What are guilt trips?

Guilt is a powerful emotion. When someone wields it skillfully, either knowingly or unknowingly, to get a need met, they’re issuing a “guilt trip.”

Imagine that you aren’t feeling up to visiting your family after they invite you, and you say you’re not up to the trip. When your mom says, “I guess we just aren’t that important to you,” welcome to the guilt trip zone.

After that, you may feel bad and want her to know that you find your family important. Maybe you decide to make the trip after all, even though you don’t feel like driving for so long, or maybe you stay home but now spend your entire weekend worried about your mom being convinced you don’t care about her.

Guilt trips are more likely to happen within our close relationships, relationships where we care about the other person’s feelings and have emotional ties with them.

People who use guilt to communicate are doing it to express frustration, and they use it when they feel something is preventing them from saying just how they feel. Guilt trips often come from those who have difficulty with direct communication. It may be difficult, but understanding where someone who relies on guilt is coming from can help communicate with them.

The person issuing the guilt trip may not realize what they’re doing. The difficulty is that if guilt is used a lot, you may start to resent them for it. Even when the guilt is part of a helpful behavior – like trying to get you to exercise when you really need to – it’s important to note that changes made out of guilt are usually riddled with resentment and a negative sense of obligation.

Allowing guilt-tripping to continue as a pattern of behavior in a relationship you really care about won’t help you or the other person involved. It may be tempting to go along with whatever guilt trip-based request, but resentment can add up and harm the relationship. There are some helpful things you can do:

1. Call it out when you notice it, even if only to yourself.
2. Listen to the guilt-tripper with as much compassion and empathy as you can muster. Maybe they’re afraid of being clear and honest, or they never learned how to communicate well. Listen for their feeling. Using our example above, your mom feeling you don’t think your family is important, you might say, “I can tell you’re upset and thinking some things based on me not feeling up to the trip. Let’s talk about that.”
3. Protect your boundaries.

Guilt-tripping most often happens in relationships that really matter to us. For that reason, it is important to address it, set and protect boundaries, and reach out for help from a professional counselor when you’re unsure of what to do or for support in identifying boundaries and improving communication.