Guilt over “Having a Life”: Understanding and Addressing Separation/Disloyalty Guilt

This article aims to offer an overview of our knowledge about separation/disloyalty guilt, a maladaptive kind of interpersonal guilt that derives from pathogenic beliefs that associate the healthy and adaptive goals of being separate, different, and independent from important others with the danger of deeply hurting them. These pathogenic beliefs stem from early relational traumas and adverse experiences, such as having had relatives who showed their children that they were visibly hurt by the attempts at exploration and differentiation from their children. Separation/disloyalty guilt has been shown to correlate with eating disorders, panic disorders, obsessive and phobic disorders, illness anxiety disorder, and with transdiagnostic features such as difficulties in mentalization, emotion regulation, and intolerance to frustration. We describe how patients with separation/disloyalty guilt can look for disconfirmations of these pathogenic beliefs during their psychotherapies and how clinicians can help them have the corrective emotional experiences they need.