Effects of Guilt Guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, real or imagined. There are different types of guilt. Guilt can be caused by a physical thing a person did that they are not proud of or wanted to hide, it can be something a person imagined they had done to someone or something else, or it can be caused when a person he did something to his God or religion. Everyone, at some point in their lives, deals with guilt and this has a different impact on each person. People who feel guilty about something they have done or said can influence how other people behave and feel. Some people are affected by guilt worse than others, for example Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter. Talked about in The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale, a man with the deepest sense of guilt, was responsible for the moral well-being of his people. He went against his teachings, committed adultery, and left the woman to publicly suffer alone while he remained as a hero in the city. On the other hand, sometimes the masses are affected by one person's guilt. He was much more guilt-ridden because he didn't tell anyone what he had done. By keeping guilt internalized, a person ultimately ends up hurting themselves. More than seventy percent of all the things that make people feel guilty are discovered later in their lives by other people. Guilt has three categories that affect people the most: physical, mental and spiritual. The physical effects of guilt can be greater or lesser depending on the person. Some people get sick from guilt. For example, in The Scarlet Letter it is said: "a disease of the body, which we consider whole and entire in itself, can after all only be a symptom of some disorder in the spiritual part." (93) Guilt can take a toll on the people a person loves. Although a person wants to protect them, his guilty symptoms can upset his loved ones even if he doesn't want it too. Dimmesdale loved Hester, the woman with whom he committed adultery, but he hid his sin from people while she could not. Subsequently, Dimmesdale hurt the person he loved and the guilt overwhelmed him throughout the story making him sick, pale, restless and without energy..