I was talking with a friend on the phone, and I was going through a brutally hard time. My life had been turned upside down. I told him about my difficulties, my problems, about how I had to force myself to do everything. Basically, about how everything sucked.

Many weeks later, steeped in my own suffering, I asked myself: where was he in all of this? I reached back to other conversations, even the ones from better times. With horror I realized that even when things were good, I hadn’t asked about him — how he was doing, how his life was going. Although that was only the tip of the iceberg, a dense sense of guilt rose in me.

“Discomfort” would be far too mild a word for how that felt. I started judging myself harshly, belittling myself; I was furious.

But what is this guilt, exactly? Guilt presupposes control — and the mind likes it. Did I have control back then? That calls for an honest answer.

After reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, I began to distinguish three things.

The first is real guilt.

Suppose I said something hurtful to someone, and right away, or after a short moment, my conscience speaks up. “I shouldn’t have said that.” This is the moment when I can actually take action and repair something — offer a sincere apology, for instance. Am I right about it? Maybe, maybe not. Conscience operates according to my values and responds to them. Often it is the only signpost available.

The second thing is guilt without choice.

I didn’t do something well. I acted against my own values. But in that moment I had no tools that would have let me know better.

I didn’t choose — I didn’t know how to do it any other way.

The past has already happened, and I have gained a piece of information and a measure of awareness. Because of that I can act differently in the future; I’ve been given some direction. Real guilt demands repair; this second kind demands learning. I didn’t act in keeping with myself in the past, but I can act rightly at the next opportunity.

And finally, the third is guilt with helplessness hiding underneath it.

On the surface it resembles the second kind, but in fact it gives us no answers at all. The mind prefers guilt, because guilt gives it a substitute for control. Helplessness assumes there was no control at all, and that is hard material to accept. What is characteristic of this state? A sense of guilt without clear evidence.

Of course, the evidence will show up quickly — the mind is really good at this. It will find not one but dozens, even hundreds of proofs, and deliver every one of them flawlessly. If one piece of evidence is disarmed, it hands you the next. And the next. And one more. It is like an executioner carrying out a sentence. The reasons will not run out, and it is easy then to get stuck in a loop of your own thoughts and in an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. There is no rational way out of there, and no unambiguous answer. If the material can always be found, what kind of evidence is that? You don’t get out of this by settling the charges, but by returning to reality — to what we are actually doing.

So perhaps every time we settle accounts with the past, it is worth asking ourselves a different question. Not only:

Did I do something wrong?

But above all:

Could I have acted differently back then, or did I simply not know how?