Will You Be Having A Side Of Shame Or Guilt With That Today?
There is a notable difference between shame and guilt, which has to do with the source of the emotion. Shame is an experience of feeling somehow bad, according to an external set of values and our perceived judgment by others. Guilt is what we feel for going against our internal grain, our conscience, our superego—the executive branch of our sense of self and identity—and doing the thing we feel on some level is wrong.
Similar But Different
It’s helpful to identify the difference between these two feelings and to spell that out when we’re sitting in our emotions, on a bad day, attempting to get through them. Sometimes we may be ashamed for something we have actually made up, what we imagine others are thinking, as opposed to how we are in reality perceived. We could possibly even be caught up in our own fantasy—being too in our heads—which has a lot less to do with fact than we might imagine. We could be wrong about our assumptions or perceptions, yet have a whole story plotted out with villains and victims. Shame is what cancels our societal pariahs. You’re probably not a pariah.
Maybe You’re The 2.0 Upgrade To An Obsolete Value System
If it’s guilt that you’re experiencing, there is always a chance that such a pang may radiate from a set of values internalized from an early relational source, potentially an outdated value system. Maybe you don’t actually need to feel guilty for splurging on something your mom would never let herself buy, but you knew she always wanted: fresh cut flowers. Maybe they could only be gifted to her because her own mother had survived the Great Depression and her DNA also got stamped with a peculiar taste for raw onion sandwiches. Somehow you know you don’t have to eat onion sandwiches, so why can’t you also just enjoy the hydrangeas that you bought at a fancy bodega, being the independent hardworking adult that you are, without feeling frivolous and wasteful?
Identifying the source of that gnawing sensation in the gut gives us a chance to own whether we want to buy into that feeling or not. Whether you do or you don’t—and sometimes the stakes are of course much greater than the frivolity of flowers—naming the uninvited feeling and looking at its source helps the emotion to process and move along on its merry way. Which is what we want. Byeee.
Our undesirable emotions are trying to get us to see something we would rather ignore. It’s always a good thing to feel because that means we are alive, and when what we experience registers as discomfort, that’s a helpful reminder that we need to point the camera inward to see what’s going on—in here—instead of what we may or may not have done—out there. Sometimes we feel shame or guilt for useful reasons and it’s time to own up to ourselves.
Nursing The Feels
Sourdough was huge early on in the pandemic, and it was cool to scope out the very best starter. We all self-medicated our suffering by eating our feelings and gaining our quarantine fifteen. This indulgence gave us the sense of having some control over our mass-isolated, social-justice grieving, politically tumultuous, zombie apocalypse virus situation.
In our process of self soothing through hard times, sometimes we overeat or indulge in some other way in order to avoid confronting what it is that we would rather not feel, by self-medicating on our own terms. When we experience unbearable shame or guilt and we then find ourselves set out to eat fast food or a whole pint of ice cream until we could burst, now we can feel bad about something that was in our control.
The connection to make here is that we unconsciously seem to prefer to blame ourselves for something we set up because it’s somehow more tolerable than processing what bothered us in the first place, which is now out of our control to change.
The problem with such emotional displacement is that those original undesirable emotions will push back up later, if we don’t take the time to acknowledge and deal with our feelings. This explains how we may still occasionally feel embarrassed about that one heinous thing we did back in seventh grade, and we can still find a way to blush about it and wince and writhe in our delayed mortification every time it comes to mind.
Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously
The upshot to such embarrassment, in general, and a way you can let yourself off the hook and process and allow that old memory to rest for good, is that people are always paying a lot less attention to your mistakes than you think they are. Others don’t care about your gaffes because they are too busy worrying about their own. We are all just bumbling along through life, and we need to stop taking ourselves quite so seriously. It’s probably somehow pretty funny, anyway, whatever happened to you in seventh grade, when you really stop and think about it.
