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One of my early discoveries on becoming a practicing clinical psychologist was that my guiltiest patients seemed to me to have the least to feel guilty about, while those that had actually committed acts that would have inspired me to feel guilty often felt no guilt at all.
Guilt is an emotion we feel when one of our actions (or even an imagined one) has caused suffering or harm to another person. Shame, on the other hand, is a private, shrinking feeling of our own deficiency, inadequacy or badness.
On the whole, people tend to be either guilt-prone or shame-prone. Studies reveal that people who are prone readily to feel shame and are preoccupied with managing their sense of self-worth, experience relatively little genuine guilt. Shame seems to hijack the capacity to own our actions and assess their impact on others.
On the other hand, the guilty tend to focus on and exaggerate their perceived ability to harm or inconvenience others, irrespective of whether these concerns are realistic. For my guiltiest patients, almost any action or inaction can easily become a focus of self-reproach. An unanswered text or phone call might trigger a cascade of worry: “What did I do wrong?” “Is she angry at me?” “Did I offend her in some way?”
Research suggests that children begin to develop a sense of responsibility for the feelings of others as early as the second year of life. In my clinical experience, guilty beliefs destined to become chronic generally originate in childhood.
Both egocentric and confused about how the world works, children tend to assume that they cause, or are central to, many phenomena, both for good or ill. For example, a child with a depressed mother might begin to assume that he or she was responsible for the illness by burdening her. On the other hand, If a child identified with a chronically unhappy mother, guilty feelings of disloyalty might now attach to feeling happy or fulfilled in ways the parent did not.
Parents rarely set out consciously to blame their children for their problems, or explicitly make their child feel responsible for their setbacks. But even the best of parents sometimes do. For a child particularly sensitive to feeling responsible for others, or faced with the need to adapt to confusing life phases without optimal parental guidance, childhood can be rife with opportunities to develop guilty, unrealistic beliefs.
Children have neither the vocabulary nor understanding to verbalize these problems. Because guilt-prone children tend to be “intropunitive” (blaming or punishing themselves for problems) they tend not to signal or act-out their conflicts the way their “extrapunitive” (more shame-prone) counterparts do. Guiltier kids can often seem like model children.
As I write this post, we are in the midst of the fear and uncertainty surrounding the spread of the COVID-19 virus. It is quite normal, of course, to worry about the health of ourselves, family and friends. But by sheer statistics, most of us will remain healthy and uninfected.
As a psychologist, it is my assumption that in addition to relief at good fortune, this will trigger an undercurrent of guilt for many people. Perhaps they developed guilty beliefs in childhood that they did not deserve to prosper, or that good fortune somehow came at someone else’s expense. These beliefs, developing in the murky vagaries of childhood memory, are not very clear in the adult mind. But in my office, with guiding focus, my adult patients still feel them acutely and testify to their constricting effects in their lives. With work, they can be overcome.
The role of unconscious guilty beliefs in human nature is well understood by psychologists but underestimated in our current media culture. In times past, the admonition, “finish your plate, there are starving children in China,” was not an empty appeal to unproductive guilt. It was intended as a motivation to finish our food.
My hope is that perhaps this pandemic may help us to focus on accepting good fortune and feeling compassion for others without the freight of unproductive guilt. Indulging in guilty fantasies at this time only robs us of the opportunity for gratitude. Research in positive psychology shows us that the capacity for genuine gratitude is at the heart of happiness and self-care.
