QUESTION: It’s been 20 years since I left [extremism] and I still feel so guilty and ashamed. Will I ever get over it?
ANSWER: I’m grateful that you asked this question! The guilt and shame of our pasts can weigh heavily indeed, and as someone who has been out of extremism for 30 years, I can attest that letting go of these feelings is an ongoing process. The movement(s) and activities we were involved in were harmful both to members of our communities, as well as ourselves. It is reasonable and, dare I say, “normal,” for us to feel the way we do.
For many years I let guilt and shame overwhelm me and be a driving influence in how I walked through the world. I felt that living like this was the price I had to pay for my past, and for decades I never questioned it. I allowed thoughts like “why would anyone at work listen to what I have to say?” or “people won’t be my friends because of who I used to be” dominate my mind and actions. As a result, I often kept my distance from others, or sat in the back of the room, feeling both unwilling and unable to contribute. To cope with the loneliness and lack of fulfilment living this way created, I turned to unhealthy coping strategies like binge eating and prescription drug abuse.
In short, I acted like I was a shadow in the midst of my own life and as a result I missed out on a lot of the fun of living. If your relationship with guilt and shame is anything like mine, you know it’s unsustainable, and when you consider its full impact, you realize it’s a selfish way to live. That may sound harsh, but allowing these emotions to dominate and limit our participation in many aspects of life keeps us in a safe little auto-opt-out bubble where we avoid enriching the those around us by preemptively assuming that we cannot.
I used to think that guilt and shame would automatically fade over time, but unfortunately that is not the case – at least not for all of us. Instead, I learned they must be considered and worked through with deliberate and decisive actions. The first step is recognizing and appreciating why these feelings are important, and the role they’ve played in our post-extremism lives. Guilt and shame are strong emotional signposts that indicate how much our worldviews have evolved. They can also serve as catalysts for us to continue learning, growing, and participating in activities that heal and build back the social fabric we tried to rip apart so many years ago. It has taken me a very long time to understand that emotions like guilt and shame serve a purpose and can be positive in their own ways.
Acceptance of these feelings reduces the power they have, while fighting against them only further entrenches these emotional responses in our minds. To let them go, there are lots of exercises out there around writing letters that you burn, shred, or throw in the ocean in a dramatic fashion. Doing this can help, surprisingly enough, but when an emotional response is deeply entrenched after decades, an afternoon of writing it out often isn’t enough. Instead, we must work on creating new emotional stories and thoughts we tell ourselves to overwrite the old guilt and shame.
Recently I read Kamal Ravikant’s book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, in which he explains how he saved his own life through radical self-love, forgiveness and acceptance. Telling a former extremist that they need to just love themselves more seems trite and ridiculous, but at a fundamental human level it is essential for our own healing and survival. We spend so much time unlearning the hate we had for others and reconnecting with the humanity in them that we often forget to also heal and connect with the humanity within ourselves, believing, as I did, that being emotionally stunted by the weight of shame was the price of our worst life choices.
We, like every other human being, are worthy of love from ourselves and others. And, like every other human being, we are the sum of the stories we tell. While we may not be able to entirely remove the books of guilt and shame from our mental library, we get to decide which stories we pull off the shelf most often, and we can do that in a way that does not sidestep responsibility of our past actions.
A few years ago, I connected with some of the people I directly harmed when I was a neo-Nazi at Queen’s University, and they gave me the gift of allowing me to apologize to them. While they appreciated the apology, in most cases they said they had forgiven me a long time ago and had moved on. I was shocked because I had not forgiven myself and was still carrying that guilt! They may not have understood at the time, but their forgiveness gave me permission to start to heal myself and move the past to where it belongs: in the past. By doing so, I can be more present for myself, my family and friends, and my work.
After thirty years I’m learning how to live life as it’s meant to be lived. You can, too. And if you need someone’s permission to put down that weight or make those feelings of guilt and shame quiet down, you can have mine.
You’re allowed to love yourself.
