Celebrate guilt!

Before Corey and I wrote Celebrate Green! and started Green Halloween, I was a life coach.

And as a coach, guilt was one of the most common issues clients talked about.

“I feel guilty I don’t spend enough time with my kids.”

“I feel guilty I don’t spend enough time on myself.”

And now that we’re in the green world, I hear, “I feel guilty that I haven’t gotten rid of all the plastic in our house,” or “I feel guilty about the amount of driving I do.”

The bottom line is that no matter what we feel guilty about, almost everyone looks at guilt as a bad thing, an emotion to escape.

But what if we turned that idea upside down?

What if we looked at guilt as a prod, a kick in the pants, a wake up call, even a good thing?

What if instead of feeling bad for feeling bad, we did something with the guilt we experience.

A couple of things recently got me thinking about this.

One was the Greendex survey from National Geographic that “looked at measures of consumer behavior in areas relating to housing, transportation, food, and consumer goods. Greendex 2012 ranks average consumers in 17 countries according to the environmental impact of their consumption patterns…

“The top-scoring consumers of 2012 are in the developing economies of India, China, and Brazil, in descending order. Those in emerging economies continue to round out the top tier of the Greendex ranking, while the lowest scores are all earned by consumers in industrialized countries. American consumers’ behavior still ranks as the least sustainable of all countries surveyed since the inception of the study, followed by Canadian, Japanese, and French consumers.

“Meanwhile, consumers in developing countries with the highest Greendex scores are the most likely to agree that they “feel guilty about the impact [they] have on the environment,” despite having the lightest footprint as individuals. The research finds a positive relationship between the extent to which people feel guilty about their impact and the Greendex scores of average consumers in the same countries. Consumers with low Greendex scores, i.e., those demonstrating the least sustainable behavior as consumers, are least likely to feel guilty about the implications of their choices for the environment.” (Bold is mine.)

See what I mean?

On a personal level, I’ve been reading Beth Terry’s Plastic Free, How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too. (I’ll be reviewing the book soon.) I’ve known about and acted on the big plastic no-no’s like plastic shopping bags, food and personal products containers,wrap, and toys. But I hadn’t realized (or maybe preferred not to consider), how fully plastic has invaded every single aspect of our lives and how much I handle every day without thinking about it. Yes, reading about the ubiquitous nature of this “necessity” is depressing and yes, on just about every page, guilt bled into my brain. But it didn’t stop there.

As I read, I began thinking about which of Beth’s ideas I could implement more fully. I’ll never be perfect. There are certain things I won’t be giving up, plus, as I’ve written about before, my husband doesn’t embrace environmental change with the same enthusiasm as I. But with the guilt I feel, I challenge myself to do what I can—not so that I’ll feel less guilty, but because drowning in guilt is counter productive to the way I want to live my life. It’s a time waster and I see life as a once around deal and want to embrace every second.

I used to suggest to my clients whose guilty thoughts haunted their days, to take 10 minutes daily in which to feel guilty. Sit in a chair facing a blank wall. Look at every aspect of your guilt. Feel it in your body. Cry if you need to. Don’t attempt to escape it. Embrace it. See what it has to teach you.

Do this once or twice a day for a week. Write down what you experience.

At the end of the seven days, create a list of seven small steps that will take you in the right direction. For the next week, instead of spending that 10 minutes a day feeling guilty, spend them taking action.

When we can harness our guilt in this way, why would we want it to go away?