what’s the difference between guilt and shame?
Why are they important to mental health?
Guilt and shame are very important emotions for humanity. According to the Oxford Dictionary, guilt is emotion used to describe unhappy feelings caused by knowing or thinking that you’ve done something wrong. Shame is the emotion used to describe feeling sad, embarrassed, or guilty when you know you have done something stupid or wrong.
Without guilt, we wouldn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Without shame, we wouldn’t know appropriate behavior and social etiquette. We need guilt and shame in order to treat people with respect, be kind, have a support system, and survive society. Guilt and shame are not bad emotions—we need them to be basic decent human beings! We need more people like that these days.
Sometimes the the words “guilt” and “shame” are used in other contexts too. The legal system will deem someone “guilty” of a crime. Someone can say, “Oh, that’s a shame”, to communicate their mild disappointment. What I find interesting is how these words are imposed onto us by other people. When these words are imposed onto us, we may start to feel guilty or ashamed too. We may start to get defensive because we know we did something wrong, or we may start to feel badly for disappointing someone else.
As the “You, First” package at South Asian Therapists states, guilt and shame are conditioned emotions. We learn what we should feel guilty and ashamed about by other people. We learn our morals and values from our parents, families, friends, community, and environment. We develop our values of right and wrong over time, and they can always change.
When we care very much about doing the right thing and not disappointing people, it’s not uncommon to feel anxious about making sure other people are happy, or depressed when we feel rejected and don’t feel connected to people around us, no matter how hard we try.
Does this sound familiar to you? Maybe it resonates because you have people-pleasing anxiety. Maybe you grew up in a family where you were the “black sheep” and made to feel ashamed about not fitting in. Maybe you grew up trying to be the “Good kid” or the “Good Indian daughter” and breaking out of that mold makes you feel bad or ashamed. If you grew up in a conservative culture or a small-knit community, like many South Asian cultures, it’s not uncommon to feel this way. Why?
Because in a communal-oriented culture, we learned our values from our community. The culture and the community taught us what is “right” and what is “wrong”. Sometimes these values are good—we learn how to be a part of a community and treat people with respect. Sometimes these values are rooted in tradition, survival, and intergenerational trauma, and do not necessarily apply in today’s day and age. This can lead to toxic, or unhealthy guilt and shame.
Your values can change over time because your beliefs about yourself and the world can change over time too. As your values change over time, you might start to feel guilty and ashamed for doing things differently, especially when your relatives have certain expectations of you and you don’t want to disappoint them. You might feel intense anxiety and have trouble taking your mind off things. You might feel sad when you and your family start to grow apart.
Guilt and shame are “hidden” emotions to a lot of clinical mental health disorders, such as depression, grief, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders and body-image issues. Since these emotions are conditioned emotions and imposed by other people, they can also be conditioned by traumatic events.
This is why I call myself “The Bad Indian Therapist”. When we’ve been taught that there’s only one (1) way to belong, and that we’re not belonging the “right” way, we can start to feel left out, sad, and disconnected from people. When we do feel connected to someone or to some place, we may start to feel anxious of losing this connection. We may feel like we have to work very hard to keep good things in our life so we’re afraid to make mistakes. What if you don’t have to work so hard to belong?
Interested in learning more about how guilt and shame are related to mental health? Visit my Depression, Anxiety, Body Image and Eating Disorders, and Trauma and PTSD pages to learn more about my approach.
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