Guilt, the less intense but still powerful cousin of shame, has a certain knack of creeping up on us introverts. It can pop up at any time, if we let it. Don’t want to take that call right now? *guilt* Don’t want to go to that cocktail party? *guilt* And then of course there are the times we feel guilty with the help of well meaning family and friends who make comments like “you don’t go out enough.”

According to the Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd edition: “Guilty individuals are pained by their evaluation of failure. Guilt is often associated with a corrective action that the individual can take (but does not necessarily take) to repair the failure and prevent it from happening again.”

Summarizing the above, guilt is:
a) painful, and
b) sometimes followed by the wish to change

So in the case of declining a cocktail party invitation our guilt mental chatter may sound like “Oh man, I’m being so rude by not going. She’ll be offended. I need to stop being so selfish and just go to these things.” Guilt is an important emotion. It helps us to be empathetic and kind, and to make up with people we’ve slighted. But the mental chatter quoted above brings up two important questions. Is the slight imagined? And is the situation really something we need to feel guilty about?

It’s not worth the mental and physical exhaustion of feeling guilty for something that’s imagined or not a big deal, particularly if you’ve silenced a phone call or declined an invitation because you need some downtime.

Here are a few ways to combat your social guilt:

  • Ask yourself if it really is something you should feel guilty about (and therefore a behavior that needs to be reexamined). Perhaps your guilt is the product of an extrovert-biased society, or you’re projecting your own feelings onto someone else.
  • If you did genuinely make a mistake, is there anything you can learn from the situation?
  • Realize that the past is finished, and therefore beyond improvement. The future however can be changed.
  • Determine ahead of time what kind of social situations you should unequivocally accept an invitation to. For instance, you could make it a personal pledge to go to all birthdays and retirement parties for at least one hour and to try to be present and open during that time. This will help with the “will I/won’t I” mental anguish we sometimes feel. And once you’ve put in your hour you can leave if you want.
  • Realize that you are not responsible for the other person’s feelings and reactions (though of course this should not be used as an excuse to be mean or decline an invitation in a rude way). Sophia Dembling, in her book The Introvert’s Way, says the magic words to repeat to yourself are “Not my responsibility. Not my problem.”
  • If you’re very worried you hurt someone else’s feeling, ask them.
  • If you’ve confirmed that you’ve hurt the person’s feelings, you could apologize and see if you can come to a compromise about social situations going forward.
  • When declining an invitation from a good friend, make plans to meet one-on-one later on. If you regularly ignore their phone calls, trying scheduling Skype video calls instead.
  • Set a timer and give yourself 5 minutes to feel guilty. Once the 5 minutes are over, forget about it and go on with the rest of your day.

And finally, explain your introversion to the people around you. They may not be ready to listen the first time you say it, but please, keep talking about it!