The Body Keeps the Score: Your Guilt Is Lying to You

By Elena Vella | Mind & Soul | PUCKA by News Beast

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There is a man in the news this week who was training for an Ironman — the kind of race that demands everything from a body, months of early starts and self-imposed suffering and the particular discipline of someone who has decided to prove something, not to anyone else, but to the voice inside themselves that once said *you can't*. James Camilleri was riding. A pothole swallowed his front wheel. He hit the ground with a broken collarbone and a fundraiser for Caritas Malta that will now have to wait.

I want to talk about what happens in the body after something like that. Not the collarbone — that heals. I want to talk about what happens in the mind of a person who was doing everything right and got punished for it anyway.

Because there is a thought pattern that follows injury, failure, sudden loss — follows it as reliably as shadow follows light — and it goes like this: *What did I do wrong?* Not the practical version of that question, the useful one that checks your tyre pressure and your route. The other one. The one that arrives at three in the morning with your arm in a sling and says: *Maybe this happened because you deserved it.*

Psychologists call this the just-world fallacy — the cognitive bias (a mental shortcut that distorts reality) that insists bad things happen to bad people, or careless people, or people who somehow invited it. The reason we cling to this belief, even when it's clearly absurd, is because the alternative is more frightening: that the world is genuinely indifferent. That you can train for six months, raise money for people who have nothing, choose the right road — and still meet a pothole that was nobody's fault and changes everything.

The mind resists this. It would rather assign blame — even to itself — than accept randomness. Self-blame, perversely, feels like control. If *I* caused this, then *I* can prevent the next one. The body is broken; the illusion of mastery remains intact.

I see this in the clinic more than almost anything else. Someone arrives after a divorce, a redundancy, a health scare, a betrayal — and before they can grieve it properly, they are already constructing a case against themselves. *I should have seen it coming. I should have been different. I should have known.* The self-indictment is so automatic, so fluent, that it sounds like wisdom. It isn't. It is the mind doing what minds always do when faced with chaos: reach for a story that makes the chaos make sense, even if that story is unkind.

The clinical term for what actually helps is *cognitive reappraisal* — not positive thinking, which is just denial wearing a nicer jacket, but genuinely examining the story you're telling yourself and asking: *Is this accurate, or is this just comforting?* There is a difference between learning from an experience and punishing yourself with it. The first makes you wiser. The second makes you smaller, and smaller people are not better at avoiding potholes.

What the body knows, and what the mind resists learning, is that resilience is not the absence of breaking. It is the capacity to break and to hold both things at once — the fracture and the fact that you were doing something worth doing when it happened. James Camilleri was training for an Ironman. He was raising money for people who needed it. The pothole does not change either of those things. The pothole is just a pothole.

The work — the real, unglamorous, non-Instagram version of psychological health — is learning to separate the event from the verdict. Something happened to you. That is not the same as something being wrong with you. Your nervous system will try to collapse that distinction every single time, because certainty, even painful certainty, costs less energy than ambiguity.

So here is what I would offer, and I mean this practically, not poetically: the next time something breaks — a plan, a relationship, a collarbone — give yourself forty-eight hours before you write the explanation. Not forever. Just forty-eight hours. Because the story you tell in the first hours is never the true story. It is the panic story, the just-world story, the *I must have deserved this* story. The true story requires a little more distance, a little less adrenaline