"I deserve it"

Sometimes the commentary presents itself as justice. You did wrong, and wrongdoers should suffer. To let yourself off would be to cheat. The feeling is strongest when someone else was affected by what you did. You snapped at your son, or let a colleague down, or forgot your mother's birthday. It can feel as though hating yourself for a while is the least you owe.

There's something right in this, and I don't want to argue it away. When you've hurt someone, you should feel bad. That pang is conscience, and a person without it is dangerous. The distinction from the last chapter applies here. Guilt, in the useful sense, is about the act. It says, "I did a bad thing, and I need to put it right." It belongs to correction. What the commentary supplies is mostly the other kind, which says, "I am a bad person." That's attack again, under another name.

Ask who receives the payment. If you snapped at Sam this morning, the person you owe something to is Sam. What he's owed is an apology, an explanation that it wasn't his fault, and a parent who's in a better state this evening. An hour of calling yourself a terrible mother gives him none of those. He doesn't know it's happening, and nothing reaches him. If anything, he gets less, because a parent who's busy hating herself is withdrawn and brittle, and more likely to snap again.

Self-punishment can even stand in for repair. Having suffered, you feel the account is settled. You feel you've paid, though the person you wronged has received nothing, and the urgency to make amends fades. I'm offering that as an observation and not a finding. It's worth checking against your own experience. After a long bout of self-reproach, you may be no more likely to pick up the phone and apologise, and sometimes you're less likely.

Compare the sentences with the offences too. You can do this with the list you made in chapter 1. A late form earned "you absolute idiot, what is wrong with you". A slip over a figure earned "they're wondering how you got this job". If a judge handed out sentences on that scale for offences of that size, there'd be a public inquiry. No system of justice would recognise them. The commentary says the same things whatever the offence, and says them just as hard.

If you've done something that matters, you owe three things, in this order. You should acknowledge it plainly, to yourself and to the person affected. You should repair what can be repaired. And you should work out what you'll do differently. That's a demanding list, and it's much harder than calling yourself names, which asks nothing of you. Once those three are done, the debt is paid. Further punishment does nothing for the person you wronged.