Separating shame from guilt for personal growth

Something that often comes up in therapy is how subtle differences in how we define words can contribute to miscommunication. Think of how ambiguous it can be to answer ‘good’ when someone is asking how you are, or how your understanding of the word ‘happy’ might include different emotions, memories, body feelings and thoughts to someone else’s. Words have a lot of power, and it’s good to check shared understandings so that that power works for us rather than against us.

An important example is the difference between shame and guilt. Although they’re used interchangeably in everyday language (people usually say ‘guilt’ when they mean ‘shame’, and don’t mention real shame at all because it’s so uncomfortable to talk about), in a mental health sense, they have quite different and specific meanings. Guilt often feels uncomfortable or nervous, and comes up when we notice our behaviours don’t match our life values. On the other hand, shame includes feelings and thoughts of being fundamentally broken, defective, or damaged at our core. It’s a toxic, corrosive inner experience in which a person might feel sick in their stomach or feel a desire to disappear. Shame says “I am bad (full stop)”, whereas guilt says “I have done bad things”. 

This distinction is very important because guilt can be linked to hope and growth, while shame cannot. Shame often connects to difficult early life experiences, when things were going badly, and the young mind struggled to make sense of what was happening. When we first assumed that there was something bad about us that invited bad things to happen, this allowed our younger mind to imagine we were making some sense of what was happening, to feel a little more in control. Sense-making can be comforting, but connecting it to shame is very damaging to self-worth.

Having guilty thoughts and feelings is like daydreaming as we wander through a forest with soft leaves, then suddenly being scratched by a thorn, which causes us to look up and realise we’ve left Soft Forest - that we’ve lost our way. Discomfort that guides us to re-evaluate what we’re doing can be very healthy, and guilty experiences often help to put us back on the path we want to be walking. It can also be future-focused, and allows us to notice that we have the power to act differently in future, which gives hope of feeling better.

Shame and guilt mostly cover the same life experiences, and we might not realise we are choosing one or the other in how we respond, but the difference is so important. For example, if you lose your house key, a shame response to this experience might focus on painful thoughts like “I have always been a completely stupid person”, feelings of intense rage and helplessness, and pacing around frantically searching the same places for the key. A guilt response to this experience might allow the person to reflect on what went wrong in their organisational systems which allowed the loss to happen (such as not consistently putting keys in the key bowl), feel some sadness and dissatisfaction with their past actions, and plan steps to organise a new key and prevent the same type of loss from happening again (such as getting a brighter key bowl and putting it where it’s easier to see near the entry door).

If you’ve been grappling with shame and having lots of everyday experiences that reinforce shameful feelings, I hope the above distinction might be useful to you, and help you think about how you might shift the experience of shame towards guilt. It might sound strange, saying “Try to bring more guilt into your life!”, but real guilt can be a call to action that builds hope for a better future, and strengthens our belief that we can make changes for the better. It’s also a topic that I love discussing with people, so if you’re having trouble with shame, you would be welcome to send me an email to explore working together on improving it.