To be in community, we don’t get to say or do anything we want without attending to the consequences of how it affects others.  When I say or do something hurtful to someone else, it can evoke feelings of shame and/or guilt.  Shame and guilt are two of the most basic and distressing emotions we can experience.  Brene Brown defines shame as the intensely painful emotion we experience when we believe we are flawed or defective and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.  In contrast, she differentiates guilt as an adaptive social emotion that focuses on behavior and how our behavior affects others or falls short of living up to our values.  Her short differentiation of the two goes like this:  when I feel shame, I feel like I am a mistake; when I feel guilt, I feel like I made a mistake.  (see for example this brief clip of Brene Brown on 60 minutes from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSrXxqKfYwI) 

In my life, in many of my clients’ lives, and in the relevant research, we don’t grow so much when we are stuck in shame – we deny, we get defensive and attack back, and thrash around to avoid feeling like I am defective and unworthy of love and belonging.  But in contrast, when we can move to a place of guilt – that we made a mistake – that can lead to growth and change.  Part of this has to do with how we language it to ourselves and with each other:  do we focus more on statements of being or statements of doing?  Do I call myself stupid for getting a low grade on a test or do I say that I didn’t learn or understand some of the material as well as I thought I should and I need to look at getting help or studying differently or…?

I think that languaging and labeling is part of what makes issue of confronting racism, sexism, antisemitism, and other “isms” so challenging.  Facing “isms” in ourselves so often provokes shame rather than guilt: “I’m not a racist,” “are you calling me an anti-semite,” “I’m not one of those men who are more dangerous to women than a bear in the woods,” etc.  This shame can come from both how others confront us (e.g., “you’re a racist”) and how we talk to ourselves about our behavior (e.g., “I’m not a sexist.”)  These kinds of ways of talking to ourselves and each other are more being than doing statements, and therefore lead us more to shame than guilt.  We don’t talk about it as making a racially hurtful (or supportive) statement or action; rather, we talk about it as you are being a racist (or an anti-racist).

While focusing more on behavior than on being/identity might allow for more change, a difficulty with that is we rarely make “ism” acts in isolation.  We have been acculturated to see the world and not see the world in certain ways.  Working on confronting “isms” effectively requires looking at patterns of thoughts, interpretations, emotions, and behaviors.  It’s not enough to just look at I said this one thing this one time.  But once we really start getting into looking at patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior like that (e.g., implicit biases), it is not a far leap to see that as who we are, and end up in shame and defensiveness.

So if you are struggling with feelings of shame or confronting “isms” that you grew up with and would like some help, please contact me.