IIC 39: Seeing the Real, Radical, and Resounding Differences Between Shame and Guilt

Dr. Peter discusses in depth the difference between shame and guilt, which are so often misunderstood and confused, and we take a deep dive into the research about what kinds of effects shame and guilt each have on our psychological health and our relationships.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundations for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 39, released on October 26th, 2020, and it is the third episode in our series on shame. This episode is titled The Real, Radical, and Resounding Differences Between Shame and Guilt. Now, remember two episodes ago in episode 37, we introduced shame, the silent killer who stalks us from within. And in the last episode, episode 38, I invited you to see the signs of shame in yourself and others, to recognize shame in yourself and in others, becoming better able to detect it. And that’s really important because shame pulls us to hide it. Shame pulls us to allow our shame to be hidden, unobserved, unrecognized for what it really is and for what it really does. Shame is tricky.

[00:02:04] It’s slippery and it loves to camouflage itself. I’m going to encourage you to listen to those last two episodes, episodes 37 and 38, if you haven’t done it already, because they are very rich. They are packed full of information. Our Resilient Catholic Carpe Diem community members, that’s the community that grew up around this podcast. They’re talking about how they listen to him multiple times because they’re really working on understanding the content of those. Now, because of those two episodes, 37 and 38, we have a much better understanding of shame. We’re going to take the next step. Now, if you haven’t listened to those, this episode, episode 39 will stand on its own. I will give you enough context to be able to understand what we’re talking about. So you don’t have to stop if you don’t want to. Today, though, we are going to understand much more deeply the difference between shame and guilt. Shame and guilt. Many people use these terms, shame and guilt, interchangeably. They don’t recognize a difference. It’s sort of like I just feel bad with both of them. There’s something wrong. It’s just, I’m self-conscious. I know something’s wrong. That’s about as far in terms of the conceptualizations as they get. I, in my psychological intakes, ask about shame, guilt, anger, fear, and sadness. Those are the sort of five primary negative emotions, and I ask people to rank them as far as which one is the most significant for them, and I ask which ones the least significant for them too. It’s information that’s actually really valuable.

[00:03:53] And then I ask, what’s the difference between shame and guilt? And you know what? Most people cannot give me a good answer. It’s rare that somebody actually captures something of the distinction between shame and guilt. Do you know the difference between shame and guilt? Do your siblings know the difference? How about your spouse or your significant other? How about your friends? How about your best friend? If you asked your best friend what the difference between shame and guilt was, do you think your best friend could tell you? How about your kids? As we will see, it’s a crucial distinction between shame and guilt, because the upshot is that when we work with shame and guilt, we work with them in very different ways. So today we’re focusing on recognizing the difference between shame and guilt and understanding how they operate, understanding what they cause, what happens downstream of shame and guilt. This is really important psychologically. This is really important spiritually. It’s not just an idle curiosity. It’s not just the kind of thing that philosophers debate about, like, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No, this is absolutely crucial information. This is a real world concern.

[00:05:26] And I’m not the only one that thinks this. Brene Brown, I talked about her before. She said, “I believe the differences between shame and guilt are critical in informing everything from the way we parent and engage in relationships to the way we give feedback at work and school.” Bernard Williams, 1993, said that, “Guilt and shame overlap to a significant degree, and we will not understand either of them unless we take both of them seriously.” Let’s go back. Let’s rewind. Let’s just review what we know about shame. We’re going to cover this much more quickly than we did in episodes 37 and 38. But just an overview here. First off, shame has been very difficult to define. Most of the definitions that I’ve run across have been very inadequate and actually quite contradictory. There’s a lot of confusion even in the professional literature. There’s not standard definitions. There’s definitions that contradict each other. It’s actually kind of a mess, really. Shame is only mentioned once in the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church, and that’s in paragraph 1216 on baptism. And the only thing it says there is that baptism is called clothing, since it veils our shame. There’s just a sort of metaphor there as to why baptism is called clothing, and that’s because it veils our shame. It’s not particularly helpful in getting at what we’re talking about in this particular podcast. Shame is not mentioned in Father Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary.

[00:07:05] It’s not mentioned. It’s not listed in the traditional Catholic Dictionary. There’s no entry for it in the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia. There’s very little out there about a Catholic understanding of shame. Those aren’t the only omissions, though. I mean, shame is also not listed in the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology. Oops. That’s an omission. So let’s go back to some definitions we have. Brene Brown. “I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. Something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to fail to do makes us unworthy of connection.” Okay, we covered this definition before in episode 37, and we also looked at how it captures something, but not everything of the dimensions of shame. I am making the argument that shame has five dimensions. Most of these dimensions were covered in Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon, and Onno van der Hart’s book Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Practical, Integrative Approach. They had the most comprehensive discussion of shame that I could find, but even that discussion needed to be supplemented considerably. Shame has five dimensions. Shame is a primary emotion. Shame is a bodily reaction. Shame is a signal. Shame is an internal self-judgment. And shame is an action, a verb. Let’s review. Shame is a primary emotion. Shame is a bodily reaction, a physiological reaction. Shame is a signal. It has the function of signaling something.

[00:08:57] To us, shame is an internal self-judgment and shame is an action. Let’s review these real quickly. Shame is a primary emotion. Primary emotions are those that we feel first, a first response to a situation, a first emotional response to a situation. They are unthinking. They’re instinctive. They’re automatic. These are the emotions we have that just well up within us. It’s all about heartset. These emotions can be conscious or unconscious, and they can be held by a part of us. For example, a part of us can be burdened by shame. And that shame doesn’t just come and go in waves. It’s there all the time. Shame is also a self-conscious emotion, and we’re going to get into that today in much more detail. And shame is a moral emotion. Psychologists consider shame to be both a self-conscious emotion and a moral emotion. So there’s a little new information we’re going to be getting into. Shame is a primary emotion, also a self-conscious emotion, also a moral emotion. It’s an emotion. Second thing, shame is a bodily reaction. It’s a physiological reaction. It’s a reaction that’s in our body, but is not under our control. It could be hyper-arousal. That’s where our sympathetic nervous system revs us up, puts us into fight or flight mode. Heart starts racing, breathing quickens, pupils dilate, blood rushes to your arms and legs. Your face turns red. We’re getting ready to defend ourselves or to attack or to run away.

[00:10:32] On the other end, we could go to hypo-arousal, where the parasympathetic nervous system shuts us down. A freeze response, like a deer in the headlights. We numb out. We might dissociate. Our head drops. We break off eye contact. We tighten up our muscles. We begin to curl up into a ball, hunching to protect ourselves, like vital organs, trying to make ourselves less visible. Got that sense of ice water in the veins. We get the fluttering in the belly. Hypo-arousal. That’s the parasympathetic nervous system shutting us down. So we’ve got shame as a primary emotion, also a self-conscious emotion, also a moral emotion. We’ve got shame as a bodily reaction. We’ve got shame also now as a judgment, a negative, critical global judgment of who I am as a person. It’s getting into mindset. Part of me holds this disparaging perspective of myself. Part of me accuses me of being incompetent, inadequate, or worthless or unlovable or bad or even evil. It’s a judgment about who I really am that this part of me picked up from the perspective of an important other who was perceived as critical or rejecting. Okay, so shame is an emotion. Shame is a bodily reaction. Shame is a judgment. Next one, shame is a signal. Shame is a function. It signals to us it’s a warning. Shame is a signal that there is a lack of attunement or an even more serious threat in one of our important relationships.

[00:12:12] It’s got this important function as a social threat detector that signals us to modify or avoid behaviors that will likely lead us to be rejected by somebody we need. So shame is a signal. So we have shame as an emotion. We have shame as a bodily reaction. We have shame as a judgment. We have shame as a signal. And the last one is shame is an action. It’s a verb, as in shaming. And that’s an action that’s intended to cause someone else to feel inadequate, worthless, unlovable, a loser, whatever, for being or doing something that the shamer feels is wrong or is undesirable. It’s a quick way to control another person, especially one in a dependent position. It’s a quick way for us to also control ourselves. Part of us is forced into the role of shamer to anticipate negative consequences if we step out of line with somebody who’s important to us. Okay, so shame, five dimensions: an emotion, a bodily reaction, a signal, an internal self-judgment, and an action. Those five. So now we move on to guilt. Now, guilt is simpler to understand than shame. There are three primary classes of definitions of guilt. Basically, there’s three ways that we look at guilt. One is as a moral state. The second one is as a legal state. And the third is as a self-conscious moral emotion.

[00:13:52] So we have a moral state, a legal state, and an emotion, and in particular, an emotion that is both moral and self-conscious. Let’s start with the objective moral state. So if you look up guilt in Father Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary, you’ll get this definition. “A condition of a person who has done moral wrong, who is therefore more or less estranged from the one he offended, and who is liable to punishment before he has been pardoned and made atonement.” So Father Hardon, the great Jesuit, basically tells us, look, it’s when you are in objective moral condition of being in the wrong. It’s guilt that isn’t about emotion. It’s not about this self-conscious moral emotion, it is about an objective state of affairs. It’s about the condition of your soul. Pretty easy to understand that. The second is a legal state. So in other words, if you are on trial for a crime and you are found guilty in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of the state, you are in the condition of guilt. Right. So therefore likely to have sentencing and some kind of punishment, something like that. So it’s a legal condition. Guilty of having committed a crime. Those two we’re not going to spend a lot of time with today. It’s the third one that’s really most important. And that is guilt as a self-conscious and moral emotion. Now, guilt is not a primary emotion.

[00:15:25] It’s not the emotion that comes up first. It’s not one of these, it depends on how you count them, 5 or 7 or 8 primary emotions. But it is an emotion and it’s a particular kind of emotion. In the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, guilt is defined as “A self-conscious emotion characterized by a painful appraisal of having done or thought something that is wrong, and often by a readiness to take action designed to undo or mitigate this wrong. It is distinct from shame, in which there is the additional strong fear of one’s deeds being publicly exposed to judgment or ridicule.” So American Psychological Association basically telling us guilt is a self-conscious emotion characterized by a painful self-appraisal of having done or thought something that’s wrong. And it also comes with this readiness to try to right the wrong. Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a psychologist, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says this about guilt. This is her definition. “Guilt is first and foremost an emotion. You may think of guilt as a good way to get someone to do something for you out of a sense of obligation, but it’s more accurate to think of guilt as an internal state. In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states. It’s one of the sad emotions, which also include agony, grief, and loneliness.”

[00:16:59] Okay, thank you, Dr. Whitbourne. There actually was a good definition of guilt at emotionaltypology.com, under their section on negative emotional typologies. And there, in discussing guilt, they said, “You feel guilty when you did something that caused harm to someone and you hold yourself at least somewhat responsible.” And there’s an example. Imagine the feeling of running over the neighbor’s dog while backing out of your driveway, or mistakenly accusing your daughter of stealing cookies when your spouse actually took them. Feeling guilty is often associated with a moral transgression, committing a crime or a sin. We need to distinguish, though, feeling guilty as an emotional experience from being guilty, as in a legal or moral judgment. Someone might have committed a severe crime and be tried and be convicted of being guilty of it without feeling any guilt at all. And the opposite can also be true. You can feel really guilty when, rationally speaking, you haven’t done anything wrong and no one holds you responsible. For example, imagine that you invite a friend to come over and on the way to your house, your friend has a serious car accident. Nobody blames you because you had no way of knowing this would happen and no way to stop it. But you might nevertheless feel a great deal of guilt, guilt as an emotion. If this happens, you’re basically mistaking a causality — if you hadn’t invited her, she would be all right — with a responsibility that somehow you should have been able to prevent the harm from happening.

[00:18:47] People who feel guilty often have the impulse to undo or repair their wrongdoing, for example by refunding for financial damages. I need to right the wrong done. And if the damage is irreversible, something’s been destroyed, a life’s been lost, or someone’s trust has been irreversibly betrayed, the guilty person may instead try to atone for his wrongdoing by punishing himself, by doing penance. And this is, again, from emotionaltypology.com. These are not religious folks here. They’re just recognizing that there is this need for atonement that goes along with the self-conscious emotion and moral emotion of guilt. If someone feels guilty for doing something wrong that other people don’t know about, they may have an urge to confess what they did. In all of these cases, the explanation seems to be that the guilt-feeling person wants to demonstrate that he is not a bad person, but a good person who just did something wrong. So let’s go ahead and review guilt. Guilt is better defined than shame in the literature. It’s simpler. It’s only three dimensions to guilt rather than five. And we’re really only focusing on guilt as an emotion. It’s a self-conscious and a moral emotion, characterized by a painful appraisal of having done or thought something that is wrong. And often there’s a readiness to take action designed to undo or mitigate this wrong.

[00:20:19] All right, so how about an example? How about story time with Dr. Peter? I want to take us back to January 1976. I’m in the second semester of first grade at Saint Gabriel School in Neenah, Wisconsin. I’m six years old and it’s recess time after lunch. Now, this is Wisconsin in January and it’s really, really cold, snow on the ground, winds blowing. But in those days, the teachers sent you out for recess anyway, to burn off your energy. So we were playing and running and jumping in the bitter cold sunshine. We’re all dressed up in heavy coats and scarves and hats and mittens and snow pants and boots. Frostbite was like a real possibility. And we Wisconsin kids, we knew how to dress for the cold. So it’s time to come in. And all the kids are stomping the snow off their boots and unwinding scarves and pulling off mittens and putting everything into little cubbies that we have in the hallway to store our gear. And so I took off my scarf and my hat and my mittens and my coat and my boots, and I took my snow pants off. As all my winter gear comes off, my mind is a million miles away thinking of a book I’ve been reading, while all the chattering and clamoring of the first and second graders goes on all around me. But then the whole hall goes silent.

[00:21:45] What happened? I undressed too far. To this day, I don’t know why, but I took my blue corduroy uniform pants off too. And I’m standing there in my mustard yellow uniform shirt, in my green cardigan uniform sweater, and my whitey tighties, my Fruit of the Loom underwear. You know it’s Fruit of the Loom because it says so in big letters on the elastic waistband. That’s right. What you’ve had bad dreams about, what’s woken you up in a cold sweat, what you were relieved to discover was just a dream, well, in that hallway in January 1976, that was my cold, hard reality. Now, at that point, everything seemed to go in slow motion. I saw the surprised faces of my fellow students, looks of shock and disbelief. A few smirks on the faces of the boys. I looked down and saw my bare, skinny white legs and my pants on the ground. The blood rushed to my face and I could hardly move. It was at that moment that Jan W., the biggest of the second grade girls, she broke the silence by calling out in her big girl voice,  “Peter took his pants off!” accompanied by a pointing finger. Then there was a collective gasp, then confusion, and a gale of laughter from some of the boys and the whispered twittering of, “Did you see that? He took his pants off.” I regained control of my body, and with amazing rapidity, faster than I ever had before, I leapt into my pants, zipped them, snapped them, belted them, and tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

[00:23:36] I was filled with intense, self-conscious emotions. And we’re going to come back to this story to illustrate some of the things that we’re talking about as we talk about shame and guilt. So, as we said before, shame and guilt are both moral emotions and self-conscious emotions. Jonathan Haidt defines moral emotions as those emotions that are linked to the interests or welfare, either of society as a whole, or at least of persons other than the judge or agent. Moral emotions provide the motivational force, the power and energy to do good and avoid doing bad. That’s from Kroll and Egan in their article from 2004. Now I’m going to draw heavily in this next section from June Price Tangney, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra Mashek, from their 2011 Annual Review of Psychology article called Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior. This is an excellent review article in this area. It’s actually accessible online. They discuss how shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride are members of a family of self-conscious emotions that are evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation. So these emotions can be conscious or unconscious. These emotions rise up and they punish or reinforce behaviors. Shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride function as an emotional moral barometer, providing immediate and salient feedback on our social and moral acceptability.

[00:25:16] When we sin, when we transgress, when we make mistakes, these aversive feelings of shame, guilt or embarrassment are likely to ensue. And when we do the right thing, positive feelings of pride and self-approval are likely to result. So the potential is that these emotions, feeling these emotions, can guide our behavior and can check us, can keep us from doing wrong. Now let’s really dive in to the difference between shame and guilt. We’ve defined them both, but let’s do the compare and contrast. That’s what we’re going to do now. Now, Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek, they talk about three ways that have traditionally been employed to distinguish guilt from shame. Three ways. The first way is to look at what event elicited the emotion. So you’re looking at the event. What caused the emotion to come up? That was thought to make a difference as to whether you felt shame or whether you felt guilt. Second thing, was the transgression public or private? In my case, the transgression was public. I was in my whitey tighties in the hall at the school. Public. Third thing, was it a failure of self or was it a failure in behavior? Was it something about me as a person, or was it something about what I did? Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek really start busting myths about the difference between shame and guilt, because they’re reviewing what the data actually say. So let’s take the first one.

[00:27:13] The type of eliciting event. They reviewed the literature that looked at all kinds of events that were thought to evoke shame and/or guilt, including lying, cheating, stealing, failing to help another person, disobeying parents, looking for which acts led to feelings of shame, and which other acts led to feelings of guilt. And you know what they found? Squat. Nada. Zilch. There were no prototypical shame-inducing behaviors versus guilt-inducing behaviors. They couldn’t find anything along those lines. There was no difference that they could detect on a consistent basis between these behaviors, inducing shame versus inducing guilt. That one seemed like it’s a bust, even though that is something that people often point to. That may happen in a particular person. A particular person may engage in a behavior and feel a lot of shame about it, and engage in a different behavior and feel a lot of guilt about it. But there’s not sort of a prototypical one that cuts across people in general. Second one, public versus private nature of the transgression. Right? The thought is that when you’re in public, the shame is more likely to come up because of the exposure to others and the disapproval of others, because that shortcoming or transgression is witnessed by others. Whereas guilt is likely to happen in private, right? Because this is an experience that arises, it’s an emotion that arises because of how you’re disapproving of your behavior in your own conscience.

[00:28:52] So shame, that’s public. It happens in public. Others disapprove. That’s what causes the emotion. Guilt, private. All right. What did they find? Actually, there’s not much of a research basis for this distinction. If you look at a systematic analysis of the social context of what induces shame and guilt, as described by several hundred children and adults, shame and guilt were equally likely to be experienced in the presence of others. In other words, the presence of others didn’t matter as to whether you felt shame or whether you felt guilt, at least across people. Solitary shame experiences were about as common as solitary guilt experiences. So people were feeling shame when they were on their own, when they were not in contact with other people, and people were feeling guilt on their own, and they were about equally common. And even more to the point, the frequency with which others were aware of the respondent’s behavior did not vary as a function of shame or guilt. So what’s happening is that it doesn’t matter whether other people know. A person could still have a very strong shame response, even if nobody else knew. So what this is telling us is that people focus on others’ evaluations because they are already feeling shame. They’re looking for confirmation of their inadequacy, of their worthlessness, of their own lovability, of their stupidity, or however they’re cutting themselves down, in the faces of other people for confirmation.

[00:30:33] They’re not finding it there. They’re not generating it from there. They’re actually experiencing themselves and assuming the other people believe that about them as well. So it doesn’t matter whether there’s an audience or not. That’s what the data says. They are feeling shame because of their own internal processes, not because of others’ evaluations. So that one’s a myth too. That one’s busted. That leaves us with the third one. Have we got something here? Have we got something with conceptualizing the fault as a failure of self, as an inadequacy of self, versus a failure of behavior? Is there a difference between shame or guilt, depending on whether I look at what the transgression was as something intrinsically wrong with me, or if I see it just as a mistake that I made or a sin that I committed, but not something that’s sort of bound up in my identity? Well, this idea was first proposed in the psychological literature by Helen Block Lewis in 1971. And Tracy and Robins in 2004, they updated it and they called it an appraisal-based model of self-conscious emotions. So what were these researchers, what were these thinkers telling us? Lewis was telling us that shame involves a negative evaluation of a global self, whereas guilt involves a negative evaluation of a specific behavior. So shame is about me and who I am.

[00:32:13] Guilt is about what I did. So here’s the difference. You can actually hear the difference in the same sentence with different emphasis. This is shame. I did that horrible thing. This is guilt. I did that horrible thing. You see the difference there? This distinction, this third distinction between failure of self versus a failure of my behavior, that actually is backed by the research. Both experimental and correlational methods showed that internal, stable, uncontrollable attributions for failure were positively related to shame. So in other words, when you felt like something was internally wrong and it was just there all the time and that you couldn’t control it, that was reliably correlated with shame experiences, whereas internal unstable and controllable attributions for failure were positively related to guilt. So in other words, when I’m feeling guilt, it seems like I can control it. It seems like I could manage it. I just made a mistake. This is not an unchanging attribute of who I am. It’s just about something I did. Tangney and her colleagues addressed the question of, what’s the more painful emotion? What do you think the more painful emotion would be, shame or guilt? It’s shame. Shame is the more painful emotion because it is about who I am rather than what I did. It’s about all of me. It feels like that, like it’s all of me. So shame leads to hiding and guilt leads to amending. This was something else that they checked out and it actually was born out to be true.

[00:34:08] People who are experiencing the self-conscious moral emotion of shame were more likely to hide, escape, and deny their experience than those who were experiencing guilt. Guilt, if you’re experiencing guilt, that’s more likely to lead to reparative behavior, an attempt to make amends, an attempt to set things right. These researchers wanted to know, is there a different focus of the distress? And indeed there is. When a person is feeling guilt, the focus is on the other person. There’s an empathy. There’s a reaching out. There’s a wanting to make it okay. And the research on the emotional dispositions demonstrates that guilt proneness consistently correlates positively with measures of perspective taking and empathetic concern. That means that higher levels of guilt are related to higher levels of empathy, higher levels of being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes, walk a mile in their moccasins. That kind of thing. Like if you’re experiencing guilt, you can actually connect with what another person might be experiencing. You’ve got that perspective. On the other hand, shame, entirely different ballgame here. Shame leads to self-absorption. The focus goes in on me. And that actually reduces substantially the capacity for empathetic connections with others. It’s hard to be compassionate with anybody else because it is very much a focus on how bad I am. So when you look at shame proneness, it’s either negatively correlated with other-oriented empathy.

[00:36:00] In other words, the more shame, the less capacity I have to connect with somebody else. Or there’s no correlation, you can’t find a correlation. It depends on the methods that you’re using. But there is no evidence that increased shame leads to an increased capacity to connect with somebody else, like with guilt. What happens is that when you’re experiencing high shame, you tend to focus on yourself, on your own distress. Makes sense. The emphasis on the bad self derails the capacity for empathy, derails the capacity to enter into somebody else’s internal world, to somebody else’s phenomenological world, and meet them there because it feels like your own house is on fire. You’re just struggling with that sense of badness. If I’m in my own world of hurt, my own world of inadequacy, if I’m struggling with feeling worthless and bad, how can I offer anything to anybody else? How am I going to be able to do that? How am I going to be able to make a gift of myself? These researchers took a look at reactions to anger. And what they found was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Across individuals of all ages, proneness to shame is positively correlated with anger, hostility, and the propensity to blame factors beyond the self for one’s own misfortunes. What that means is that the more shame I experience, the more anger, the more hostility, and the more likely I am to blame external factors, the less likely I am to take responsibility for my own actions.

[00:37:48] Helen Block Lewis saw this in case studies, going back to her original work in 1971, and she referred to it as humiliated fury. It sort of reminds me of the snapping moments, right, when people just can’t take it anymore. In fact, when you compare shame prone individuals to those who are not shame prone, shame prone individuals are more likely to engage in externalization of blame. They’re more likely to experience intense anger and express that anger in destructive ways, and not just in verbal ways or symbolic ways or indirect ways, also in direct physical ways. There’s all kinds of displaced aggression too, self-directed aggression, that is, aggression turned inward, aggression turned toward the self, and also just holding anger in, you know, this ruminative, unexpressed anger. Shame prone individuals report awareness that their anger typically results in bad consequences and long-term bad consequences, both for themselves and for their relationships with important other people in their lives. If you look at Harper and Colleagues, 2005, they looked at the link between shame proneness and perpetration of psychological abuse in dating relationships by heterosexual college men. They found that shame prone men are more likely to commit psychological abuse, and especially when they were angry. So shame proneness has got real consequences to anger, hostility, and actually destructive behavior.

[00:39:30] There was a study that came out, Tangney did it in 1995, that looked at anger episodes among romantically involved couples. Partners who were shamed in the relationship were significantly more angry, more likely to engage in aggressive behavior, and less likely to elicit conciliatory behavior from their perpetrating significant other. It just ruins relationships. The shame comes in and it ruins relationships, people. And we’re seeing this not just in theory or not just in clinical observations. It’s not just clinical experience that’s telling us this. The research is telling us this. Lewis, back in 1971, talked about the shame rage spiral, where partner shame leads to feelings of rage, that leads to destructive retaliation, which then sets into motion more anger, more resentment in the perpetrator, and then expressions of blame and retaliation, which is then further likely to shame the initially shamed partners. And it goes round and round and round without any way out. It’s terrible stuff. What about guilt? Let’s take a look at guilt and anger, the connection between guilt and anger. Stuewig and colleagues in 2006 looked at mediators of the link between moral emotions and aggression in four samples. They theorized that negative feelings associated with shame lead to externalization of blame, and that can lead people who are experiencing shame to react aggressively. You know what? They found that to be true. That actually was true across all of their samples. They also thought that guilt would facilitate empathy.

[00:41:13] Because remember, when you’re feeling guilty, you can step into the shoes of the other person. You can understand the other person. And that was likely to reduce outward aggression. You know what? They found that the relationship between guilt and low aggression was partially mediated through other-oriented empathy and also an inclination to take responsibility. So if you’re feeling guilt, you’re much less likely to act out in anger than if you’re feeling shame. In fact, guilt gives you a protective buffer against acting out, against committing offenses against other people or against yourself, whereas shame leaves you more vulnerable to act out, more vulnerable to harm others and yourself. What about psychological symptoms? Let’s take a look at those. And that that question was directly addressed by Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek in their 2011 article. And the results with shame are very clear. Research over the last 30 years consistently indicates that proneness to shame is related to a wide variety of psychological symptoms. We’re talking low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, PTSD, suicidal ideation. Across the board, you see higher symptoms, higher levels of psychological symptoms. And these are robust findings. The negative psychological implications of shame are evident across measurement methods. It doesn’t matter how you measure it, it’s there. The psychological implications are bad no matter how you measure it or no matter what age group you’re assessing and what kind of population you’re looking at.

[00:42:53] Both the clinical literature and the empirical research agree that people who frequently experience feelings of shame about the self are correspondingly more vulnerable to a range of psychological problems. Period. Full stop. If you have a lot of shame, you are much more likely to be psychologically symptomatic. What about guilt? Well, we’ve heard all this stuff, you know, Catholic guilt, guilt, you know, just it leads to all kinds of problems in the future. And that’s the traditional view, right, that guilt plays a significant role in psychological symptoms. You know what? The empirical findings have been much more equivocal. They’re unclear. Clinical theory and case studies make frequent references to this maladaptive guilt, characterized by chronic self-blame and obsessive rumination over one’s transgressions. But you know what? Hasn’t always come out in the literature. It’s not at all consistent. It’s not very strong. And theorists and researchers have emphasized the adaptive functions of guilt, particularly for interpersonal behavior. And that makes sense, right? If you have somebody that wants to make amends, that wants to understand what happened through the eyes of another person, that’s actually healthy, right? So this whole idea of Catholic guilt, it’s not holding up. What about engaging in illegal, risky, or otherwise ill-advised behaviors? What happens with that? Right, because shame and guilt are both painful emotions. It’s often assumed that they’re going to motivate individuals to avoid doing wrong.

[00:44:26] Right. I don’t want to do anything else to make me feel worse, right? From this perspective, we would anticipate that both shame and guilt would decrease the likelihood of transgressions and impropriety. And you know what? When you look at guilt, that’s actually pretty clear. College students, their guilt proneness was inversely related to self-reported criminal activity. And what that means is that the more guilty they felt, the less wrongdoing they committed, the fewer crimes they committed. Basically, when you are looking at adolescents, there was a number of studies, three studies that looked at if adolescents have guilt, that is shame free. In other words, they’re not experiencing a lot of shame, but they do have guilt, they’re less likely to be delinquent. Guilt prone college students are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. And even when you look at jail inmates. So these are folks that have already committed some crimes, at least presumably, if you look at their guilt proneness assessed shortly after incarceration, if they’re feeling guilty about what they did, if they have the capacity for guilt, if they’re feeling guilt, their likelihood of recidivism, their likelihood of substance abuse in the first year after release goes down. They’re less likely to commit those crimes again. They’re less likely to wind up back in prison. Guilt again seems to have this protective function against doing illegal, risky, or otherwise ill-advised behaviors.

[00:46:02] What about shame? Let me take a look at shame. Shame does not appear to have the same inhibitory functions as guilt when it comes to acting out. In fact, shame proneness was positively correlated with externalizing symptoms in kids on the child behavior checklist. Greater shame was associated with more intentions toward illegal behavior in college students. If you assessed shame in the fifth grade, in fifth graders with higher levels of shame proneness, that predicted later risky driving behavior, earlier use of alcohol and drugs, and a lower likelihood of safe sex practices. Similarly proneness to shame has been positively linked to substance use and abuse in adulthood, and there were four studies that confirmed that finding. Brene Brown sums it up. “Shame is a focus on the self. Guilt is a focus on the behavior. Shame is, I am bad. Guilt is, I did something bad.” On balance, guilt seems to be a much more adaptive emotion, benefiting individuals and their relationships in a variety of ways. But there is growing evidence that shame is a moral emotion that can easily go awry. All right, so to review this all real quickly, we’re just going to wrap this, right? We talked about shame and guilt and the difference between them, right? They’re both moral emotions. And both of them are linked to the interest or welfare of society or other people. We looked at the ways that you can distinguish them.

[00:47:52] And you know what? The only way that’s really distinguishable that we’ve been able to find is this distinction between looking at myself as having failed and something being wrong with me versus my behavior. That’s the primary difference between those two as emotions, right? Shame leads to hiding, and guilt leads to efforts to amend. Shame leads to self-absorption, the focus on me, whereas guilt leads me to focus on the other person, to reach out empathetically. In fact, because in shame I’m so focused on me, it’s very difficult for me to get outside myself and enter into the world of another person, which reduces my capacity for compassion, for empathy, for connection, for relationship. Guilt reduces the incidence of angry acting out against other people, where shame increases it. Helen Black Lewis called this humiliated fury. It’s about when we just won’t take it anymore. And we’re prone to act out. Psychological symptoms, there’s a world of difference here. Shame, you see much greater incidence of low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress, suicidal ideation. Whereas in fact, guilt, it’s far less clear. There’s not as much consistency in the findings. And in fact, both theorists and researchers have emphasized the adaptive functions of guilt, particularly in relationships, in interpersonal behavior. Risky behaviors, illegal behaviors, poor decisions, much more likely when there’s shame than when there’s guilt. So in summary, high levels of shame are not adaptive.

[00:49:47] Levels of guilt, much more adaptive. All right. So we want to return to my story. Right, 1975, Saint Gabriel School, in the hall. I actually in that moment, as I was reflecting on this, experienced some shame. There definitely was shame there. But interestingly, as I reflected on that experience, it was more guilt. I had a deep sense of being important to Mom and Dad, being cherished, being valued. I wasn’t really struggling at six years old with this defective sense of self. I was a star student. I was really good at school. I got affirmation from teachers, but I also had this really deep sense of right and wrong. My mom and dad really disciplined me. And mom would always say that when I did something wrong and she punished me, it hurt her more. The punishment hurt her more than it hurt me. And she actually would like cry when she would punish me and stuff like that. So I believed it. I had this deep sense of propriety, a deep sense of proper behavior. And I was taught that I was always supposed to get dressed and undressed in my room. Right. And that my sister wasn’t supposed to see me. Right. My sister shouldn’t see me undressed. So there was definitely shame due to the public nature of my unintentional disrobing, but not so much that I felt inadequate or worthless or bad. I had made a mistake, and a grievous one in my opinion, but not one that destroyed my sense of self-worth.

[00:51:14] I did feel guilty about the exposure to the girls of my class to my pantless state, and I was mortified by that. I felt guilty about that. But you know what? The kids reacted as though it was just a mistake. It was a curious, remarkable mistake, but it was just a mistake. I wasn’t an idiot. They didn’t call me that. I wasn’t a flasher or anything like that. I was just an absent-minded kid who took the undressing after recess one step too far. That was it. That was all that it was. All right. This is a really long podcast. Oh, this is long. Future directions. Right, now we have the basic learning for understanding, shame, and guilt at the natural level. We’re going to get into the spiritual impact of shame in this series of episodes on shame. We’re going to get into the so-called Catholic guilt. We’re going to find out if that’s really guilt, or could it possibly be shame or something else? Right? We’re going to be moving into more of the space where the psychological and the spiritual overlap. We’re going to get into soulset. For example, your parts who feel unloved and unlovable, those parts of you who carry your shame, how do you think those parts experience God? Would those shame-burdened parts see God as loving and caring, or would they see him in some other way? How does your internal critic, you know, that part of you that has the running commentary about your faults and failings, the part of you that exacerbates shame in you — how does that part of you see God? We’re going to talk about that.

[00:52:56] What’s the relationship between shame and pride? And I’m not talking about pride as a self-conscious emotion, where you feel a sense of self-approval because you did something good. I’m talking about pride in the moral sense, the sin of pride, the vice. How does pride and shame, how do they connect? What can we learn about examples of shame and guilt from the Scriptures? Look at the psychological dynamics of the historical figures in the Scriptures that struggled with shame. Then we get into like the real guts of this. And that is, how does Satan try to use your shame against you? Remember, grace perfects nature, right? So it makes sense for Satan to attack you at the weak points in your natural foundation. We’re going to be getting into all of that and a whole lot more about shame in this Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast, where we harmonize the best of psychology with the truths of our Catholic faith. All right, so now it’s time for you to act. You know, back in episode 37, I said that shame was the silent killer who stalks you from within.

[00:54:17] I’m giving you potentially life-saving information. Shame is the silent killer who stalks you from within. Shame is hidden, camouflaged, deceptive, tricky. God wants to involve you, you, in his plan of salvation for others. And I want you to think about who you might reach out to with this information on shame, with this information on guilt. Who can you share this podcast with? How can you get out there with your personal testimonial to say these podcasts are worth listening to? You can talk about how they’ve helped you. Share them with the people that you know that you think might really respond to them, right? Listening to others about their shame, too. Use the word shame. It’s not a perfect word, but it’s good enough. It’s good enough to begin the conversation about shame. But listen to other people. Give them the definition of shame. Talk with them about the five dimensions. Telling them that they’re not unworthy, telling them that they’re a good person, if you tell a person that’s struggling with deep shame that they’re a good person, you tell them it’s not their fault, that they’re not bad. What do you think’s going to happen? Right. Do you think that, you know, they’re just going to be like, oh, wow. Amazing. Thank you for telling me that. Now I know I’m a good person. You said those magic words and you helped me feel better about myself.

[00:55:47] No, they’re not going to say that because they’re going to think you just don’t know who I am. If you really knew who I was, if you really saw me the way that I see me, you’d know how despicable I really am. Right? People believe that they’re the experts on themselves. We need to learn how to be with others. But in order to be with others in their shame and to help them with it, you have to be dealing with your own shame too. I’m going to be telling you about an opportunity for that. I’m going to be telling you about the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, where we’re learning together how to work through shame. We deal with these tough topics. We deal with the tough topics in the RCCD community. Now, you can take these podcasts and you can work through this critical information yourself. And a lot of people do, right? And there’s really valuable information. It can be really helpful to you. And I’m glad for the people that benefit from the podcast alone. But there’s another option. You can join us and we can do this together. This is cutting edge stuff and it’s conceptually difficult. You’re not going to get this level of discussion on shame and guilt in most graduate programs in clinical psychology. And almost none of them will get you the combination of the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview, based on research, based on the best conceptualizations, based on clinical experience, and on the solid foundation of divine revelation, what we know to be true because the Church teaches it.

[00:57:16] If any of you can show me a curriculum that goes into depth, this level of depth on guilt and shame from a Catholic perspective, I want you to send it to me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. I don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel. There’s a lot of effort that goes into pulling all of this stuff together. This particular podcast, this particular episode, took about eight hours to pull together. So, you know, if you’ve got it ready made, by all means, please share it with me. I’d love to be able to work with something that’s already well-formed. Working through guilt and especially shame is critical to our well-being on both the natural and the spiritual levels. We know through clinical experience, through theoretical conceptualizations, through empirical research, there are serious, serious consequences to unaddressed shame. You can work through these things on your own. You can think about these things. It’s so much better, it’s so much more relational to join us, to join the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, work through these things with us, right? People doing it together, like-minded Catholics having great discussions, sharing examples from real life, being vulnerable on the discussion threads.

[00:58:27] If you’re in psychotherapy or counseling, so are many of our RCCD members. That’s really common. You can use membership in the RCCD community, all the resources, all the community support, all of that is a great supplement to your therapy work. If you’re not in therapy, this is still a great opportunity to take advantages of resources, to take advantage of the relational connections so that you don’t have to do this by yourself, that you’re in a community where other people can know you and be with you in it. We had our first office hours last Wednesday, October 21st. There was a great Q&A session on shame. It was very thoughtful, thought-provoking. It’s recorded so that RCCD members can go back and listen to it. There’s bonus podcasts that we had from our last episode on shame in marriages. All kinds of great things happening. But I’ve got to tell you that we’re going to temporarily suspend new membership in the community on November 3rd, and that’s coming up really quick. That’s because I am totally revamping the community. I’m going to make it so much better than it is right now. And right now it’s great. It’s going to be even better, because I’ve taken this community design masterclass that really helps me to know how to connect people even better in community online, like what we’re doing. And so I just need some time to straighten that all out.

[00:59:43] If you join now, you’ll get the low rate that we have for this year all through 2021. Prices are going to go up in 2021 when the membership reopens. We’ll have a waiting list for people that want to get in, but the price goes up if you join next year. So I’m going to encourage you to join before November 3rd, before November 3rd, so that you can lock in those low rates. Thank you for being here with me. Every one of you that are doing work around guilt and around shame are strengthening the mystical body of Christ, and that has a positive impact on everybody, including me. You are helping me if you are doing your work on shame and on guilt, and if you are doing your work on shame and guilt, you are helping everybody else in the mystical body of Christ. That’s how it works. So I’m grateful that you’ve listened to this, that you’ve gone this far. I’m grateful for your resolutions to actually continue to work through this stuff. And I will be with you as your host and guide to walk you through several more episodes on shame and its importance. And we will be here together with it. So without any more, because we are way into this. This is by far the longest episode. Thank you for staying with this whole thing. We will invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.