A shared universe › Blog › Guilt and shame are not the same thing · Español
Guilt focuses on what you did; shame focuses on what you believe you are. It helps to tell them apart because guilt tends to lead us to put things right, while shame pushes us to hide and is more closely tied to low mood. After we get something wrong, both can appear, and they look so alike that it is hard to separate them. One looks at what we did. The other looks at who we are.
The psychologist June Tangney and her colleagues have studied them in depth. In a review published in 2007 in the Annual Review of Psychology they set out a distinction first put forward by the psychologist Helen Block Lewis: shame is a negative judgement of your whole self, and guilt is a negative judgement of one particular thing you did.
Guilt fixes on an act: “I did something that was wrong”. Shame fixes on the whole person: “I am someone who is wrong”. It seems a fine distinction, but it changes what we do next.
According to that review, guilt usually moves us to make amends: to own up, to apologise, to fix what can be fixed, to do it differently next time. Shame moves us to deny what happened, to hide or to get away from the situation, and often to become defensive or to blame someone else.
Shame also seems to get in the way of empathy. When all your attention is on how bad you look, there is little room left to think about how the other person is. Guilt, by contrast, goes hand in hand with putting yourself in their shoes.
Guilt hurts, but it leaves a way out. Shame leaves none, because you cannot repair what you are.
Tangney and her team describe people who are prone to shame as having lower self-esteem, lower mood and more anxiety. Guilt about something specific and clear, on the other hand, is not linked to those problems.
A 2011 meta-analysis that brought together 108 studies with more than twenty-two thousand people partly confirmed this: shame was more strongly related to symptoms of depression than guilt in general. But it found an important nuance. Guilt felt about things that could not be controlled, or guilt that floats around without being tied to anything specific, was related to depression as much as shame was. These are correlations: they do not tell us which comes first.
Sometimes we feel guilty about things that did not depend on us: an illness, a break-up, what someone else did. That guilt does not ask for amends. It asks for someone to help us see it from the outside.
It is exactly the kind that, according to the meta-analysis, most resembles shame in what it does to your mood. That is why it is worth handling with care: asking yourself what you knew and what you could do at the time, not now that you know how it ended. Treating yourself with the same kindness you would show a friend has a name in psychology, and we talk about it in the article on self-compassion.
If shame or guilt keeps you awake, makes you feel worthless or comes with a sadness that lasts for weeks, it may help to talk it over with your GP or with a psychologist. Putting it into words with someone who knows how to listen often brings a great deal of relief.
If what you feel is stopping you from living, don’t go through it without company. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free, confidential and answered 24 hours a day. If there is immediate danger, call 112. In another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
In A shared universe you can light a star with “What weighs on me” and write the thing you don’t dare to tell, in no more than 280 characters and without names. Nobody will know it is yours.
Other people will read it and can keep it company with a tap or with a few words of comfort or hope. You will see how many times it has been kept company and what people have said to you, but never who.