Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha. I'm welcome to Stuff
Will Never Told You projection of iHeartRadio and today for
the Monday Mini, we were tackling a subject that is
a much larger subject, so we're just going to focus
(00:26):
in on some basics. We have talked about guilt before,
women in guilt in a lot of different ways. So
I was trying to come up with We've had busy,
a busy week here at Stuff One Never Told You,
So I was trying to come up with something that
wouldn't be too complicated. Usually we make a mistake and
(00:50):
it is incredibly complicated anyway, but that might be the
case for this one as well. But I was thinking
about I had just come back from Dragon Con, which
is something I love doing every year. It is a
source of stress every year, however, and I realize, like
every year after I do it, I feel guilty, Like
(01:10):
I go over everything that I did. Did I impact
this person's time? Did I make it better? Did I
make it worse? Like all of these decisions and questions
and everything, and I just feel guilty. And I've noticed
that that happens a lot when I hang out with people.
In general, I'm just always questioning if I made the
(01:34):
right or wrong decision, and it's something I've grown to expect.
I think I've joked before when we go back and
pick out classics, I can always tell what time of
the year it is, because we kind of do similar
episodes around the same time of the year. Like Sabatha
usually have one about holiday stress and burn my places. Yes,
(01:56):
I have one about dragon con and boundaries and stress
around that, and so I've just because it's something that
I've come to expect. And we have talked about guilt
several times, and I think we should come back and
revisit it on a larger scale because the media has
(02:17):
given women's guilts as compared to men's, a fancy, flashy
new name, which is the guilt gap. Cool. You know,
they love to do it. So we're mostly focusing on
there's a lot of different types of guilt, and we're
going to get into some of them. We're mostly focusing
on ones that impact women more than men. Okay. Multiple
(02:38):
studies have found that women of all ages experience more
guilt than men. In one study, women had a lot
more reasons they listed for feeling guilty as compared to men.
Both in professional and personal terms. So it was like,
no matter what it is, women feel more guilty in
this very heteronormative way. But I did find a study
that had a non binary also and they feel even
(03:00):
more guilt than women did in that study. There has
been a lot of research into why this might be.
I don't think any of it is really surprising. One
of the main theories has to do with how women
are socialized. So women are often socialized to put themselves
second and make everyone else happy. If someone or something
(03:24):
isn't right, women often believe it's their faults and they
are the ones who have to fix it. We are
also socialized to be more empathetic, and when we can't
act on that empathy, we feel guilty. Some speculate in
a strange way, it is also an attempt to control
our circumstances, so if we're guilty of breaking something, we
(03:44):
have the power to fix it. Admitting that things aren't
our fault also is an admission that we can't control things.
For some it's a way of not addressing how to
move forward. So, I mean, there's a lot of a
lot to unpack there, but I do think it's interesting
that if you are laying the blame on yourself. Then
you feel like you can fix it, like you have
(04:07):
some kind of power, it's in your control. A lot
of times it isn't. And there's so many I was
thinking about this. There's so many stories I've read where
the like powerful moment is you know, someone telling you
it's not your fault you have yeah, and you're like,
it is though.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
That with men? Well, like, I've never seen that as a
scene with women that I think about it. I've seen
like three or four times.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Couple of those.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Times it's a joke, but few of those times. A
lot of the times i've seen that. Maybe it was
because it was so highlighted in the stupid Matt Damon
movie Oh Goodwill Hunting.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, Okay, well, yeah, I think you have a point
there because most of the things I'm thinking of, I
can think of some instances of women, but all of
this is fan fiction, so i'd have to really I.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Feel like the scenarios that I've seen that are all
dramatized are men.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Interesting? Okay, well, listeners, let us know, let us know
if we're missing a good example. I would love to
hear about it. So there, as I said, there have
been a lot of studies about this, and they have
broken down the types of guilt that affect women. There's
so many. I think one of the studies I was
(05:27):
reading at forty nine different specific things. So I'm just
going to go over some of the basic ones. One
is sexual guilt and virginity guilt, which I thought was interesting.
Basically feeling guilty for not being sexual enough or still
being a virgin or not being a virgin. So many
(05:48):
of these things are like damned if you do, damned
if you don't. Yeah, type of conversation. You feel bad
either way. And we've talked about this a lot before
when we talked about actual violence and self blame. What
was I wearing, should I have gone out, etc. All
these factors that society tells us and then some of
(06:10):
us internalize of like I could have controlled it, and
I could have prevented what happened based on these things.
Survivor's guilt was a big one, both with kind of
sexual assault, but also outside of that, and then guilt
for your own trauma, guilt for being traumatized and bringing
(06:31):
it up. That was a big one. Not reaching milestones,
which is something you and I have talked about a lot,
not having the house, not having the family, whatever it is.
Women reported a lot more guilt about that than died
for having a better life than others and or not
doing enough. Body slash health guilt slash falls. So having
(06:57):
guilt around not taking care of your yourself, not looking
a certain way, and having any sort of flaw. That
was a big one. Religious guilt. Now, as you know, listeners,
we did a whole bitty series thirteen plus episode Don't
Worry about Us that looked into this, but it was
(07:20):
it was a big one. It came up for a
lot of women not feeling like they were meeting the standards,
and they even went out of their way to say
it wasn't the kind of original sin of Eve. It
was just I'm not meeting the standards of the religion
that I follow in my mind. Feeling guilty for not
having at all or competing at work. I think there
(07:45):
was a lot. There were a lot of work ones
that were interesting because it was essentially feeling guilty for
not doing enough, but also for like I don't know,
bragging or doing too much. Damned if you do, damn
if you don't. Again, feeling like you can't make mistakes
and guilty if you do. As a symptom of depressive
(08:07):
disorder also came up. There were a lot, a lot,
a lot of them were around family and relationships, so
not being there for family enough, feeling guilty for saying no.
Here is a quote from the Glasshammer. Researchers found that
nineteen percent of single women feel selfish for setting aside
(08:28):
time for their self care. The same research concluded that
eighty six percent of married women feel the same way.
Selfish feelings can come with extra guilt because you don't
want to let anyone down by spending time on yourself.
That's a huge eighty six percent. And we've talked about
that too before, about that feeling as a mother, and
(08:51):
neither of us are mothers, but that feeling of you
have to put yourself seck in. Yeah, everyone else's first,
and you can't take time for self care apparently, right,
are you.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Feeling suffish, you know, taking care of your children, which,
by the way, also I feel like I don't see
it in here. You're selfish for not having children. I've
seen them lot to women specifically.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Mm hmmm, I think that was on there. I didn't
include it in my outline, but because it had forty
nine reasons that right, But yeah, there was one that
was you know, essentially because I've talked about that too.
I felt guilty for not having kids in my family,
even though I never wanted them. And I actually told
(09:34):
my mom recently. She came to visit me on my
birthday and she was like, you know, I would have
liked grandkids. I was like, well, you're not getting them
for me, right, And she was like, I know, it's fine,
but there was a time I was considering, I guess
I'll get married and have kids, even though it's not
what I want.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah. I think that's in this level of like, you're
not giving me guilt grandchildren, which has never been accused
of me. My parents have said we wanted a cute
Asian child, and only what a grand child, and like
that's weird because who knows there could be problems. I
could have problems, and that's a whole different trauma if
I feel guilty that I couldn't produce. But like, yeah,
(10:14):
there's I've seen a lot of people talk about you
should feel guilty. Yeah I'm not having children, and people
are like, yeah, we do, like I'm like, what, I
don't I.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Don't know, but I know I do know that people
will try to make a lot of people feel guilty
for that, and I know that it's a thing, so uh,
not dismissing it at all. Feeling guilty for existing was
a big one.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Feeling guilty for breaking up slash divorce like failure of relationship.
This was an interesting one because they the study I'm referencing,
they had the percentage of men versus percentage of women
that felt guilty for it, and uh, women were much
more likely to feel guilty for this. They were guilty,
(11:01):
I mean in every one they felt more guilty, but
the percentage was higher in that one. Not loving your partner,
So I thought this was interesting. It's basically like if
you start dating somebody and you think, you know what,
I don't really love them, but I like them a lot,
and maybe I'll start to love them, and then it
just never happens, and then you want to break up
(11:22):
and feeling very guilty for that. Here's a quote from
a study called the Wide Variety of Reasons for Feeling
(11:43):
Guilty and Adults, Findings from a large cross sectional web
based survey by Tobias Luck and Claudia Luck Sikorskime. Female participants, however,
more frequently stated reasons for feeling guilty assigned to categories
like subjectively perceived responsibilities for life situations, events, circumstances and death,
circumstances of others slash for not being able to help
(12:06):
slash support neglecting someone, not taking enough care of someone,
not being there for someone, faults in education, or misbehavior
towards children, not spending enough time with children, not taking
enough care of children, not being there for children more
than male participants. Male participants, by contrast, more frequently stated
(12:29):
reasons for feeling guilty related to partners slash spouse problems
slash issues in relationship slash marriage, cheating slash having affairs
and divor slash breakup. So they were more worried about
that whole part. And it seems women were more worried
about like everybody else in their life, like children, taking
care of family, community.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Like it's also cheating. They should feel guilty rightly, So
if you don't, you're a sociopath.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
It was pretty telling, you know, like with any study
like this, this is self reported. It was an internet study,
but I do think it was pretty telling because some
of the percentages were very stark and like men didn't
seem to care about that at all, and women were
really worried about it, but especially children. Like that, it
(13:28):
didn't seem that children came up too much with the men.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
In the low birth rate.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I wonder why, Yeah, exactly exactly. Something else I wanted
to note is that in this study they found that
older folks report less feelings of guilt, and they had Yeah,
they had a couple of reasons for why they thought
(13:55):
that was.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
One is.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Kind of this idea of like looking back with regret
versus just kind of accepting where your life went, and
something called what they call the fading effects, which is
just like once you get further away from something, you
don't really regret it as much because this is your
life now, this is you're not going to change it.
(14:21):
So I did think that was really interesting though, because
a lot of times you see stories of the media
where the older folks are like, I regret everything in
my life, and you know, they look back, But this,
this study seemed to indicate.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Like, na, Yeah, so if you're someone like me who
does struggle with a lot of just guilt for random things.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
There are a lot of tips out there, some that
I wanted to include. Recognize instances when you start to
feel guilty. So I've clearly already said one, when I
hang out with you for some reason, I'm worrying that
I've made I did something wrong, So I should look
at that and examine why that is. Try to remove
(15:12):
yourself from the cause of guilt. So, like, what would
I think about this situation if I wasn't at fault.
So if you kind of take away the idea that
it's your fault, then what just look at that situation.
Once you take that away, focus on the present. I
think this is a big problem for me where I'm
always thinking about the next thing. Oh are they bored?
(15:35):
Or they have I ruined this? Have I ruined that?
But if you stay in the present, and I find
a lot of times, if I'm being objective, everybody was fine.
They didn't need me to be mother hitting over, Like,
are you having the best time of your life? Find
activities that calm you down and make time for them.
(15:57):
We recently talked about this self suthing, yes, And I
also want to mention the intersection of all of this
in communication, because that did come up a lot in
the research I was doing, of just being able to
communicate your feelings of guilt and hopefully having someone who
(16:19):
will listen to you and be able to tell you,
be able to legitimize that you feel that way, but
tell you why that's not what's going on here or
whatever it is, or just talk it out. Just talk
it out. So that's a very, very very condensed version
(16:40):
of a topic I think we're going to have to
come back to because that research paper was quite long.
But yeah, it was very they said at the top,
in every instance, in every category, women feel more guilty
than me. I said it flat out. So clearly it's
(17:02):
a thing and we should talk about it. But in
the meantime, listeners, if you have any thoughts about this,
we would love to hear from you. You can email
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(17:24):
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Joey Yes, thank you and thanks to you for listening
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