If you only feel bad when you get caught, that isn’t guilt. It’s disappointment.

There is a difference between minding the thing you did and minding the result for you. Being caught produces a sharp, recognisable feeling, but it is mostly about losing the position you were in: the trust, the freedom, the clean record. Real guilt turns up earlier and quietly, when nobody else knows yet. Telling them apart is useful mainly because they ask different things of you.

Next time something goes wrong, check when the bad feeling started. If it waited for the discovery, ask what you would have thought about it had nobody ever found out. That answer, rather than the punishment, is the one to act on.