Guilt Vs Shame – How To Use The Power Of One To Protect You From The Other
- Jul 2, 2024
- 5 min read
Colleen & Dana are well-established healers and coaches. They are the creators of The Black Belt Mind, NAP, & YIM, incorporating Colleen’s Traditional Chinese Medicine training and Dana’s extensive coaching & martial arts experience into systems you can use to improve your health, career, and every relationship in your life in unprecedented ways.
You know those days when you realize you may not have been your best self? Sometimes that can feel like guilt, and sometimes it can feel like shame. Neither emotion was built to stick around, but of the two, one of them can be useful, and one of them is inevitably destructive. Once you’re aware of these two concepts, though, you can choose the one you listen to (and put the other one firmly into the recycling bin where it belongs).
What’s the difference between guilt and shame?
For our purposes, the difference is quite simple. Guilt is feeling bad for what you’ve done. Shame is feeling bad for what you are.
Shame is not productive
Shame is something that other people use to control your actions. If you feel bad for what you are, there’s no changing it. There’s no atoning for it. There’s no saving yourself from it. You are just less than.
Guilt is made to give you information. Shame is meant to keep you small.
Guilt is actually useful
Of course, you don’t want to feel guilty. Nobody wants to feel guilty. That’s the power of guilt, though: it feels bad.
Guilt is the emotion that you feel when you are aware that there’s a possibility that your actions could have been damaging or destructive to someone or something else.
A healthy sense of guilt is one of the reference points that you can use to measure your conduct. You can feel guilty for tripping and stepping on the cat, for laughing at the joke that made your partner look embarrassed, for agreeing to go to a party that your friends weren’t invited to because they weren’t considered enough (smart enough, rich enough, polished enough, etc.).
You feel the guilt and it allows you to check on your values and change your behaviour accordingly. You start to leave a nightlight on so you can see the cat. You ask your partner to share with you what upset them about the joke so you can understand them better; you apologize honestly so they know they can trust you. You look at your ego-to-integrity ratio and realize that you don’t need to exclude others in order to recognize your own value.
Guilt keeps you safe from shame
Guilt is intended to be a transitory emotion. You’re not meant to live in it. You’re meant to learn from it, course correct, understand yourself and your values better, and move on.
The purpose and power of this is that If you can have your own healthy sense of your choices, your actions, and what makes you feel good or guilty, then you’re much less likely to fall under the power of others trying to enforce shame on you.
This matters. If you have a healthy sense of guilt that you can use as a positive reference for your conduct, you also have to have a high sense of your own self worth.
Nobody is born with shame
Self-worth is your own innate awareness of your own value. Shame is the belief that you have no value.
No human being is born with a sense of shame. It’s taught and it’s learned. Have you ever changed a baby’s diaper and the cool air resulted in them peeing on you? They didn’t feel ashamed about it. In fact, they likely laughed at the discovery that they could be their own personal fountain. Or at the fact that you were sputtering. But they didn’t feel shame.
Guilt is something you talk about, something you ask for help with. You feel guilty that you didn’t make it to your friend’s milestone birthday party so you ask their family to help you think of the best apology, the thing they’ve always wanted to do, the gesture that’s intended to say “this is how much I value you.”
Shame is something you hide and hope that others don’t find out about. So many people walk through life having hidden their shame about their sexuality, their shame about their career choice, their shame about where they have failed.
If there’s something you’ve been taught to be ashamed of, you likely know how to joke about it in order to distract people from it. You likely get angry when people get too close to it. You likely have it run through your head late at night, when everything is quiet except for your mind.
The good news
The great news, actually, is that since shame is taught and is externally created, it’s not yours. And if it’s not yours, it doesn’t need to alter your reality or be a part of your life. As you regain a sense of your own self worth, as you start to recognize the ways that you are truly valuable, you can put down the shame that you’ve kept tucked away in secret. After all, it was never yours to begin with.
Get rid of your shame
It doesn’t serve you. Learn from your guilt, sure, and move on; guilt doesn’t need to live in your head or wake you up at 3 in the morning or have you flushing beet red when you remember it. Guilt gets burned off when you use it to course correct and move on.
Shame, on the other hand, is something that you have every right to toss in the recycling bin, and then let your system use that energy for something else that’s more useful.
If you’d like to learn more about shame and guilt, or if you’d like to do some gentle but powerful work on getting rid of shame, come visit us. We’d love for you to put down your shame and find a healthy relationship with guilt and with self-worth: because you definitely deserve to.
Visit our website for more info!
Read more from Colleen Robinson & Dana Pemberton
Colleen Robinson & Dana Pemberton, Wellness and Leadership Strategists
Dana and Colleen bring partnership to a whole new level in their work together. Vastly different in many ways, they deliver their own brand of magic to the groups, companies, and individuals they work with across North America. Colleen’s experience as a Chinese Medicine Practitioner, fascination with the intersection between science and spirituality, and focus on healing combines with Dana’s “boots on the ground” approach based on a lifetime of martial arts training (he started at age 3) and several decades of coaching. Together, their focus is to help you find and clear the old patterns that are holding you back, and replace them with simple concepts you can apply to move forward with ease.
