In adoption reunion, have you ever found yourself turning to someone in your life and saying "If you loved me you would" or ending an argument with "don't worry about me". If so, are you using guilt as a weapon?
Using guilt as a weapon may get you what you want in the short term, but it is a dangerous tactic that will undermine your relationship with your natural mother, child, sibling, spouse or significant other.

Using guilt destroys intimacy by making love conditional. If you manipulate someone with guilt you are telling them that unless things are done the way you demand you will stop loving them. You set yourself up in a position of power that can only be sustained by keeping the other person down. Guilt attacks both the other person and your relationship.
By putting a guilt trip on someone by using the tactics above sets up tasks that someone must perform to your satisfaction in order to be accepted and worthy of your love. These tests, say to the other person t prove their love for you because you don’t believe that they love you. The other person may feel that they are required to start from the beginning and prove their love all over again.

Guilt can destroy trust. Guilt attacks a person with the intent to harm them. It is a behavior designed to cause pain so that the other person will change their point of view or behavior.

How can you expect the other person to trust someone that is intentionally wounding them? Without trust, a healthy relationship is impossible because trust creates the foundation and roots where intimacy is grown It is the basis for honesty, openness, and vulnerability. You can not develop emotional intimacy with someone you have to protect yourself from

One of the most painful way to hurt the other person with guilt is to bring up past hurts and wrongs. No matter what the other person has done in the past or how sorry they are for doing it, there is absolutely nothing they can do today to take it back. Bringing up the past is a cruel way to punish someone. If a person chooses they can torture the other person forever with it and it will never go away. Loving someone requires forgiving the past and letting it go. If you honestly can’t let go of something that has happened then you can not be in a relationship with that person. It simply does not work.

Using guilt is never and act of love and it is always an act of violence. It may be masqueraded as brutal honesty but the true intention of guilt is always to wound or hurt. Guilt can make the other person suffer so why do some use it in adoption reunion?

Some may use guilt when they feel threatened, unloved or unworthy. Something in the relationship or in our past makes us feel vulnerable and one resorts to guilt in an attempt to regain control of the situation. Unfortunately, using guilt never gives us what we are really looking for. Instead of building the relationship that we crave, you are attacking the other person with guilt and that will pull you apart.