How To Cope With Guilt In Recovery

Along with depression and anxiety, guilt is a major challenge you may face in recovery and is extremely common. Guilty feelings play an important role in both maintaining and breaking with addictive behaviours. They can drive our desire to numb ourselves with substances, but they can also provide a catalyst for change.

When starting your journey to recovery, you may feel like you have a lot to feel guilty about. Old emotions the addiction numbed can rise to the surface, and there also may be new realisations about how you behaved when you were addicted.

Guilt and shame

Before exploring practical ways to cope with guilt in recovery, it’s important to explore the distinction between guilt and shame.

Guilt and shame can feel similar and are sometimes used interchangeably, but their key differences exist. Guilt refers to the feeling of having done something wrong and experiencing psychological discomfort as a result of our actions. Shame, however, is the feeling that we are wrong—that there are flaws intrinsic to who we are that make us bad, unloveable or unworthy.

Guilt can be appropriate if we have done something wrong. It can make us reflect on our actions, motivate ourselves to do better, and make amends. Shame, however, can get in the way of our ability to recover by making us feel like there’s something wrong with us and, therefore, we aren’t worthy of recovery.

A good way of identifying whether an emotion is guilt or shame is whether it focuses on your actions or who you are. A guilty person who misses a meeting because of a hangover may think to themselves, ‘I feel bad for drinking too much and inconveniencing others.’ A person feeling shame may instead berate themselves as a bad or unreliable person.

How guilt manifests in recovery

Guilt often manifests as feelings of regret. These regrets could relate to how your actions may have harmed loved ones, prevented you from living up to your ideals, or wasted time or potential. Guilt is an emotional state, but like many, you might feel it intensely in your body – clenched stomach, difficulty sleeping, muscle tension.

Guilt can be extremely painful – but it’s normal. If you dedicate yourself to learning from it, guilt can guide you to make better choices in the future.

Self-acceptance and forgiveness

If you feel guilty, you may struggle with self-acceptance, and even feel that it’s damaging. It can feel as if you’re letting yourself off the hook for how you behaved in the past.

This is not the case. Self-acceptance means treating yourself with the same compassion as you would a friend or loved one, accepting that imperfections and mistakes are universal, and finding the strength to heal and grow. Other people can behave in ways that hurt us, and while this can make us upset with the person we can forgive them. A lack of self-acceptance and forgiveness can result in feeling stuck in self-blame, which impedes your capacity for change and growth.

Challenging your thoughts

While guilt is normal and natural, persistent negative self-beliefs will hold you back. These beliefs can get in the way of progressing in your recovery – they can be inaccurate, and rooted in shame.

Core beliefs play a large role in recovery. By identifying and challenging negative beliefs that don’t serve you, you open up new opportunities for growth and transformation.Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be a useful tool for challenging persistent negative thoughts – more on this later.

Mindfulness

The link between mindfulness and working with guilt may be obscure, but studies suggest it can be helpful. Researchers in the US and Portugal examined whether practising mindfulness reduced feelings of guilt. Participants were asked to write about a situation that made them feel guilty and then engage in a short mindfulness practice. Those who participated in the mindfulness practice reported feeling less guilty.

Mindfulness is about living in the present moment, which sounds simpler than it is—it takes practice! Mindfulness can be practised alone, with a therapist, or in a group, making it an accessible way to deal with guilt in recovery. It helps by redirecting your attention back to the present moment instead of ruminating on the things you feel guilty about.

There is a time and a place for exploring why you feel guilty and learning from your mistakes – reliving them over and over again with no goal or purpose can keep you stuck in your feelings. Mindfulness can give you the space and distance from your feelings that you need to process them, without being overwhelmed by them.

Focusing on progress and growth

It’s important to learn from the past – and equally important to focus on your future.

Celebrating milestones, small and large, setting goals, working towards them, and giving yourself credit are essential ways of managing guilt. This helps by increasing feelings of self-worth and self-efficacy. Self-efficacy means believing in your abilities – and it’s an excellent predictor of long-term recovery. The good news is that self-efficacy can be worked on – by setting goals of any size and giving yourself credit for achieving them.

You can’t change the past -but you can work towards a better future.

Professional support

A good therapist will help you sort your feelings of guilt from your feelings of shame and work with you to contextualise, understand and address them.

For many, just talking about their feelings with a professional can be helpful, and individual talk therapy with a counsellor can help by allowing you to get your feelings off your chest. Some forms of more specialised therapy, commonly used in addiction recovery, can be useful for people who need to explore their feelings more and help with processing guilty feelings.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy involves identifying negative thought patterns and challenging them.

Feelings of guilt can be worked through using cognitive behavioural methods. Sometimes, we experience excessive guilt by overemphasising our responsibility in previous events. Negative thought patterns can arise from feelings of shame, and recognising and addressing this can be healing.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can help you clarify your thought processes, correct distorted and faulty thought processes, and have a clearer perspective on your emotions.

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy

DBT is based on CBT – it’s for people who intensely feel emotions. DBT can help reduce substance abuse, which is why it’s often used in recovery.

People who struggle with drug addiction and alcohol addiction can often feel emotions very intensely and turn to medicating themselves with substances as a result. DBT can help with this by working on your ability to feel and tolerate painful emotions that you would previously block out by using.

DBT aims to help you work on both the acceptance of painful emotions and a desire for change – this is the dialectic of DBT. For people struggling with intense feelings of guilt, DBT can be a useful tool that helps you to accept that you did things that you aren’t proud of and help you change your behaviour for the better in the future.

Final thoughts

Dealing with guilt during addiction recovery isn’t just a challenge—it’s a crucial part of the journey. Knowing the difference between guilt and shame is key. Guilt can help us reflect and improve, while shame can hold us back by making us feel unworthy. Understanding this helps us move forward toward healing and growth.