09 Oct The Guilty Hyena
Many would argue that there’s no worse feeling than guilt. When it gets to you, it feels like a hyena is munching away at your heart with the intention of leaving behind only your despicable carcass.
Guilt makes you feel an uncontrollable need to ‘cleanse’ yourself and unless you get rid of it quickly not only will the hyena keep gnawing at you, but it will eventually bring in the rest of her pack for a final nibble on your genitals. What’s funny is that, though you feel this way, the chances are that whatever it is that you’ve done has been forgotten by everyone, except yourself.
This horrible feeling is what leads many a cheating man (and sometimes women) to ‘come clean,’ despite the fact that, the truth won’t really do their partners’ or spouses any good. Though disguised as such, these types of guilty confessions are not the result of some high moral principles, nor are they a product of sincere and genuine regret. What generally motivates cheaters to confess is the desperate selfish need to get rid of the hyena which is making its way up their scrotum.
Guilt however, can be quite the hero at times. When it comes in normal doses, it is a good thing. Guilt, or rather fear of it, is what keeps us on the straight and narrow, it is what keeps us away from realizing our distasteful fantasies, and more importantly it is what keeps us away from that third chocolate bar, that fourth glass of wine and that seventeenth cigarette.
But some people let the hyena eat away at their souls without control. The torturous gnawing is there all the time and for no particular reason whatsoever, just perpetual omnipresent grinding and chewing. It cripples their self esteem, and burdens their life with complimentary trips to a virtual land of fault and culpability.
A recent study from Spain’s University of Basque Country, has unsurprisingly revealed that the most guilt-ridden people on earth are those of the gentler sex. Women feel guilty about things like forgetting a friend’s birthday, about not breastfeeding their two year olds, or snapping at a relative. Women are incessantly brooding over an indiscretion of some sort like buying yet another pair shoes, or throwing away last night’s leftovers. You name it, and women are feeling guilty about it!
According to Mary Ann Bauman MD – director of Women’s Health for INTEGRIS, a nonprofit health system in Oklahoma – the reason for all this female guilt is because women build their self-esteem and their self-worth through relationships. This means that for women, it is of utmost importance that no one thinks that they are being selfish in any way. But since it is humanly impossible to always act selfless and altruistic, aiming to do so, or even to appear so, results in women overextending themselves and feeling continually inadequate. Let’s face it, not even the likes of Mother Theresa are capable of always being good and philanthropic, let alone, normal earthly women like us.
Men, it seems, have it different. According to Bauman, they build their self-image and self-esteem through their accomplishments and not through their relationships with other people. This does not mean that they don’t feel guilty, but to a much lesser degree than women, and for very different reasons. . According to this same study men tend to feel guilty for not managing to achieve their parents’ expectations, and those men who are predisposed at trying to please their parents even as adults are especially plagued with feelings of guilt.
The fact remains that on the whole, men feel significantly less guilt than women and this probably explains why so many of them refuse to admit their guilt and wrong doings despite endless evidence stacked up against them.
My personal addition to this theory is that successful and highly accomplished men are even more likely not to feel guilty about their wrong doings, because deep down they feel that because of their achievements, they are exempt from the rules that govern everybody else. In simpler words, they genuinely feel entitled to it – start with Bill Clinton and finish off with OJ Simpson, Tiger Woods and the boy next door who just made it to the National Football Team –
Out of the 300 men and women that were studied, it resulted that men felt most guilty about things that affected them and them alone, like over indulging, over eating or drinking too much. Although women felt guilty about these things as well, men were less likely to brood over things like not making enough time for family or a sick friend.
The findings, which were also published in the Spanish Journal of Psychology imply that, feelings of guilt in men and women work in chronological reverse order. Whilst women develop feelings of guilt relatively early in life, it takes men almost half a century (40s -50s) until their interpersonal sensitivity levels reach those of women, and by the time men start to figure out the whole sensitivity thing, women start to develop high levels of ‘anxious-aggressive’ guilt. Unlike empathetic guilt which makes us feel sorrow for a person that we think we might have wronged, ‘anxious-aggressive’ guilt is like a time bomb waiting to explode in the face of an unarmed stranger.
So whilst men dabble and fumble with empathy, sympathy, and sensitivity until half way through their lives, women spend the same amount of time pulling their guilt inward and blaming themselves. The findings suggest that the solution to all this is early socialization. We need to stop teaching boys that it’s normal or even expected of them to be insensitive and aggressive, and that girls need not always be sweet and agreeable. This will make it more likely for men and women to end up on the same page before retirement age.
Clearly this is much easier said than done, and driving hyena’s into extinction is probably more likely to happen than short circuiting the way men and women develop over the years.
First published in FM Magazine March 2010
