Guilt is a bad emotion, trust me. No, no… don’t start feeling guilty about feeling guilty. I didn’t say you were bad. I said guilt was a bad thing. Some people are overrun with it, almost always because of their upbringing: their religion, their parents, their teachers, some trauma in their past. And I appreciate that it’s a very, very hard habit to shake. There’s a comfort in it that, like any addiction, makes it hard to give up. But give it up you must, even if it takes you most of your life to do it.

I had a relative when I was younger who used to feel guilty about everything. She felt so guilty she had to talk to her friends for hours about what to do about it. None of which was any help at all to the people she felt she’d wronged, but at least it meant she could talk about herself and how she felt for hours. Because that’s what guilt is about: you. It’s a way of focusing on yourself that doesn’t feel self-indulgent because you’re shining a light on the shameful, dark parts of your psyche. Even so, it’s sort of a back-handed compliment to yourself because the fact you feel guilty means you care, so you’re basically a decent person.

Look, I’m not saying don’t ever feel guilty. We all do. But guilt should be just a momentary flash of conscience that alerts you to the fact that you’ve messed up. It’s what you do with the guilt that counts. You feel it (briefly), deal with it and then the guilt is gone. If you really can’t deal with it, for whatever reason, then you need to drop the guilt anyway. Because it doesn’t help anyone.

If you feel you’ve treated someone badly, or neglected them, or betrayed a secret, or let someone down, your guilt is in no way helping that person. It can’t really, because you haven’t got time to worry about them while you’re so busy thinking about your own point of view.

I don’t want to sound too harsh, because most people who are given to guilt have a complex relationship with it that goes back a long way, and the majority of them are truly not trying to be selfish. On the other hand, I do want to be harsh because – if this is you – you deserve better than to spend so much time berating yourself needlessly. You’re damaging your self-esteem and your self-respect, and you need to understand what’s going on so you can stop it. Because you really must stop it.

One reason why you must stop is because you need to start thinking about the person or people you think you’ve short-changed. Go and fix it, before you think about yourself. And then once you’ve fixed it, you won’t need to think about yourself because it will all be OK again. You might regret what you did. Hopefully you’ll learn from it. But you won’t need to feel guilty.

One common factor among people who are prone to guilt is what petty things they feel guilty about. I remember my elderly relative spending hours fretting about the fact that she’d promised to visit a friend and then discovered she had a meeting so she couldn’t make it. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just phone the friend and say, ‘Sorry, my mistake, I’ve double booked. How about Wednesday evening?’ As an adult I now understand that she couldn’t do that. Solving the problem would have deprived her of an excuse to feel guilty, and guilt can be so deliciously indulgent to wallow in, can’t it?