Anxiety Therapist: 6 Types of Toxic Guilt and 6 Tips to Help and Heal
Anxiety Therapist: 6 Types of Toxic Guilt and 6 Tips to Help and Heal
Written by: Lauran Daugherty Hahn, LMHC
Updated January 2026
Tired of feeling ripped apart by guilt? Does making decisions feel like anxiety and guilt volleyball? “If I work late, I will feel bad about not being with my family, but if I go home, I will feel bad about not getting more work done.” No matter what you decide to do, you are plagued with anxiety and guilt. Does it feel impossible to do things that will allow you to take care of yourself because the burden of guilt is just too much to bare? If toxic guilt has attached itself to you like the Bubonic Plague, read on to find the type of toxic guilt you struggle with and tips for dealing and healing so you can have peace of mind.
What is the Difference Between Toxic Guilt and Healthy Guilt?
Toxic guilt has you sizing yourself up against external standards, like what other people are doing or other people’s ideas of what you should be doing. The primary drive of toxic guilt is to avoid feeling inconsiderate, selfish, or defective. It pushes you to override your own internal needs, wants, desires, and capacities in order to save face or maintain approval.
Healthy guilt is the feeling of dissonance you experience after acting out of alignment with your core values. This kind of guilt helps you stay in bounds with your own ideals and guides you toward repair or realignment. It functions as an internal compass that, when listened to and attuned to, allows you to step more definitively into your authentic self.
As an anxiety and trauma therapist, I work with clients every day who struggle with toxic guilt and anxiety. For many people, toxic guilt is rooted in early relational patterns, which is why attachment therapy in Orlando can be an important part of healing these dynamics.
It’s similar to pollution in the air, at first you will notice a stench, a gross film in the air, and the impulse is to recoil. But after enough exposure, you start to get used to it. Toxic guilt is similar, after enough exposure, you get used to feeling bad about yourself. Just like polluted air damages your heart, lungs, and brain; toxic guilt damages your thoughts, emotions, and relationships.
What is Toxic Guilt and Shame?
With prolonged exposure to toxic guilt, there is the risk of shame setting in. Guilt is believing “I did something wrong.” Shame is believing “I am bad. There is something wrong with me.” Both toxic guilt and shame are painful to experience; however, shame reaches down into the center of the soul and has you believing you are rotten to the core. Guilt is less personal and is more about the behavior, while shame is about the self. Because guilt often shows up in relational dynamics and communication patterns, understanding guilt in relationships can be an important step in preventing it from evolving into shame. Guilt is easier to heal from and move through than shame, which is why it’s important to work through toxic guilt sooner rather than later.
6 Types of Toxic Guilt & 6 Tips to Help and Heal
1. Believing you have to be Perfect
A Google search of perfectionism is defined as a “refusal to accept any standard short of perfection”. If you have a perfectionist standard for yourself, you will fall short of your goals. It is not humanly possible to be the best at everything all the time. There just aren’t enough hours in a day to be the best employee, the best mom, the best yogi, the best friend, the best spouse, and the best dog mom. If your standard is perfection, no matter where you are or what you are doing, it won’t feel like enough. You will feel pulled to be somewhere else or to be doing something else. All of this internal struggle has you feeling anxious while you’re attending to one thing and guilty because you’re not attending to the other thing.
Tips: Do your best without having to be the best. Accept your imperfections and be kind to yourself. Acknowledge yourself for all that you have done and all that you do. Treat yourself as you would treat a friend who has a lot on their plate. Say things to yourself like, “Look at all the things you do daily. You are a rockstar.”
2. Comparing Yourself to Others
Comparing yourself to others is really never a good idea, especially when it creates thoughts like, “Wow, they really have it together and my life is falling apart”. This type of comparison can make you feel bad about yourself and trigger toxic guilty feelings of not being good enough. Often when we are comparing ourselves to others, we are comparing the way we feel on the inside to what others look like on the outside. Social media is like putting gasoline on a stoked flame when it comes to this kind of toxic guilt. This constant comparing leads to having a harsh internal critic.
Tip: Resist the impulse to compare your insides to someone else’s outsides. If after you put your phone down from scrolling through Facebook or Instagram you feel yucky, it’s time for a social media sabbatical. If you can’t help yourself and find yourself comparing, make sure you aren’t projecting perfection onto the other person. They are human with their trials and tribulations too, no matter what their Facebook reveals.
3. Believing Self-Care is Selfish
Can you say “mom-guilt” “dad-guilt,” or “family-guilt,” in general? This particular flavor of toxic guilt runs rampant where your needs conflict with someone else’s that you care about. Self-care is not selfish. Let me repeat, “SELF-CARE IS NOT SELFISH!” Yes, I am shouting. Seriously, y’all, I wish I could climb up to the top of the Bank of America building in Orlando and shout it out for the world to hear. When we put our self-care last, we overextend our nervous system and set ourselves up for failure. If you really want to bring your best self to the people you love, fill your own tank first, so they get the best version of you.
Tip: I like to use the old airplane air analogy. They recommend putting the oxygen on you before your child, which makes sense because if you’re dead, you can’t do much to help your child. Self-care is the same. If you haven’t inhaled some love oxygen into yourself, what do you have left to give to others? The quality of care you give to your family and friends is going to be exponentially better when it’s coming from a full tank rather than an empty tank.
4. Continuing to Punish Yourself for Things of the Past
We’ve all made mistakes in the past. We’ve hurt people and we’ve hurt ourselves. When you continue to relive your transgressions in your mind, you’re punishing yourself for no good reason. If you struggle with this type of guilt, it’s time to open yourself up to self-forgiveness. This is a process, not a goal.
Tip: Take your screw-up and learn from it. What did you learn about yourself? How have you grown from the situation? What would you do differently? Take all this information and put it into action in how you show up today. Channel the mental energy you were using to beat up on yourself into doing the right thing for yourself and others. Change how you talk to yourself about the past transgression. Use encouraging and supportive words toward yourself, much like you would to a child who failed a test or wrecked his bike.
5. Taking Responsibility for Others’ Feelings
This genre of toxic guilt comes from taking too much responsibility for other people’s emotions. Seeing someone else’s struggle and believing you can and should do something to fix them will certainly lead you down the path of toxic guilt. With this type of toxic guilt, you will feel bad when someone else feels bad and you will have the impulse to take care of them. This will quickly empty your tank, so to speak, because you will need other people to be ok for you to feel ok. This leads to exhaustion. If this sounds like, check out the rescuer section in this trauma triangle article.
Tip: Picture this: There is a giant hula hoop and you are standing at the center. All things inside the hula hoop are you, your energy, and your emotions, and they are your responsibility. All the things on the outside of that hula hoop are not yours to manage or control. Take a big breath and yes, let everything go that is not inside your hula hoop. Having the inclination to fix someone else’s emotional issues is a boundary issue. For more on this, check out the series I wrote on boundaries.
6. Being Manipulated
This is similar to the one above, but here, the other person is aware that you can be “guilted” and they use that to manipulate you. This is a problem in toxic relationships and can be very confusing. If you’ve found yourself in relationships with people who blame and manipulate, you may want to read more about the roles we play in the trauma triangle, as well as the steps to exit the trauma triangle.
Tip: If you’re in a toxic relationship, you will need a great deal of support to work through the confusion, as well as find the strength to either set new boundaries with the person or to get out of the relationship. Find friends or family that you can trust while you navigate this, as they will be your sounding board when confusion sets in. For more information on troubleshooting your boundary setting, Boundaries: 3 Reasons You Move the Line.
7. Self-Silencing
I know. I know. This article was only supposed to have 6 types of toxic guilt. However, over the last several years seeing clients, I have noticed a very specific type of guilt in relationships. This brand of toxic guilt silences folks before they ever ask for anything in relationships. With preemptive guilt, you stop yourself from expressing any needs, wants, and desires before your partner even has a chance to say no. Internally, you’ve already decided that for them. This can come from having a family of origin where your needs were not attuned to, so you decided that they weren’t important, or it can be a result of asking for your needs to be met in the relationship and your partner then dismissed you. In either case, preemptive guilt is detrimental to yourself and the relationship because disowning your internal truths is not sustainable. This pattern often has roots in early relational experiences, which is why attachment therapy can help address the deeper wounds that make expressing needs feel unsafe.
Tip: If you notice yourself shrinking before you know how the other person will respond, at minimum, pause and check in with yourself. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with who were silencing themselves based on how they thought others would respond, only to learn that once they finally spoke up, it wasn’t a big deal.
If you struggle with more than one of the above types of toxic guilt, relationships can be challenging. It’s hard to get a sense of where you end and the other person begins. If this sounds like you, you may want to consider Attachment Therapy as an option for healing.
All of the therapists at Mindful Living Counseling Orlando are trained and experienced in Attachment Therapy. If you’re interested in learning, just follow the steps below.
Fill out our New Client Consultation Form.
Schedule a consultation call with our Client Care Coordinator
Begin your healing journey!
Attachment Therapy Orlando Resources
10 Strategies for Dealing With Self-Doubt (From a Trauma Therapist)
How to Deal With an Emotionally Immature Partner
A Trauma Therapist Explores How Guilt in Relationships Turns Care Into Resentment
Don't feel emotionally connected? 31 signs your partner is emotionally immature
Other Therapy Services Offered at Mindful Living Counseling Orlando
Mindful Living Counseling acknowledges that toxic guilt is only one of the challenges that you may struggle with. Therefore, we provide various therapy services to cater to diverse needs. Our therapy services include EMDR Therapy, Trauma Therapy, Teen Therapy, and Toxic Relationship Therapy. We also offer Guided Meditations to our clients. If you have any queries, please feel free to reach out to us!
About Orlando Therapist: Lauran Daugherty Hahn, LMHC
My name is Lauran Hahn, and I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. I have been passionate about EMDR Therapy for the past six years, ever since I witnessed how it transformed the lives of my clients. This experience has motivated me to pursue additional certification, and now I am a certified Sensorimotor psychotherapist, an EMDRIA-approved consultant, and an EMDR Facilitator at ConnectEMDR. I am thrilled to announce that I am now offering EMDR Intensives