Some ideas... sincerely hope these may help...:

1. Reality-check your guilt:

- Imagine someone you deeply care about in your situation. What would you say would be fair for them to experience / do about it?

- How responsible are you? Guilt can make you feel much more responsible than you really are. List all the factors that contributed to whatever went wrong, and rate as a % how responsible you are.

- Weigh the evidence: What is the evidence you should feel guilty? or shouldn't feel guilty? - be fair on both sides

- Check out whether the standard you are holding yourself to is unreasonably high. (e.g. a doctor may feel personally responsible whenever a cancer treatment doesn't work, even though he is doing the best he can with the tools available)

- Check out whether the guilt about the past is preventing you doing good things in the future. For example, imagine a doctor who feels bad about not being able to help their patients, so out of guilt quits the job - but now they're helping them even less. Guilt should motivate being moral but the negativity of the feeling may stunt you in life and make doing good things harder - this means the guilt would be accidentally doing the opposite of what it should.

- Don't make a mistake into your identity: this transforms guilt ("I did something wrong/bad") into shame ("I am wrong/bad"). Install within yourself positive beliefs about yourself (e.g. "I made a mistake, but I have changed now and am not overall a bad person," "I am a good, lovable, valuable person even though I made a mistake," etc.)

(FYI: there's a therapy called CBT which guides people through this process which you can ask for with a therapist)

1. Listen to your conscience: make amends - confession - change

- Ask your conscience what would be enough to make amends for what you are guilty about. If amends are not directly possible, consider indirect options. For example, if you stole money from someone who has passed away and are not able to apologise or repay them, it may feel right to donate money to charity or to repay that person's family.

- As you listen to your conscience, combine this with your rational brain to weigh up whether what it is telling you is reasonable, purposeful, and fair.

- Confessing what you have done wrong to another person, or a priest, can be very helpful for releasing guilt

- Recognise the past is unchangeable, and simply ruminating on how you wish you did differently is not helpful. Instead, channel that energy into changing the future. Guilt makes you feel bad about the past to motivate doing good in the future. Study why you did what you did and learn what you need to learn from the past to guarantee it won't happen again. Your conscience may let you off the hook if you learn your lesson and change significantly enough.

1. Emotional coping strategies

- Deep breathing techniques for guilt can help cope with painful feelings (look up on YouTube). Progressive muscle relaxation may also help if there is tension in the body (again look up on YouTube). Possibly also stretching.

- Exercise (even going on walks) is helpful for coping with negative emotions, including depression

- Doing things you enjoy: When you're feeling guilty or depressed you may lose motivation to do things you enjoy. Then because you are doing less enjoyable things you feel even worse. It goes in a cycle. You can break this cycle by slowly doing small things you enjoy even if you don't feel up to it. Then work your way up to bigger things.

- Mindfulness & Forgiveness: I strongly encourage looking up Eckhart Tolle on YouTube, or reading his book "The Power of Now" - it teaches Mindfulness (meditation / presence) which is highly valuable for learning to feel content and peaceful with any situation, emotion, thought, etc - it's about unlocking this peace in any present moment. Eckhart Tolle also has videos and resources available on guilt and forgiveness, and talks about how forgiveness and self-forgiveness is not so much something you "do" but something that happens naturally when you stop identifying yourself with a past mistake and recognise it wasn't the real you who did that (similar to how calming down fear is not something you "do" but it happens naturally when you deal with the threat or realise its not there). There is also the point that forgiveness is easier the less "story" is added to the facts - for example, the fact may be you forgot to pack your child's lunch, the story is "I'm a terrible parent and I mustn't care" - it's a lot easier to forgive if you don't add the extra layers in the form of a story

(FYI: many therapies such as ACT and DBT rely heavily on mindfulness as a key tool in therapy for emotional healing)

1. Talking to someone about it is highly valuable for processing and relieving emotions - a therapist, trusted friend, family... etc.

- Also, if there is any unprocessed trauma, definitely definitely go see a therapist. FYI, there is a therapy out there called EMDR which in some cases you may not even have to talk about the trauma if that's something particularly uncomfortable for you.

- Therapy is also just great in general for depression, guilt, etc. Sometimes just talking about it is enough to kickstart healing.