Josh Goldberg on Guilt & Shame

Transcript:

When it comes to the subject of disclosure one of the things that we have to get good at – that we have to learn to travel through and navigate – is the idea of guilt and shame. The communities that we work with at Boulder Crest have no margin for error. If people make mistakes, bad things happen, people can die. But when we bring that attitude – that sense that we have to be perfect – into our personal lives, into our family encounters, it creates a lot of challenges. Before we think about any of this, I want to de-conflict and really describe the difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt has a useful purpose. When we say something hurtful to someone that we care about and we feel that pain in our conscience – we feel as though we did something wrong, we feel guilty – that guilt is a clue. It’s a cue to do something. It’s a cue to make a repair – to make an apology. There’s value in that. The challenge is when we feel guilty long enough because of things we did,  what we run the risk of accumulating is shame.

The difference fundamentally between guilt and shame is that shame is “I am bad” and guilt is “I did something bad” and if you do enough things bad you may well conclude that you are a bad person – that you were not deserving of a good life and that you should be isolated from the rest of humanity. And when we think about this idea of guilt and shame and we think about finding ways to disclose and talk about it.

There are two really really important ideas for you to keep in mind. The first is the quote from Dr. Brene Brown, who spent so much of her life studying this idea of shame, and she said “shame cannot survive empathy it can’t survive being spoken”. At the core of shame is this sense of disconnection with ourselves. We don’t want to connect with ourselves. We are almost afraid of who we’ve become, and the antidote to that is to lean into it –  to do really hard things and have those conversations.

The second thing that we have to find our way to is the recognition that human beings are made of crooked timber. Nobody bats a thousand. Nobody. And we have to find some measure of forgiveness. The story of the two wolves is an important story because it reminds us that we are capable of doing incredible good in the world, and we are also each capable of incredibly bad things at the same time and it’s a fundamental question of which wolf we feed.

So as we think about these ideas of guilt and shame, it really fits in nicely with disclosure, and the importance of having a 3 to five in my life. I feel really sound that I have the ability – no matter what I do – I can pick up the phone, and call a member of my 3 to 5, and tell them what I did, and even if it’s effed up – it’s okay. They’re not necessarily going to forgive me. They’ll hold me accountable, but they give me the opportunity to express it, and to be able to not have it start to eat away and allow it to feed on itself. So as you think about disclosure, and you think about guilt and shame, reflect on what you need to do in your life to provide yourself with the forgiveness that you deserve and require to move forward in your life.