Any being is basically good and basically has good intentions. Anybody knows instinctively that at least this is the way it is supposed to be.
If a person finds herself having acted in ways that she labels as "not good" it violates the rule about being good. The typical responses to that is to feel bad, to hide one's actions from oneself or from others, or to punish oneself.
The person herself is her own worst judge. Most people will punish themselves severely if they feel that they have violated rules they should abide by.
A person who is certain of her own goodness will not do that. However, the typical human being has no such certainty. She will typically know that she ought to be good, but she isn't quite. That opens the door to all sorts of religious manipulation and guilt trips. People will jump through all sorts of hoops in order to redeem their "badness" so they can feel good again.
The existence of moral codes is a major contributor to guilt. A moral code is basically a set of fixed rules that somebody in some position of authority has established, presumably to simplify things for subjects with less of an overview, to ensure that they do sensible things. A moral code, if created with good intentions, is typically a set of simple rules for behavior that on the average would be deemed to best enhance people's lives. Created with less good intentions, the idea is to control people by having them go out of their way to live up to arbitrary limiting rules. Moral codes are often positioned as if they have been decreed by "the gods", to give them maximum effect.
Moral codes are fixed ideas. They can never work under all circumstances. They are ways of not looking, not dealing with things, not taking one's own decisions.
A member of a group would typically commit to following the moral code of that group. It might or might not be written down. It might for that matter just be that individual's implicit idea of how one is supposed to behave. But any group has some kind of rules regulating behavior to a higher or lesser degree.
By being a member of the group, one implicitly agrees that its rules are "good". Now, what happens then when one breaks the rules? Well, if one is not quite connected with one's basic goodness, one will probably consider that one has done something "bad". Most likely one will feel a little bad about it.
When one does what one considers to be a perpetration, one will limit oneself a little bit. That is a twisted way of maintaining the truth of every being being good. If one does something that isn't good then one can't be quite as much of a being. So, one makes oneself a little smaller. At least in relation to the group whose moral code one violated.
If one keeps making more perpetrations, they will stack up and one will limit oneself more or withdraw more and more from the group. One will more and more hold oneself back. Because one has acted badly, one holds oneself back from acting, so that one doesn't get to do something bad again.
One will also tend to attract bad things to oneself in the area. One's guilt will act as a magnet, making it likely that the same thing will happen to oneself.
Another piece of twisted logic that often happens here is: if one committed a perpetration against a person or group, and one inherently always does good things, well, then that person or group obviously can't be good. In other words, one justifies what one has done by further putting down the target of one's perpetration. Again, that is likely to get worse and worse. Because one did one perpetration and put down the target to justify it, it is then more justified to do another perpetration against them, then to justify that, and then to do another, etc. One would most likely be badmouthing that establishment more and more. And if it was a group one was a member of, one would withdraw more and more from it.
A moral code might belong to a group, to a relationship, or to just one individual.
Having one's perpetrations being almost found out by others creates a very frantic phenomenon that can be quite explosive. The person is wavering between whether or not she has been found out or if her actions are still hidden. That would particularly make her badmouth anybody who is perceived as almost finding her out. That is a phenomenon a process facilitator needs to be aware of and avoid. If you are almost finding somebody out and they get upset, please "find them out" completely to get it over with. Get the whole story if you have started to get some of it and the client is getting frantic.
Much of this perpetration/justification/holding back phenomenon is a process of individuation and separation taking place. One separates from that which one does bad actions against.
Now, none of this is really the truth of the matter. Those are semantic reactions, done sub-consciously from an already limited and misunderstood perspective. If the truth is re-established, all the negative phenomena will go away.
All separation is artificial. Spirit isn't really fragmented. If one fully realizes that, there is never any basis for guilt. What one does is what one does. If one is a whole and aligned person, there is no reason to label it as bad or feel ashamed of it. And, if one is a whole and aligned person, one will naturally do things that honor the wholeness of the situation, and it never becomes an issue in the first place.
The basic handling of guilt is to help the person towards recognizing the basic goodness in herself and everything. If we dig into the "bad" actions she has done, we will find basically good intentions.
One needs to have the ability to forgive oneself. Seeking forgiveness for one's sins from the outside doesn't solve anything. It would just give one a license to be irresponsible. A person must be responsible for her own actions. She must act out of her basic goodness and must forgive herself for any perceived mistake she might have made.
One way of addressing the matter is to free up the fixedness of rules, that there is only one right or wrong way of behaving. Those rules can be addressed like any other fixed ideas, testing their limits, finding what they are trying to accomplish, seeing them from different viewpoints, etc. Also finding what purpose the fixedness itself serves. There are some things she is trying to not look at by keeping things black and white.
Finding the basic goodness in oneself and others will tend to get under this whole mechanism. Really there is no such thing as badness. People do what they do because it consciously or sub-consciously is the best thing they can think of at the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but regardless, there is really not much need for making oneself or others totally wrong.
A fixation on good/bad and a need for punishing oneself is basically a polarity. One would in principle have one side that did something and another side that judged it as bad. The action side is lacking the judgment and the judgment side is lacking the ability to act. If they were together there really wouldn't be any problem.
The whole idea of perpetrations comes out of fragmentation, the idea that one isn't whole. There is somebody else who sets the rules, there is somebody else to commit perpetrations against, there is somebody else to judge them. If one takes responsibility for being a whole person and one starts acting according to one's own integrity, then there is no issue of perpetrations any longer.
Integrity is to be acting out of wholeness.