Coping Constructively With Guilt: William G. Justice

Emotionally and spiritually healthy people experience feelings of guilt. I have spent many years working to help people cope with guilt and the subsequent feelings of guilt.
During the thirty-one years I served as a bedside hospital chaplain, I listened to concerns of almost 200,000 people. Although I wore no clerical collar, I listened to confession almost daily. During my three years of internship and residency in a post-seminary clinical training program for potential hospital chaplains, although I am a Protestant, my supervisors had prepared me to hear people’s confession as they sought relief from the pain of guilt.
After having settled comfortably into my ministry as a chaplain in the East Tennessee Baptist Hospital, Knoxville, Tennessee, I earned a licenses as a Marriage and Family Therapist and as a Professional Counselor. Twenty-eight years later, I retired from the hospital and I went into private practice. I continued there for sixteen years. I was forced to close my practice to care for my wife who was slowly dying.
I often referred to mine as a ministry of listening. For forty-seven years I had listened almost daily to people who were coping with feelings of guilt.
With my training background in both, theology and psychology, during the 1970s, I began reading everything I could find about guilt from both, a theological and psychological perspective. I searched every library I could find within a 200 mile radius of my home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Colleges, universities, and theological schools graciously allowed me to search their care files and shelves and to loan me their books.
By the time I began writing on the subject, to my personal observations and conclusions, I added the thoughts and conclusions of the writers of forty-six books. I could tell my publisher that I had read everything I could find in print on the subject of guilt.
In 1980, Baker Book House published my first book on guilt: Guilt and Forgiveness – How God Can Help You Feel Good About Yourself. The next year, in 1981, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. published my second book on guilt: Guilt, The Source and the Solution.
Twenty-six years later, I re-wrote and combined those two books under the title, Damned, if We Are Not Forgiven: Understanding Guilt and People Who Are Their Own Worst Enemies. Published by GlobalEdAdvance in 2007, it remains in print as a paperback and now has been published as an ebook by both, Amazon and Barnes Noble’s Nookpress.
Although we may try any of more than two dozen ways of coping with feelings of guilt, forgiveness is the only constructive way of dealing with them. Unfortunately, that is not always as simple as it may sound. It is my hope and my prayer that this book will help you cope with guilt and its feelings, and that it will help equip you to help others who struggle with them.