There is a strange law of psychology that reveals that small children who have been treated badly by their parents often blame themselves and not their parents for their pain. They may hate who they are rather than hating those who have done them wrong. Small children quickly notice when they are not loved as much as they might need to be and understand nothing of the reasons for this hard-heartedness, but they feel all of the pain.
Nevertheless, they need to locate some kind of explanation and so they quickly and intuitively settle on one that almost always feels most compelling to them; that they have done something wrong.
In adult life, it then takes very little to reignite a feeling that somewhere along the line they have said and done something awful. What precise offense they believe themselves to have committed shifts according to events in their lives and the prevailing public mood.
Whenever they make a new friend, they know that soon enough the friend will realize that they are bad and let them go. What makes the guilt so hard to shake off is that they can’t exactly pinpoint its origin.
The only way to cure this kind of guilt is to unpick its origins; to realize that we are of course not bad at all, rather that we have been bullied without justice into thinking we might be. We need at last to exchange self-flagellation for a little bit of righteous anger against those who have done us wrong.