Continuing on from the previous post about guilt vs shame, I wanted to write a bit about humiliation and embarrassment, other feelings which can get confused for shame. The way you feel when a friend notices your fly is unzipped… Or the way you felt when you said something wrong in front of the whole classroom, and everybody laughed loudly at you. These are examples of classic situations which can trigger guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and shame. We typically mix up thes

Guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and shame... We typically mix up these words as a catch-all, but the truth is they describe very different feelings.

Something that often comes up in therapy is how subtle differences in how we define words can contribute to miscommunication.