Think better – this is how to break free from hidden emotional chains

Understand the difference between shame and guilt

There are two words that you probably use all the time, but do you know what they actually mean? The words I'm talking about are guilt and shame, and in common parlance they tend to get used almost interchangeably. But they are not the same, and making this mistake can negatively affect your experience of these feelings, your perception of yourself in the presence of these emotions, and your response to them.

Guilt
"I've done something wrong/bad"

Here’s the difference: guilt is all about behaviour. It's the experience or feeling that something we have done was bad or wrong. For example, if I forgot about a coffee date with a friend and stood them up, afterwards I would probably feel guilty about that. 

In response, I might call them immediately to apologise, assure them that it wasn’t personal, and schedule another meeting. And if I did all those things, with a little time, my feeling of guilt will ease and eventually disappear completely. 

Additionally, my experience will have taught me something important. Did I forget the coffee because I didn’t manage to put it in my diary? Almost certainly. So if I utilise my experience of that guilt healthily and effectively, then it should help me to get better at diarising my meetings and avoiding similar mistakes. I'm not saying it's foolproof of course, but this is how we learn

In other words, assuming it hasn't become a chronic problem, guilt is an adaptive emotional response to messing things up – it allows us to acknowledge and take responsibility for something we’ve done wrong, without taking it to the level of feeling as if that behaviour proves our fundamental flaws or defects. 

Which is where shame comes in – guilt’s maladaptive cousin.

Shame: "I am wrong/bad"

Shame is not feeling bad about something we’ve done. It’s feeling bad about who we are. Let’s take the same situation of my forgotten coffee, but imagine that I am somebody who has a sticky fear of being a bad friend, a hangover from some uncomfortable secondary school experiences, maybe. Then, instead of guilt, I’m likely to feel shame – "I stood my friend up and that means I’m a bad person," or "I stood my friend up because I’m a bad person." 

Shame is a much deeper, darker and often more persistent emotion than guilt. And it causes different kinds of reactions, too. When feeling guilty, I’d be likely to make amends for my mistake, but if instead I felt shame over that same mistake, I would be more likely to hide, lie or try to ignore the situation completely. 

Maybe I would never mention the coffee, feeling unable to face the conversion. Or perhaps I would lie about where I was, saying I had to go to an emergency doctor‘s appointment or something like that. Worse, I might try to turn it back on them by claiming they said Saturday, not Friday. Perhaps I'd feel so bad about it that I'd head to the pub and drown my sorrows (unlikely with this example, but not out of the question). Finally, I may spiral into self-loathing and beat myself up for weeks or months for being such an unreliable friend.

These are just examples, and they might sound a little dramatic. But they are the types of things we do in a state of shame, because it’s so uncomfortable and painful to experience the fear that we are fundamentally bad or wrong and we’ll do pretty much anything to avoid it. The problem is that our avoidance doesn’t make the shame go away. In fact, the opposite happens – it festers, growing deeper, darker, and more painful, especially as the things we do to run from our shame invariably cause more of it. 

Guilt or shame? It's the meaning that matters

But here’s the thing: whether we experience guilt or shame after a certain mistake has nothing to do with the mistake itself, and everything to do with what we decide it means. It's not that some mistakes are about our behaviour and others are about our fundamental personality. Anything we think, feel or do can only ever mean what we allow it to mean about who we are as people – that part is made up. 

So, after screwing something up, we can go the way of guilt and take responsibility, apologise, make amends, and walk away stronger and better for it – or we can go the way of shame and allow that mistake to define who we are and how we feel about ourselves, to diminish us and force us into hiding. It’s a matter of perspective. 

By and large, it comes down to whether or not we are capable of understanding and accepting the difference between how we behave and who we are. Because these are different things. Even the cleverest of people still do stupid things. The most beautiful, attractive people we know still look rough some days. The funniest of people still say unfunny stuff from time to time. No single behaviour can ever define who we are.

Choosing guilt

This means that, if we're in a pattern of shame in some area of our lives, there is a simple – although that definitely doesn't mean easy – way to break it. 

Shame is its own fuel. A shameful behaviour causes us to hide away, which communicates that we are not fit for public consumption and that hurts, so we do things to try and make that feeling go away, like drink or eat or withdraw, and all of these things just make us feel even more ashamed. 

But, as Brene Brown teaches, empathy is the antidote to shame, even though it's probably the last thing we want to do when we feel ashamed. However, if we treat the focus of our shame as if we felt guilt instead; if we take honest responsibility for it, just for ourselves at first, and then with others later; if we work up to talking about it (again, with ourselves first, or in writing, then with other people when we're ready); or if we find any other way to create a safe, compassionate space to say, This is it. This is what I'm afraid of, this is what I'm telling myself horror stories about, this is what's been in control of the way I've been acting, then things will change.

Of course, we need to be careful how and with whom we do this – I'm not saying this is a conversation for your hairdresser, or, heaven forbid, a post on social media. That's not it. This is about finding someone you can trust, and with whom you can feel a genuine connection. That could be a friend or a family member, but we don't all have someone like that, so it could also be a therapist or counsellor, or it can be yourself – we all have to start somewhere. If you don't have someone to talk to – or if you're unsure about your options, don't risk it – write yourself a letter. 

If we do that, regardless of how gut-wrenchingly hard it might seem before we start, things will change when that conversation is done. I promise you.