Guilt can be an unrelenting source of pain, keeping us stuck in the past and preventing us from being present and loving ourselves and others. Guilt may simmer in our unconscious, or we may condemn ourselves–not once, but over and over. Either way, toxic guilt is insidious and destructive and can sabotage our goals and relationships. It lowers our self-esteem and makes us easy targets for blame and manipulation. Unresolved guilt can cause anger and resentment, not only at ourselves, but also toward others. On the other hand, recovery from guilt encourages us to get along with others, improve ourselves, and build self-esteem. Even if what we did was wrong, we can still find self-forgiveness. Freedom from Guilt and Blame provides a step-by-step workbook for healing guilt and finding self-forgiveness and self-compassion. Self-forgiveness is self-essential to self-worth. Yet, for many of us, self-acceptance remains elusive due to toxic guilt – sometimes for a lifetime. Freedom from Guilt and Blame is designed to free you from guilt’s grip. It will help you sort out healthy from toxic guilt and distinguish it from other emotions, such as shame and regret. You’re guided to review and assess your values, motives, responsibilities, actions, and beliefs, and understand the negative impact of perfectionism and codependency. To overcome guilt, three methods are set forth in detail: cognitive, self-compassion, and spiritual. Applying these specific self-healing techniques and exercises will generate self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.

In most Western societies, guilt is widely regarded as a vital moral emotion. In addition to playing a central role in moral development and progress, many take the capacity to feel guilt as a defining feature of morality itself: no truly moral person escapes the pang of guilt when she has done something wrong. But proponents of guilt's importance face important challenges, such as distinguishing healthy from pathological forms of guilt, and accounting for the fact that not all cultures value guilt in the same way, if at all. In this volume, philosophers and psychologists come together to think more systematically about the nature and value of guilt. The book begins with chapters on the biological origins and psychological nature of guilt and moves on to discuss the culturally enriched conceptions of guilt and its value that we find in various eastern and western philosophic traditions. In addition, numerous chapters discuss healthy or morally valuable forms guilt and their pathological or irrational shadows.

Are you living under a cloud of guilt that you can't seem to shake no matter what you do? Do you feel guilty about everything, all the time? We all have different ways of dealing with our guilty feelings, but none of them work for very long. Timothy S. Lane explains that our strategies for dealing with guilt don't work because guilt is not ...

Drawing connections between Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf's criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, The Ethics of Immediacy recounts the far-reaching consequences of the modern turn towards a new ethics of immediacy. During the first half of the 20th century, a profound transformation – an existential revolution – took place in European culture in how human beings conceived of themselves. Inspired by Freud's psychoanalysis, a newfound appreciation for the realm of immediate experience in human life emerged. With Freud himself making a signal contribution to this existential revolution, and with Woolf and Merleau-Ponty taking up Freud's ideas in their own unique ways, all three figures began to regard first-order, spontaneous, direct, unselfconscious, concrete experience of self and world as standing at the heart of what it means to be human. Jeffrey McCurry describes how this new state of affairs stood in contrast to how immediate experience had been historically dismissed, devalued, repressed, and even negated in the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy. This experience posed dangers to psychological stability, social order, and philosophical certainty. McCurry examines how Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Woolf's modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life.

What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.

This is an interdisciplinary collection of previously unpublished papers on the controversial relationship between religious behavior and mental health. Schumaker has assembled a distinguished international roster of contributors--sociologists and anthropologists as well as psychiatrists and psychologists of religion--representing a wide range of opinions concerning the mental health implications of religious belief and practice. Taken together, the papers provide a comprehensive overview of theory and research in the field. Included are papers on the interaction of religion and self-esteem, life meaning and well-being, sexual and marital adjustment, anxiety, depression, suicide, psychoticism, rationality, self-actualization, and various patterns of anti-social behavior. Religion is also dealt with in relation to mental health of women, the elderly, and children. Contributions dealing with mental health in non-Western religious groups add an important cross-cultural dimension to the volume.

Explores the role of shame as an important affect in the complex psychodynamics of literary and philosophical works.

We all need deliverance from certain yokes and bondages, for even wrong mindsets and hurt can cripple us emotionally, and spiritually and can even lead to our bodies suffering sickness and ailments. Ultimately, no matter your pain, trauma, affliction, hurt, or oppression, it is a form of enslavement. God does not want us to be enslaved. He wants us to be free, liberated, restored and healed. Remember, God ultimately wants us to be healed spiritually, then in the soul and then in the body. True spiritual counselling thus adopts a holistic approach, dealing with the spirit, soul and body.

Remorse is a powerful, important and yet academically neglected emotion. This book, one of the very few extended examinations of remorse, draws on psychology, law and philosophy to present a unique interdisciplinary study of this intriguing emotion. The psychological chapters examine the fundamental nature of remorse, its interpersonal effects, and its relationship with regret, guilt and shame. A practical focus is also provided in an examination of the place of remorse in psychotherapeutic interventions with criminal offenders. The book's jurisprudential chapters explore the problem of how offender remorse is proved in court and the contentious issues concerning the effect that remorse - and its absence - should have on sentencing criminal offenders. The legal and psychological perspectives are then interwoven in a discussion of the role of remorse in restorative justice. In Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives, Proeve and Tudor bring together insights of neighbouring disciplines to advance our understanding of remorse. It will be of interest to theoreticians in psychology, law and philosophy, and will be of benefit to practising psychologists and lawyers.

David Cifu and Cory Blake work at the Hunter Holmes McGuire Polytrauma Center (one of only four in the country) providing intensive rehabilitation care to veterans and service members who experienced injuries to multiple organ systems. This type of injury