Shame & Guilt Part One
Everyone feels shame and guilt. But, while frequent and often constructive, they can also be toxic and deeply damaging. Shame and guilt are complex because they impact our identity, our values, our sense of what is (and isn’t) our responsibility, and our relationships with others. That complexity is why shame and guilt can become toxic and be challenging to unravel. Here’s how to think about, and work with, shame and guilt in your life.
Let’s start by defining what shame and guilt are in order to understand them better and make our work with them possible. Shame is a term for a quality of emotion and is closely related to embarrassment. They feel similar if we examine how we experience them in our bodies. But, while embarrassment is comparatively light in magnitude compared to shame, they also differ in regard to the cognitive component that causes them to arise. Guilt is a state based on how we think we should be or should have been and the quality of emotion feeling associated with a state of guilt is the same as shame. Let’s unpack all of this.
Embarrassment arises when we violate our persona in some way. One example would be a person who takes great care to keep herself neat and tidy in her appearance but who falls into a mud puddle in front of other people one day while walking in the rain. Her persona is characterized by neatness and the mess that results from the fall into the puddle violates it. Another example is a family I saw one time wherein the father was a law and order guy (and actually a police officer) but he happened to be the father of a teenager who was getting in trouble with the law on a nearly weekly basis. The son’s behaviors were a source of embarrassment for the father due to how they violated his persona.
However troubling embarrassments might be when they happen, we often laugh and cringe at them at the same time. Those we can’t laugh at are often things we can look back on a laugh about later. This is not true of shame.
Shame arises from a violation of fundamental expectations about our identity and/or performance and often appears in one of three types: exclusion, unwanted or undesired exposure, or disappointing an expectation. Of course each of these three types of experiences can occur and not be considered shame if they only impact a more superficial level of expectation. Shame arises when one of these instances violates a more fundamental expectation.
To understand the difference between superficial and fundamental expectations consider two students in a gym class where two team leaders are choosing team members one-by-one for some game with opposing teams. One student is no athlete but fairly average in perceived ability and when these sorting situations happen, they are usually not chosen first but are never chosen last for a team. The other student is always chosen last. It has been this way since the first time they were ever chosen in such a situation. They are never chosen until all other possible students have been chosen for a team. So, when not being chosen on each successive turn of the process of choosing both students will experience disappointment at not being chosen. However, the latter student is much more likely to have a sense of shame by the end of it. The fundamental expectation that is being violated is: I should be not be the last person chosen at least sometimes. That is a more fundamental expectation than: I should be chosen first or at least second in the process.
So, let’s examine shame vs. guilt. Both shame and guilt are violations of fundamental expectations. However, the effect of shame is generalized and irrational but guilt is specific and rational. This can be clear if we consider an example.
Imagine a father who takes an offer from his manager to work overtime on a night that is his son’s final Little League game of the season. He knows his son would prefer to have him there but they need the money for the family expenses. Also, the son has been fairly lackluster in performance all season, so the father doesn’t expect that he would be missing anything special and the son’s mother said it was no problem for her to go to the game. But, it turns out that the son hits not one, but two, home runs during the game. That evening when everyone is home, the son cries and says how upset he is that the father missed the game.
The father feels guilt and shame.
But, I prefer to say it like this: the father thinks he is guilty for not attending the game and feels shame because this means he has failed as a father. And, I want to say it like that because the emotional feeling the father is having is shame even if we lump it together and call it guilt. The shame is there to the extent that the father thinks that missing the game means something about his identity as a father.
The reaction of the father could be different if he constrains the irrational aspect of the consequences of missing the game and keeps it within the more rational experience of regret or remorse. Shame is the profoundly icky feeling we have when we are deeply wrong or bad or exposed or shunned. Regret and remorse are versions of sadness and though sometimes profound, they are isolated to a specific action rather than functioning to injure us at the level of our identity. We will come back to this distinction in a bit.
So, guilt is the term for when we take personally the negative consequences of our actions on others.
We did something and it put someone else at risk or injured them and it is, at least in part, our fault. Guilt happens because we have understanding and empathy about someone else’s experience. The emotional component of guilt will be more like shame if we take a hit to our identity due to our infraction and more like sadness if we keep our attitude in the bounds of regret or remorse.
Like all negative emotional experiences, they can be constructive or destructive. Constructive shame and guilt help us act in accordance with our values and goals and who we want to be in the world. For example, if I flake out on an agreement to help a friend with a project and then later feel some shame and guilt, that could be constructive if it helps me in the future to be more trustworthy and to follow through with reasonable agreements. Shame and guilt in excess of that becomes destructive.
I hope this exploration helps to shed light on the relationship between embarrassment, shame, guilt, and regret and remorse. These experiences are quite complex which is part of the challenge in working with them. In the next article in this three-part series, I’m going to explore how shame and guilt can become toxic and pathways to healing.
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