My therapist dropped a whopper on my lap this last session. She knows me well enough now that she saved the hard stuff for the end of the session, and when she saw me unravelling before her eyes she said: it’s ok. We are at the end for today. You can sit with this a bit. To which I responded by crumpling into a tear-fill sigh: ok good. Yes. We are done for today.
Since you’re dying to know what she hit me with, I will tell you: the difference between Shame and Guilt.
Did you know there is a difference between Shame and Guilt? I did. Or I thought I did. I knew they weren’t the same, though people often use them interchangeably, and that Shame always sounded worse.
The differences is this:
Guilt – I have done something wrong. I should not have done that. I need to apologize/make it right.
Shame – I am wrong. I am bad. I am dishonor and regret and self-hate.
Frontiers describes this as: Although shame and guilt are positively correlated and are often used interchangeably among laypersons, empirical evidence suggests that they are, indeed, different emotional experiences that lead to very different psychological and behavioral outcomes (Tangney, 1991). One important characteristic that distinguishes shame from guilt is the object that is the focus of self-conscious scrutiny (Lewis, 1971). In response to a moral transgression, a person experiencing shame would be likely to think “I am a bad person” whereas someone experiencing guilt would be likely to think “I did a bad thing” (Niedenthal et al., 1994).
Unfortunately, shame has come up a lot for me in talk therapy. You could almost call it a theme. A theme I have called out and started pointing at when I recognize it surfacing – oh hello old friend!
What I had NOT thought through at all, was what it meant. What the message was that I was telling myself.
Now that I’ve pondered this a bit, I’m ready to share mine. It’s very hard to admit, but it goes something like this:
You are bad. See! Look what you did again. You are hopeless! See. Look how hard this is for you. You should just give up. Everyone should give up on you. How is anyone still with you? How on Earth can’t you do better. How does no one see who you really are?
Which is obviously not the way I would speak to someone I loved.
Now isn’t that something. That’s a big old fat something right there and when I realized it – truly felt the crippling weight of the truth of that definition – well I broke a tiny bit. And then I sucked that broken part back up inside me cause I wasn’t quite ready to feel all of it or do anything about it just yet.
Noted. Will think about that later.
No wonder my therapist keeps bringing up the topic of self compassion.
It is almost as if she’s trying to lead me to something….