Guilt & Shame

Two Sentences That Sound Alike

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  3 min read

There are two kinds of apology, and most of us have given both. The first leaves a person lighter: the wrong has been named, the other person has been heard, and something in the room settles. The second leaves her heavier, as though saying I was wrong confirmed something far larger than the thing she did. She forgot to call. She said she was sorry. And somehow, by bedtime, a forgotten phone call had grown into a verdict about what kind of wife, mother, and friend she is.

That difference is not personality, and it is not a sign that some people simply feel things more deeply. It is the difference between two sentences that sound almost identical and do completely different things inside a person.

I did something wrong. There is something wrong with me.

Guilt says the first. Shame says the second. The most widely used distinction in the research literature goes back to the psychologist Helen Block Lewis, who described shame as a negative evaluation of the whole self and guilt as a negative evaluation of a specific behavior. Guilt emphasizes the thing that was done. Shame emphasizes the one who did it.

The two feel different in the body, too. Guilt feels like tension and regret about an act; it points outward, toward the person who was hurt and toward what might be done about it. Shame is described as shrinking, smallness, worthlessness, and exposure — even when no one is actually watching. Guilt says look at what I did. Shame says look at what I am, and please do not look at all.

Guilt is information: it tells the truth about an act, and an act can be addressed. Shame is a conclusion: it makes a claim about the whole person, and a whole person cannot be apologized for.

What each one makes a person do

This is where the research gets uncomfortably useful. Across many studies, shame corresponds with attempts to deny, conceal, and escape, while guilt moves people toward confession, apology, and repair. Guilt tends to travel with empathy, because the person is focused on a behavior and therefore on the people that behavior affected. Shame appears to interfere with empathy, because a person in shame has turned inward and has little attention left for the one who was hurt.

That finding explains something many people have lived through without having words for it: telling someone they hurt you, and watching the conversation become entirely about how bad they feel. That is not always selfishness in the ordinary sense. Very often it is shame, which has pulled every available resource inward and left nothing for the person standing in front of it.

And then there is anger. People prone to shame are also more prone to anger, hostility, and blaming things outside themselves — with one line of research finding that the path from shame to aggression ran precisely through that externalizing of blame. Shamed people, desperate to escape an unbearable feeling, turn the tables and set it down on someone else.

Why they arrive fused

People rarely feel one at a time. What the research shows is that guilt becomes harmful when it fuses with shame — when look at the terrible thing I have done becomes, in the next breath, and am I not a terrible person. Once that fusion happens, guilt loses its advantages. Uncomplicated guilt offers many paths back: change the behavior, repair the damage, apologize, resolve to do better. Shame-fused guilt offers almost none, because it is very hard to repair a self that believes it is defective at the core.

Why does it fuse in some people and not others? My answer, which the book develops, is that guilt has to rest on something. When a person has a secure place to stand, guilt can stay what it is — heavy but survivable. When there is nothing underneath it, guilt converts.