TRANSCRIPT
What is the difference between shame and guilt? How do we heal from guilt, and how do we heal from shame? And is it a similar process?
Well, for starters, I think guilt is something that we feel on the inside, specifically in our relationship with ourselves, in our relationship with our conscience. We feel we’ve done something wrong. We feel we’ve done something bad, and it bothers us in our relationship with our own internal self that we’ve done something wrong.
Now, does that mean that we have done something wrong? Well, I actually made a whole other video on that, on healthy versus unhealthy guilt. And I think the difference, just to sum it up really quickly, is that healthy guilt is when we feel guilty when our conscience is bothered by something that we actually have done that is bad, is wrong, that we’ve harmed someone else or we’ve harmed our own selves. And it troubles us that we’ve done something that’s harmful or destructive.
When we feel unhealthy guilt, that’s when we feel troubled when our conscience is bothered by something that we actually never did but we think is bad, we think is wrong, but actually it wasn’t wrong. But we can still feel guilty. So, unhealthy or healthy guilt, it all still comes down to that internal feeling that we are troubled in our relationship with ourselves. Our conscience says, “You did something wrong,” and it nags at us.
Now, what’s shame? How is shame different? Shame ultimately is not about our relationship with our own internal self. It’s not that our conscience is troubled by something that’s happened to us or something that we’ve done. It’s something about other people, that other people are troubled by about us or our behavior, something that we’ve done or something about who we are. In some ways, it’s other people thinking that we’re bad, that we’re wrong, that we’re defective in some way, that something is wrong with us, something is troubling about our history or our behavior or our very sense of self.
But it’s not that our conscience is necessarily troubled by it at all. It’s that our relationships with other people are troubled by it, and other people are looking at us in a way that they reject us or they abandon us, or they’re putting all sorts of judgment on us, negative feelings toward us for things that they perceive are bad about us.
So, in a way, we could conceivably get over our guilt for something that we may have done or perceived that we did that was harmful or maybe wasn’t even harmful. But we can actually heal whatever it is that that wound is inside of ourselves, and all of our guilt can go away. We can heal the traumas that caused us to misbehave or to perceive that we misbehaved in some way. But that doesn’t mean that other people feel the same way. They can continue to judge us. They can look badly upon us.
And what happens as the result of the shame that they’re putting on us, the bad negative things, the judgments that they’re putting on us, is that our relationships with other people can be ruptured. Our relationships with society can be ruptured. Our relationships with our families can be ruptured. The ways that other people look negatively on us, judge us, and criticize us, fair or otherwise—and often it really is otherwise—well, it can spread. Those ideas can be catching like a virus, and other people can say, “Oh, that person is no good,” and we can internalize that. So we can actually internalize their conscience, healthy or otherwise, and we can feel awful about it, and we can really feel rejected and abandoned.
Now, one thing that I’ve seen is that most people, perhaps all people, to one degree or other, have a history of abandonment. Often it’s from their early childhood. Our parents weren’t perfect. Sometimes our parents were horribly imperfect, and the consequence of that is that at some deep emotional level, we were traumatized by abandonment. And it’s very, very hard to heal that sense of early abandonment.
What I’ve seen in myself and lots and lots of other people, when I’ve had the chance to look deeply within them, is that there can, in a lot of us, remain a real painful core of abandonment inside of us. And as the result of that core of abandonment, when other people are projecting negative judgments onto us, they look at us like we should be ashamed for our behavior. It can tap right into that early sense of abandonment, that sense that we’re not worthy, that we’re not good enough, that we don’t deserve to be loved.
So, what’s the cure? How do we heal from this shame? Well, I think there’s a few parts in it. One big part of it is for us to heal the parts of us that really feel guilty, to look at our guilt and to say, “What did I do wrong?” and to try to solve it, to stop doing the bad behavior. Number one thing: figure out how to stop doing the bad behavior. And how do we really stop doing the bad behavior? My experience, the source of what caused the bad behavior is the bad behavior that other people did to us, our traumas. And we have to heal our traumas. When we heal our traumas, we dry up our bad behavior at the source, and then we don’t do them anymore. We’re not motivated to do them anymore, and that’s the permanent cure for healing our bad behavior. And it’s also the permanent solution for living a healthier, happier, more satisfying life in our relationship with ourselves and our relationships with other people. We do a lot less behavior that bothers other people, that we have less to actually feel guilty about.
But by solving our guilt, by stopping ourselves from having to feel guilty because we’re actually no longer guilty because we’ve solved our bad behavior, we do the first step in healing our shame.
Well, the second part is really developing a stronger relationship with ourselves and deeply, deeply, deeply loving ourselves in spite of the bad things that we did. And that by healing that deep core sense of abandonment, by reclaiming ourselves, loving the little child that we were—and it’s a long, long process to do this, by the way—but healing that ancient sense of abandonment, that’s where we’re going to no longer be so susceptible to absorbing the negativity of other people, their attitude that makes us feel ashamed.
So, to really dry up the shame at its source, I think that may even go deeper. So, I think in a lot of ways, it means at a fundamental level getting away from the people who caused us the original harm. I think it may actually be taking a lot of distance, geographical or at the least emotional, from the people who harmed us. And if that’s our parents, so be it. But really giving ourselves the chance to feel the deepest abandonments that happened to us, to make sense of them, and learning how to re-parent ourselves in the ways that we weren’t.
Now, is this an easy task? Is it an easy task to heal early, early childhood traumas from age three months, six months, a year, two years old? Not in my experience. It’s actually really hard. It’s probably the hardest stuff to heal of all. It actually must be the hardest stuff to heal at all. And I think the reason it’s so hard is because it’s so underneath everything. People all have traumas going back to their childhood, but that earliest stuff, I think it’s by and large largely inaccessible to most people. So, it really may be a life’s work, especially in a world that’s so unhealed where it’s hard to get in touch with this. But I think we really have to do it in a deep way to ultimately heal the shame that we feel.
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