So, guilt. This feeling is highly charged and therefore quite unpleasant to live with. Often, in order not to encounter it, we camouflage it behind other emotions and experiences. First of all, there will be an acute feeling of injustice and a desire to prove one’s innocence and non-involvement in the situation in any way. Even if at first glance the situation is “not about you at all” and has nothing to do with you directly, you (for some reason) begin to resonate with it very strongly. The emotions that underlie the reaction given to a situation are “righteous” anger and resentment, acting as defenses. Guilt craves punishment. In order to defuse the emotional tension from the background presence of guilt in the internal space and get relief, you need to find the culprit and punish him. The mechanics of the further process here are as follows: you can go into auto-aggression and begin to punish yourself, thereby, as it were, redeeming and discharging internal guilt - and then relief comes for a while (until some situation happens that will again serve as a trigger). Or you can project this feeling outward by finding someone to blame and unleashing your anger on him. The formula “the best defense is an attack” will apply here. I will write in more detail about projection and other defensive reactions of the psyche in the following materials. A marker that communication comes from a suppressed or repressed feeling can be passive aggression (that is, expressed not directly, but in the form of sarcasm, sarcastic jokes and other manipulative techniques ). With such communication, the attacker (aggressor) will not have the desire to understand and figure out “how this happened and what can be done about it,” since the key, let me remind you, is not the desire to understand, but the desire to defuse one’s own background emotional tension. Therefore, even that information coming from the field that is not directly related to a person, such a person can perceive as an accusation from which it is necessary to defend himself - and the “either me or me” scenario comes into play. And responsibility. Responsibility, as the founder said existential direction of psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom, this is a meeting with the result of one’s previous actions and an understanding of “the creation by oneself of one’s Self, one’s destiny, one’s troubles in life, one’s feelings, as well as one’s suffering, if they occur.” Mechanisms of responsibility can be expressed in the following words : “What is happening to me now is the result of my previous actions. If it was me who did it, and no one else (not mom and dad, not the president, not a neighbor, not fate, not life-so-unfair-just-so- it turned out-I-had nothing to do with-it-itself - but I myself), then it is I (and not someone else) who can change the consequences of these actions and the further result." In general, “it is itself, I have nothing to do with it” - a marker of an infantile and immature perception of reality, from which the psychology of the victim grows vigorously, when it is not the one who finds himself in it who must correct the situation, but someone else, big and strong who will come and save. Taking responsibility means gaining the right to give an answer to what is happening, and not “silently eating what they give.” The feeling of guilt includes an internal conflict between the fear of punishment and the desire for the fact of punishment in order to atone for guilt. Out of fear of punishment, we can: look for someone else to blame, become offended, angry at injustice, etc. As soon as the fact of punishment (of yourself or another) has occurred, you can again do nothing with the situation itself, not correct it and not be burdened with finding solutions (the focus is not on action and finding a solution, but on punishing the offender). The sense of responsibility includes an analysis of the causes and shifting the locus of control from the outside world to the inside (which I did wrong), and searching for new options for solving the lesson so as not to step on the same rake again (which I need to do next time to get a different result). Out of a sense of responsibility, a person acts to resolve the situation, without shifting anything to anyone, so that it