[pic of guilt and shame]
You probably think you already know the crucial difference between guilt and shame.
And you do know one difference. A major difference.
Guilt says, “I made a mistake.”
Shame says, “I am a mistake.”
Shame also says, “I am bad and wrong and don’t deserve to live.”
Yeah. Shame really knows how to party.
Indeed, it is shame’s often loud and way-too-articulate voicing of allllll the things that are fundamentally wrong with us that leads me to another major difference between shame and guilt.
A crucial difference.
Guilt is telling the truth. And shame is a liar.
Take me as an example.
When I was a queer and gender-rich teenager, I didn’t know that I was a queer and gender-rich teenager. I just knew there was something wrong with me. Something that made me different from most of my peers.
I didn’t want to dress like the other girls, even after I was way past my tomboy stage. I didn’t want to go out with boys. I was verrrrry attached to some of my girlfriends, but they weren’t girlfriends-like-romantic-girlfriends because this was the 1970s in Ohio and girls didn’t go out with other girls.
Now I can look back at this time and see that there was nothing wrong with me. I was just a queer, gender-rich kid in an era that had no room for me. That didn’t even acknowledge I existed.
Of course I was mired in shame. When the messages around you tell you that your existence is an aberration, you start to think it’s true. You start to feel rotten at the core.
All of this aberration messaging definitely did a number on me. At age sixteen, I developed an eating disorder in an attempt to “control” what was going on with me internally. It didn’t work, of course. It only made things worse.
At around the same time, I became a Senior Camper at my beloved summer camp. Senior Campers were between junior and senior year of high school. They were given extra responsibilities at the camp in exchange for attending camp for free.
I loved being Senior Camper. In high school, I was a nerdy outcast with only a handful of friends. At camp, I was somehow popular and friends with everyone.
Senior Camper was an elevation of my already-popular status, and I basked in the approval and adoration. It helped chip away at some of the shame churning away inside me.
But my camp popularity didn’t quell my disordered eating. That was still raging on, unabated.
One of my Senior Camper duties was to oversee the kitchen volunteers. This gave me access to areas of the kitchen where campers weren’t usually allowed to go. One of these areas of access was downstairs in the basement, where food was stored. Or, more importantly, where the cookies were stored.
I began to make a habit of “having to go down to the basement to get something.” This something was usually a cookie. Or two. Or maybe even three.
My cookie excursions served as a classic guilt/shame intersection. My shame about being queer and gender-rich led me to disordered eating, which then led me to stealing cookies from the basement, an activity I felt guilty about. I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I couldn’t distinguish between the guilt or the shame, or even acknowledge that any of it was there. I just knew I felt bad. And full of cookies.
At one point during the summer, one of the camp staff came down to the basement when I was helping myself to the cookies. She didn’t catch me in the act of eating one, but she did see me closing the fridge where the cookies were stored. I’m sure I had an incredibly transparent look of guilt/shame/Nothing-to-see-here-no-one-is-stealing-cookies-from-the-fridge on my face.
A few weeks later, one of the camp directors asked me if I had been helping myself to cookies in the basement. I lied and said I hadn’t. Another thing to feel guilty about and dump into the gurgling guilt/shame brew inside me.
A few years later, I applied to be counselor at the same camp. I wasn’t hired. I assumed it was about the cookie incident, and I respected their choice not to hire me. But I was still brewing the toxic mix of guilt/shame inside me, so I wasn’t able to tease out the genuine remorse from all the other aberration messaging in there.
Which brings me back to the crucial difference between guilt and shame.
One of the most healing parts of spiritual teaching for me has been learning that I am perfect, whole, and complete just the way I am. That no mistakes have been made in God. This teaching has allowed me to accept myself as a queer, gender-rich individual. It’s allowed me to actually celebrate myself as such.
Shame is a big fat liar, and knowing the spiritual truth about myself has allowed me examine and release shame’s lies.
But guilt is a different matter. Spiritual teaching doesn’t let me off the hook where guilt is concerned.
“I made a mistake” means that mistake needs to be corrected. I may need to admit this mistake to someone else. I may need to make amends. I may need to change my behavior so I don’t make this mistake again in the future. Or all of the above.
Knowing that shame is a big fat liar and guilt is a big fat truth-teller helps me tease out the difference between the two.
When I was a teenager, I didn’t know the difference. Shame had me so caught up in its harmful and inaccurate messages, anything I did that caused genuine guilt and remorse was just sucked into the pit of shame. This left me unable to clean up the guilt because it was all mixed up into one big I Am Bad and Wrong brew.
Now, when I catch an internal message telling me I am a mistake, I know that it’s not true. I know that it’s based on absolutely insubstantial evidence that will wither in the face of spiritual truth.
And I know that I can bust out a plethora of spiritual practices to shrink the shame-lie into oblivion.
I also know that when I catch an internal message telling me I made a mistake, I need to clean it up. The sooner the better.
These two practices – catching the guilt and shame inside me, knowing the difference between the two, and doing what I can to alleviate them – helps keep me lighter. Happier. More available to Spirit in every moment.
I wish I’d known this when I was a kid. I wish I could go back to that gender-queer, cookie-eating teenager and tell them that there was nothing wrong with them. That just because they messed up, it didn’t mean they were fundamentally flawed. That some of the messages inside them were lies and some were true and they could learn to tell the difference between them.
That kid still lives inside me, so I guess it’s not too late to tell them. I guess writing this blog post was a way tease out the threads of truth and lies from my past and figure out which was which.
Spirit was with me then, telling me the truth about myself. I just didn’t know it yet.
What about you? How do you tell the difference between shame and guilt? Between truth and lies? Share your comments below!
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