Related but not the same: guilt and shame, shame and humiliation
As an EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) practitioner I ask my clients all the time, “How does that make you feel? What excitement does that bring you?” While I often hear that guilt and shame are used interchangeably, they are related but not the same.
Guilt is feeling bad about a particular action you have done. If you did something that you consider wrong, such as lying, cheating, betraying, or hurting someone, then guilt is an appropriate feeling and can be a catalyst for self-improvement. Guilt can lead to remorse, which implies genuine pain for having hurt someone. Remorse usually leads to positive actions, such as admitting your mistakes, taking responsibility for your actions, a true apology, and a commitment to change your behavior.
On the other hand, if you know that you did the best you could in the situation, but feel that what happened is entirely your fault and you are carrying a disproportionate amount of guilt, this is something you need to take a closer look at. Are you someone who feels guilty all the time, even for things that might not be your fault? If so, this is probably due to a pattern learned in childhood and can also turn into embarrassment.
Shame is a close cousin to guilt, but it is not the same. While guilt is an acknowledgment that your behavior was bad, shame is a deep-seated feeling that you are bad. While appropriate guilt is a healthy response to wrongdoing because it can serve as a catalyst for self-improvement, shame is a debilitating emotion that can lead to depression, aggression, addiction, bullying, or eating disorders. suicide.
Shame and humiliation are again closely related, but they are different. Shame comes from something you or someone else did to make you feel silly. It’s usually mild enough like realizing you’ve just given a presentation with a large chunk of cabbage between your front teeth, or shrugging off as your mother tells her new romantic partner stories about her teenage years. Once the initial discomfort is over, it can often turn into a funny story.
Humiliation, on the other hand, is neither mild nor funny, but profound and traumatic. While shame is usually caused by something you did yourself or a well-meaning person did inadvertently, humiliation is caused by the misbehavior of others. If you got a question wrong at school in class, you may feel embarrassed, but if the teacher ridicules you for not knowing the answer and calls you stupid, you will feel humiliated. It is also very likely that you will feel humiliated if you are publicly reprimanded at work or if a colleague cheats on you and becomes common knowledge.
Humiliation is associated with public failure and loss of dignity, which may take some work to overcome. However, humiliation is most damaging when it is internalized as shame. A healthy response to humiliation is anger and the feeling of “I didn’t deserve that.” Humiliation is internalized as shame, however, when other people’s misdeeds become a belief about yourself: when you think the teacher who called you stupid was right, take the public reprimand at work as evidence that you are a bad or incapable person, or the fact that your partner cheated on you as proof that you are unlovable.
The best way I know of to deeply process and overcome any painful emotions, especially potentially harmful emotions like inappropriate guilt, humiliation, and shame, is EFT. EFT is an almost magical process that finds your feelings exactly where they are at any given moment and by processing them deeply through your body’s energy system allows you to transform them in a relatively short period of time. Scientifically proven to reduce physical symptoms of stress, decrease emotional intensity around past traumatic events, and reconfigure the brain to disrupt old, debilitating thought patterns, EFT is an incredibly powerful tool to literally have at your fingertips.