See also: Guys and Guilt

All working moms have guilt war stories. We cringe when we remember the time we blanked on a basketball game, faked our way through a meeting after staying up all night with a sick infant or slid behind our desk as unobtrusively as possible after arriving late to work—again—because we couldn’t help locate the lost homework assignment. Sure, the dictionary defines guilt as a feeling of remorse for an offense, whether real or imagined. But working mothers know it’s so much more pervasive than that: It’s how we feel far too often when we’re caught in too many “damned if we do and damned if we don’t” scenarios. It can feel inescapable.

Much as we hate it, though, guilt is what keeps us human, says Dana Dorfman, PhD, a psychologist in New York City. “After all, a person without guilt is a sociopath,” she says.

“But the danger is that an overdose of guilt can be a complete waste of time and energy, especially if it traps you in a negative cycle of thoughts.” With that in mind, we went on an exploratory mission, the theory being that if we examine the anatomy of guilt, if we break it down and wrestle it to the ground, we might be able to keep it in check. We talked to experts about why guilt seems to be a working mom’s go-to emotion, how it harms our health, what we can do to keep it from making us lose sleep at night—and why men so often seem to be immune.


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