom. 4:7,8) Christ is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Christ died for our sins that we might be justified by His righteousness. Those who continue in faith are no longer under condemnation: “Who will accuse the elect of God? God justifies [them]. Who condemns? Christ Jesus died, but also rose again: He is also at the right hand of God, He also intercedes for us” (Rom. 8:33,34).

Christ is our Advocate - the one who speaks on our side. He took the whole burden of our guilt to Himself on the Cross, and the supreme Judge solemnly declares us innocent. It is completely inappropriate for a Christian to be tormented by guilt - his sins are forgiven.

This does not mean that he cannot sin and make mistakes. Alas, maybe. And the Holy Spirit will convict him of his sins and urge him to repentance. It is important to note how this differs from guilt. The Holy Spirit always points us to specific sins that we need to confess. Feelings of guilt are indefinitely oppressive. We don't know what to do with it. There is always a promise in the convictions of the Holy Spirit - once we repent, we will be forgiven. There is sadness and hopelessness in guilt. We must accept conviction from the Spirit and repent immediately, but as far as guilt is concerned, it must be rejected.

For unbelievers, Christianity is associated with guilt for an obvious reason - the Good News reminds us of the reality of sin. The proclamation of forgiveness reminds us that we need this forgiveness, and sin always "wraps" itself in many layers of denials and excuses and it can be painful to uncover them. Before we can receive the remission of sins, we must recognize them as sins. But once we do, we will be forgiven. Completely. And we will stand before the Throne of the Judge perfectly justified.

Sergey Khudiev

The toxic basis of all neuroses and personality deformations. The task of a normal person is to get rid of the feeling of guilt, and not to “pick it open” with the help of Christian spiritual practices…”

Such comments of varying degrees of "expertise" can increasingly be seen on the net. And I think you can't just brush them off with an arrogant chuckle. I would even suggest that modern psychological theory is in some way akin to Darwinism. To use its vulgar, "magazine" presentation, it seems like a powerful new bomb under the foundation of Christianity - the same as the theory of evolution once seemed.

In fact, psychology's claims against Christianity seem justified only when one tries to compare one's rough idea of ​​"guilty" with an even rougher idea of ​​Christian teaching.

All those who have come across psychological theories mainly in the pages of a women's gloss tend to confuse a painful sense of guilt with quite useful and, generally speaking, necessary objectivity. That is, it begins to seem to a person that everything confession Guilt is already a psychological deviation, a bad habit that should be got rid of as soon as possible. If you choose an absurd, but understandable illustration to the limit, then it looks like this. A wife who has cheated on her husband should not "torment herself with guilt", her task is to "understand" that it is not her fault, but only her husband, who did not show due attention, and the circumstances that developed in a certain way: "it happened."

“You are not to blame” is already a fairly common slogan in many commercial pseudo-psychological trainings. It is not your fault that you did not repay the debt - there is a crisis in the yard, and the creditor, in the end, should have thought with his own head before distributing money right and left. You are not to blame for the abortion - it's all a "young man" and a difficult life situation. (What? No, no, of course, it was not you who made the decision to enter into such an unofficial relationship with this particular young man.)

You can say, paraphrasing the poet: "Ah, it's not difficult to justify me, I'm glad to justify myself." But if twenty years ago, even in secular culture, such self-justification was not considered a social norm, today, under the slogan “And this is not me!” a semi-scientific explanation has been given: it helps to avoid self-criticism and neuroses.

Alas, at the same time, few serious psychologists were asked whether any recognition of one's objective responsibility for an unseemly act really leads to “neurosis”.

But in fact, "guilt" - that, about the "toxicity" of which psychology speaks - refers to completely different situations. This feeling of guilt just has no real basis. That is, when a person has committed something unseemly and admits it, he does not “suffer from guilt”, but admits his real guilt, after which he gets the opportunity to see what he should do with it further, how to correct it.

And “guilt” is, for example, the confidence of a growing child that it was because of him that his parents divorced or because of him his grandmother died ten years ago. Under such a feeling there is no objective basis, which means that there are no tools to correct the situation, to get rid of oppressive self-criticism, which in this case is really destructive for the psyche and often requires work with a competent psychologist.

Is a true sense of guilt harmful - baseless, neurotic? Undoubtedly. Does Christianity “preach” him? Certainly not.

Christian repentance, which is often expressed in, concerns precisely conscious, real, evil deeds committed by a person. And even when we talk about sin by “thinking”, that is, by thought, we mean not every wind that has wandered into the head, but bad thoughts, consciously accepted by a person, those that “amuse” him for a long time and savored them.

In contrast to the weak-willed and endless undermining "feelings of guilt", Christian repentance is just the beginning of an active, transforming, changing person and his psychological "temperature". You can endlessly mentally poke around in your own “fads” on the topic “Oh, what a nonentity I am” ... Or you can say: “Lord, I really acted insignificantly then and then and then! But I don’t want to do this anymore - help me fix it!” - and this is already a position of action, a change in life, and not a weak-willed static neurosis.

"You're to blame" sounds optimistic. Because now you know what to take on and what to fix

“You are to blame”: From a Christian perspective, this sounds optimistic. Because now you know what to take on and what to fix. After all, if in your own life you are absolutely not to blame for anything, and these are all of them, insidious circumstances, then you have no prospects! After all, is it possible to correct “circumstances” without correcting oneself? ..

Wait a minute, you can object to me, but doesn’t the Church’s teaching about the fall also speak of that very “groundless” guilt, in which there is no responsibility of a specific modern person? Does not the doctrine of original sin lead precisely to such a feeling of guilt, which does not follow certain human misdeeds, but only dominates him in the form of an ancestral inheritance?

But this, too, is an oversimplified view of Christianity. The biblical story tells not only how sin entered the world through Adam and Eve. First, she tells how beautiful a person is from the point of view of the Divine plan for him - after all, he was created in the Image of God. And after - talks about the great price of the salvation of mankind through the death of Christ on the cross. All this is not a reason for pride, of course, but for that state of mind that the philosopher Ivan Ilyin called a sense of spiritual rank, that is, a healthy sense of human dignity and the value of his life.

From the point of view of Christianity, a person is both beautiful and "easily inclined" to sin. But this inclination to sin, which is an "echo" of the fall, does not weigh on him like fate. On the contrary: a person is equipped with means of struggle, active overcoming of sinfulness - prayer, church sacraments, fasting as a means of spiritual "drill".

And repentance as an opportunity not to “get stuck” in a situation of one’s own guilt and sinfulness, not to self-blame, but to ask for help from the One Who is strong to lead out of any spiritual hole. Guilt is real, conscious, named - can be corrected or healed. This is better than sitting in a hole, limply and with perverted pleasure, reveling in an abstract and not named “guilt feeling”.

Some, far from Orthodoxy, people, mostly sectarians and atheists, argue that = Christianity is looking for sins so that a person feels guilty =

Let's figure out what is sin, guilt, guilt and how to get rid of them.

1. Sin, in short, is a violation of the Divine, moral Law.
Sin is a voluntary retreat from what is in accordance with nature into what is unnatural (St. John of Damascus).
Sin is a deviation from the goal assigned to man by nature (Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria).
In Russian, the word "sin" (St. Slav. gr; xb), originally corresponded to the concept of "mistake" (cf. "error", "fault"). Similarly, the Greeks denoted the concept of sin with a word meaning "miss, error, fault",

Sins, look for them or not, everyone has. Only, some see their sins, while others “do not see theirs” at point-blank range, while others see their great multitude.

The Church teaches to see, first of all, one's own sins, and to be cleansed of them, as from dirt, and not to condemn others. The Lord says: “Hypocrites! first take the log out of your eye, and then you will see how to take the speck out of your brother's eye." (Matthew 7:5)

2. Guilt - 1. Guilty, misconduct, crime, transgression, sin (in the meaning of misconduct), (According to Dahl)
That is, guilt is a misdemeanor or a crime against the Law or a sin against GOD, man, nature.

If a person does not repent, does not confess, does not compensate for the damage, does not make amends, that is, does not act according to his conscience with a sense of responsibility for what he has done, then a “sense of guilt”, a destructive and painful feeling, develops in him. Sometimes this feeling arises from imaginary guilt, when a person feels guilty for something that does not depend on him.

3. Guilt is a consequence of unrepentant sin and the reverse side of pride. Both are unacceptable for a Christian.

Feelings of guilt cause the deepest harm to a person. The feeling of guilt, unlike the feeling of responsibility, is not realistic, vague, vague. It is cruel and unfair, deprives a person of self-confidence, reduces self-esteem. It brings a feeling of heaviness and pain, causes discomfort, tension, fears, confusion, disappointment, despondency, pessimism, longing.
The feeling of guilt devastates and takes away energy, weakens, reduces the activity of a person and leads to neurasthenia and other diseases.
The feeling of guilt, in fact, is aggression directed at ourselves, it is self-abasement, self-flagellation, the desire for self-punishment.

This is what happened to Judas after he betrayed Jesus Christ. He realized that he had committed a terrible sin, and an unbearable sense of guilt made him think that he had the right and should punish himself for the sin of betrayal. And instead of true repentance, a prayerful appeal to Jesus Christ, who, of course, would have forgiven him, Judas went and hanged himself.

4. How can we get rid of sin and guilt? In Orthodoxy there is such a tool that has been successfully helping millions of believers for 2,000 years, and without which the improvement and spiritual growth of a person is impossible. This remedy is called repentance.

Repentance is a change in oneself and one's attitude towards this sin. You need to hate it (not yourself!), And have a firm intention not to repeat it in the future.

So, instead of feeling guilty, self-flagellation - having realized your sin, your guilt, it is necessary, without delay, to repent in the Church in the Sacrament of Confession and do everything to compensate the damage caused by sin in excess, showing compassion and help to the victim. And henceforth with a firm determination to change, try not to repeat this sin. Only in this way will a person be completely freed from the devastating, debilitating feeling of guilt, and from the oppression of sin, which will disappear as if it never existed.
But it happens that due to our weakness or inattention, we again commit this sin is repeated. And then in no case do not despair! It is necessary to repent of the sin committed again and, having hated this obsessive demon (sin), try to defeat it with even greater perseverance. With each repentance, sin weakens and the moment will come when you will forget about it, as if it did not exist.

“And the Lord said to Moses…: If a man or a woman commits any sin against a person, and through this commits a crime against the Lord, and that soul is guilty, then let them confess their sin that they have committed, and return in full what they what they are guilty of, and they will add a fifth part to it and give it to the one against whom they sinned; if he does not have an heir to whom he should return for guilt, then dedicate it to the Lord; (Num.5,5-7).
You can help the sick, the infirm, the elderly, abandoned children, those in need, or donate to build a church. The Lord says: “Truly I say to you, because you did it to one of the least of these My brothers, you did it to Me. (Matthew 35:30)

Our task is to transform the powerful destructive, destructive and killing energy of guilt into the positive energy of changing oneself for the better, into the creation of a New morally perfect person in oneself.

Used fragments from the article http://www.psynavigator.ru/articles.php?code=519 Point of view: guilt - spirituality or immaturity?

Natalia Volkova

psychotherapist

Depression, suicide attempts, unreasonable anxiety and fears - often with these difficult problems people turn to a psychologist. To help the patient, the specialist must understand the cause of his suffering. And often this reason is the remaining unrepentant, often deeply hidden sense of guilt. Sin without repentance, committed in the past, sprouts in the present as a spiritual tragedy. And a person often does not understand: why? And the cure, it turns out, is very close.

Wrong emotion?

Man has a centuries-old experience of guilt. Back in Paradise, Adam accused Eve of temptation; Eve accused the serpent of temptation. From the first sin, sinners try to shift their guilt onto another. Each of us, one way or another, knows this painful feeling: we have done something that should not have been done, we have crossed a certain law that our conscience knows. Over the years of my clinical practice, I have observed a strange phenomenon: the apparent confusion of psychologists before guilt as an ineradicable symptom of the most serious pathologies and disorders. Whatever theories and techniques have been developed, whatever scientific works have been written, and the feeling of guilt still continues to disturb the human mind and psyche. Classical Freudian psychoanalysis, in my opinion, hardly coped with the task by offering a dubious “medicine for feelings of guilt” - justifying it by the actions of other people, and above all parents. In modern pop psychology, especially Western, theories and practices are widespread, designed to increase human self-esteem by any means.

It is believed that people should stop judging themselves and feel their importance, regardless of their actions or circumstances. It is assumed that a person is destined to satisfy his needs (“I deserve it because I exist”), and therefore there can be no guilt. Some go even further, declaring guilt to be an erroneous emotion, and suggest simply destroying the “guilt zone” forever, as a useless experience, as something shameful and negative. The result of attempts to "heal" or "annul" guilt has been an increase in the number of people with chronic depression, states of pathological anxiety, neurosis, psychosis, and suicide. The number of those who try to drown "guilt in wine" or run away from it into a drug frenzy does not stop growing. Often people themselves come to a psychotherapist in order to immediately get rid of a painful feeling, and, often opening up in their moral falls, they are waiting to hear - that there is always something or someone - a husband, wife, parents, children, difficult childhood, society , lack of money, etc., which forced them to commit a bad deed, to violate the moral law. In a word, the fault for what they have done lies not at all on them, which means that there is no responsibility. But the formal justification of sin in the therapist's office has only a temporary effect, and then in rare cases. Unconscious and unrecognized guilt, like a hidden abscess, continues to carry out its destructive work in a person.

Get the skeleton out of the closet

Here are some examples from my practice. Patient Mikhail K. (real names of people have been changed), 45 years old, two suicide attempts, changed several psychotherapists, suffers from depression, uncontrollable anxiety, insomnia for many years, is aggressive with people, hates women. He was briefly married, had no friends, did not stay at any job for more than six months. After several weeks of psychotherapy, the root of his problems came to light - a deep-seated sense of guilt towards his mother. As a teenager, in a quarrel, Mikhail pushed her against the wall. After an unsuccessful fall, the mother fell ill for a long time, and the son, unable to withstand the situation, left home. He returned three years later, when his mother was gone. Another patient, Boris A., aged 64, a former successful businessman, head of a large firm, divorced, suffers from depression, irritability and mood swings. At the very first session, he confessed to an uncontrollable fear of death. The only son lives in another city, they have not seen each other and have not communicated for more than twenty years. After several months of therapy, he recognized his main problem - a hidden sense of guilt in front of his son, whom he had been bullying and humiliating all his life for not living up to his father's hopes, not learning and not becoming a big person and disgraced his name by choosing the ordinary profession of a tiler. One more example. Dina S., 40 years old, suffers from a severe form of depression, chronic anxiety, fears, auditory hallucinations - she constantly hears children's voices. She lives alone, it is difficult to get along with people (according to her, she runs away from them, as if afraid of some kind of exposure (a sign of paranoia). A terrible self-destructive force and total internal terror owned her most of her life. It took six months of intensive therapy before a mental abscess broke through and she said that at the age of 18 she left a one-year-old child with the man with whom she lived at that time and ran away with another.Telling her tragic story, which splashed out of her like stagnant water from a dam, she admitted: “I tried to justify myself for a long time, I thought, because I was still a child. But now I realized that my daughter was a child, and I was a mother. " All these fates and many others similar to them are united by one thing - a feeling of guilt hidden in the very depths of being. Often, caring about the well-being of the external facade, we do not even suspect what a terrible destructive work is carried out by the worm of suppressed guilt in our soul.In these destinies there is also something else, obvious to me as a right the main psychologist - a complete lack of love. Moreover, an inexplicable fear of any of its manifestations. Each of them reacted almost inadequately to my simple question: are there people in their lives whom they could truly love?

Are there guilty people without guilt?

What hides the patch of self-justification

Our moral ideal is nothing but our conscience, which keeps within itself God's Law of good and evil, of what is good and what is bad. We always have a choice - to cover it with a band-aid of self-justification, or to open our spiritual wounds, believing in their healing. The first one is definitely easier to do. Even if at first our conscience, tormented by sin and embarrassment, resists and demands cleansing from dirt, the second, third and subsequent attempts to muffle these impulses are given to us more and more easily. The heart grows cold, the mind becomes more cynical, and the soul gives less and less signs of life. From all this, it is not far from the most disastrous outcome - the spiritual decomposition of the personality and spiritual death. For guilt—that unrevealed emotional wound—many of my patients have paid a heavy price: years of despair and illness. In my practice, working with unfortunate and restless people, I constantly observe this fine line, beyond which human life can plunge into impenetrable darkness if there is no light of faith in it. Guilt and forgiveness are constant themes of my conversations with people during psychotherapy sessions. And for those of them who do not reject faith, but try to find their way to it, it is always easier to realize the important truth that when we violate the laws written in our conscience, we are guilty, regardless of whether we feel guilty. or not. When we sincerely repent, we are forgiven, even if we do not feel forgiven. Guilt, guilt and the conflict generated by this feeling is a spiritual loss. And therefore, it is necessary to seek its resolution in the spiritual life of a person, in faith. As an Orthodox psychologist, I try to rely primarily on faith in the very process of therapy. When people realize their responsibility for what they have done, they themselves seek purification through repentance and deep regret. And only then - through pain and joy - peace begins to come into the human soul, only then healing comes.

One of my former patients, who once had seven abortions in her youth and was left without children and without a family, came to repentance through terrible mental anguish. The unceasing prayer for the souls of her unborn children, for God's light and mercy to be sent down to them, gave birth to hope for a new life in her. As St. Demetrius of Rostov said, repentance restores a fallen soul, makes it from alienated - friendly to God; repentance encourages a tormented soul, strengthens a wavering one, heals a contrite one, makes a wounded one healthy.

free gift

In “Crime and Punishment” by F. Dostoevsky, Sonya Marmeladova asks Raskolnikov to repent of the murder: “- Get up! .. Come now, this minute. Stand at the crossroads, bow down, kiss the earth that you have desecrated, and then bow to the whole world and say out loud: I killed. And then God will send you life again ... Eka such and such flour to bear! Why, a whole life, a whole life! .. - I'll get used to it, - he said gloomily ... "Raskolnikov is not used to it. And after many years of ordeals and mental suffering, already in prison, he came to faith. Whatever theories and mechanisms a person comes up with in the fight against guilt, sooner or later they stop working. And the moment will come when, finally, the external noise and fuss, with which we are trying to drown out the voice of conscience, will finally fall silent, and then in deep silence we will hear the bitter truth: “I crossed ... I disobeyed God.” Repentance is impossible without humility and meekness. The realization that I personally, as a person, am weak and unable to solve my own guilt, is not easy for a modern person: our pride, swollen to gigantic proportions, interferes. Pacifying her is a big win. The ancients said: out of two people, the first of whom defeated the army, and the second defeated himself, the second came out victorious. God knows our guilt but believes in our ability to cleanse. Purification does not take place at the level of the intellect, but takes place in the heart. Often we hide emotional traumas deep, like a terrible secret that we can’t tell even those close to us, for fear of losing their love or respect (“if they find out “this” about me, they will stop loving me”).

Faith - and I, as an Orthodox psychologist, am convinced of this every day - breaks this dangerous concept that gives rise to alienation. True love is unconditional and unconditional. It's impossible to lose her. Repentant guilt only restores our oneness with God. Repentance is God's gift, given to us, to each of us, irrevocably and free of charge. It is up to us to decide how we will use this gift: we will consign it to oblivion due to inconvenience and uselessness, or we will carefully carry it through life. Psychotherapy can be useful at the first stage of the awakening of the personality, when a person learns to distinguish between his true and false feelings, the motivation of actions, the causes of conflicts, to overcome mistrust and fear, to recognize and pronounce guilt. The real purification takes place in higher spiritual realms, and I always advise my patients to seek it in communion with the Church. The doors of God's temple are open. It is our choice to pass by, comforting our conscience, or to go inside and stand with our guilt before God, the only one who can truly comfort our pain. One soldier asked the elder: “Does God accept repentance?” The elder replied: “If your cloak is torn, will you throw it away?” The warrior says, "No! I'll stitch it up." “If you spare your clothes like that, won’t God spare his creation?”