It’s a little after 3 a.m. and the 7-Eleven lights up the parking lot. You can almost see heat waves from the cooling street. The neighborhood’s up late: hot houses, cold drinks at bars, and I’m pretending last call didn’t just happen, staving off another night in the pizza box that is my bedroom.
This guy calls himself Father. Could be 19 could be 29 for all I know. His voice is timid and lulling and he’s telling me about where he’s from, how he ended up living on the street. He seems honest, without pretense. So I decide to ask him the question I’ve been asking for the last few months: “What’s your guiltiest memory?”
Father talks about hunting lizards as a kid. Makeshift pea shooters manufactured from latex gloves and pebble ammunition. He says, looking back, that he felt controlled by a violent culture, that he’s learned a lot since the afternoons he spent splitting lizards. He’s not the same person, nowadays, and he’s ashamed of the lives, however small, that he took.
“One other thing that I feel terrible for,” he begins, “that I feel totally terrible for...”
He’s searching the inside of his pockets for the decision on whether he really wants to say it.
“I was locked up one time and I ate some mushrooms,” talking faster now, “and they were poisonous mushrooms, but, like, I didn’t necessarily know that they were as fatal as they were supposed to be, and I also knew that they weren’t the hallucinogenic kind, and I convinced someone to eat ‘em with me.” Hands in pockets, digging for the words. “We were in the hospital, both, for, like, five days.”
“It was his birthday. I was on the rec yard. Yeah. I feel terrible for that. I don’t really talk about that one very much.”
It’s afternoons like these when I’m not sure if it’s the guilt or the anxiety that’s keeping me in bed.
Problem postponed: Double-click the next episode and the space station at the edge of the wormhole comes to life.
My shrink says that on days like these, I should just take the damn pill, so I do, replacing the nervous stomach pain with an emotional numbness that just might get me out of bed and permit me to write today.
I wonder if I’m alone in this. The only person so damn anxious, so filled with guilt, that I’ve ceased to exist outside my ability to project myself into “Star Trek” episodes?
I start to ask around. On the street. In bars. Only strangers.
What’s the guiltiest thing you’ve ever done?
One woman tells me that she never responded to a message that a friend sent before he committed suicide. She never did forgive herself, couldn’t exorcise the question: “If I had responded, would he still be here today?”
At the can deposit in front of the neighborhood grocery store a guy tells me about the time he erased himself with whiskey and woke up in a jail cell. Hungover in a courtroom, the charges were presented: He’d stabbed a man who only barely kept his life.
A hippie chick making line drawings on pieces of cardboard while spanging says she learned not to steal after swiping a stray longboard on a California boardwalk and catching a beat-down from said longboard’s owner. She won’t steal anymore — nobody wants to get hugged by a skateboard. But she still feels guilty about it.
I meet a lot of people who feel responsible for stuff that’s totally out of their control. Lovers lost to overdoses. Exiting prison only to find parents represented by tombstones.
I meet others whose guilt operates as a positive social mechanism: a male student in his 20s says he feels guilty all the time, but that it’s mostly procrastinator’s guilt, and it spurs him to hit the books and make the most of his education.
A business owner tells me that guilt keeps him from cheating his customers on labor costs. “It’s good for the customer and it’s good for the business.”
I begin to realize that guilt has many sides. Sometimes it’s healthy, encouraging a person stay on top of their personal responsibilities, and other times it keeps you in bed watching Star Trek all day.
The more I ask around, the more stories I hear from people living without homes that revolve around excessive guilt, or guilt rooted in past situations that were entirely out of a person’s control. I begin to wonder if any data exists surrounding guilt and homelessness — if there’s a relationship to be explored.
If you’re going to understand guilt, you’ve got to start with the youth. And by that, I mean, you have to look at how humans develop guilt and why it’s essential to establishing and refining a sense of morality.
Experiments assessing the development of guilt in children can be kind of devious by description. It’s a lot of making kids believe they broke something valuable or tasks that guarantee failure; loaded situations where the results are never feel-good experiences.
A study released in 2002 by Child Development (Vol. 73, No. 2, Kochanska et al) “examined whether children’s guilt, assessed at 22, 33 and 45 months, predicted their tendency to violate rules at 56 months.”
The study posits that “guilt and the associated aversive arousal serves an adaptive function regarding moral conduct. Children who experience guilt following misbehavior are likely to transgress less in the future because of the history of those un-pleasant affective emotional states… or the resulting ‘somatic markers’ that bias attention and response choices.”
This is to say that guilt, at least at a young age, helps people learn how to act in accordance with codes of moral conduct. Moreover, the study points out the other side of the coin: “A large volume of psychopathology literature supports the notion that impaired or diminished capacity to experience post-transgression discomfort may be one of the factors responsible for poor avoidance learning and anti-social conduct of psychopaths.”
Wow! So the absence of guilt is believed to contribute to the personality traits of psychopaths? Interesting. But can’t an overabundance of guilt also lead to unhealthy mental states?
Simply put, yes. Here’s the laundry list:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists excessive guilt as a symptom of depression. Here’s a brief rundown of conditions:
Scrupulosity, a psychological disorder typified by pathological guilt, is considered to be the moral or religious equivalent to obsessive compulsive disorder, and as a personality trait, has emerged as a suspected indicator of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Survivor’s guilt, or guilt experienced after living through a catastrophe in which others have perished, has been studied as an irrational sector of guilt that takes emotional ownership for situations outside a person’s control.
Sexual guilt has been correlated with religious indoctrination, in terms of masturbation, homosexuality, and so on.
As far as I can tell, studies of unhealthy guilt are only beginning to produce limited and partially-convincing findings in academic and research contexts, and homelessness and guilt is an almost wholly untouched field of research (barring a few loosely-related studies, such as “the production of self-blame and self-governing” in homeless shelters).
The cultural vocabulary surrounding guilt is ambiguous. In psychology circles, there’s a general distinction between guilt and shame: feelings of guilt commonly lead to confrontation and reparation; feelings of shame produce avoidance behaviors. I found people using the terms interchangeably, or attributing shame behaviors to guilt. It’s a confusing little knot of emotions.
Ultimately, I want to know if there’s a relationship between guilt and homelessness. A survey of 42 people gave me only a small sampling, and not a responsible one for drawing conclusions. But it is safe to say that guilt is an emotional presence that affects all walks of life, spanning socio-economic boundaries and the nuanced narratives we carry with us.