The Guilt That Didn’t Belong to Me

For a long time, I carried guilt I couldn’t explain.

It sat there in the background, constant. Sometimes quiet, sometimes overwhelming, but always there. A feeling that I’d done something wrong, even when I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

That’s the thing about guilt when it’s tied to trauma.

It doesn’t always make sense.

It doesn’t come from something you’ve actually done. It comes from something that happened to you — and somehow, over time, you’ve taken responsibility for it.

I didn’t realise that at first. I just thought it was part of who I was. That I was someone who made mistakes, who caused problems, who needed to do better.

So I tried.

I tried to be better. To fix things. To make up for something I didn’t fully understand. And when that feeling didn’t go away, I pushed harder.

But it never worked.

Because you can’t fix something that was never yours to carry in the first place.

That’s the part people don’t talk about enough.

When something happens to you — especially at a young age — your brain tries to make sense of it. And sometimes the only way it can do that is by turning it back on you.

“If it was my fault, then I can control it.”
“If I did something wrong, then I can stop it happening again.”

It sounds backwards, but at the time, it can feel safer than accepting that something was out of your control.

So that belief sticks.

And it doesn’t just stay in the past. It follows you. It shows up in how you see yourself, how you handle relationships, how you respond to mistakes.

You overthink things.
You take on blame that isn’t yours.
You apologise for things you didn’t do.

And underneath it all, there’s that same feeling — that you’ve done something wrong.

Even when you haven’t.

For me, that guilt fed into everything else. It fed into my anxiety, my behaviour, and the way I coped. It made it harder to speak, harder to open up, harder to believe that what I’d been through wasn’t my fault.

Because if it wasn’t my fault…

then I had to face what it actually was.

And that’s not easy.

Letting go of guilt like that isn’t just about telling yourself “it wasn’t your fault.” It’s about unpicking something that’s been there for years. Something that’s shaped how you think and feel without you even realising it.

It takes time.

It takes understanding.

And it takes being willing to question something that’s felt true for a long time.

But when that shift starts to happen, even a little bit, it changes things.

You stop carrying something that was weighing you down.
You start seeing yourself differently.

Not as someone who caused it.
But as someone who went through it.

And that’s a big difference.

If you’ve ever felt guilty for something you didn’t choose, something you didn’t understand, or something that was done to you — you’re not the only one.

And that guilt doesn’t define you.

It might have been there for a long time.

But it doesn’t mean it belongs to you.