I recently heard Mel Robbins discussing the distinction between guilt and shame, giving of course appropriate credit to Brené Brown, the renowned shame researcher. 

I was listening to an audiobook called “Work It Out”, in which Mel coaches women who are having issues in their workplace. Of course, as Mel points out numerous times, there isn’t really a distinction between work and life – whom you are at work is whom you are in life, and vice versa. The entire artificial concept  of “work vs life” is quite nonsensical in my opinion, but that’s a whole different discussion.

Mel was coaching a young woman who had the misfortune to be the victim of two sexual assaults within six months of each other, so as you might expect, she carries around with her a fair amount of trauma, and it affects all of her life – at home and at work.

The distinction between guilt and shame came up in the context of the young woman saying that she felt a lot of guilt about the sexual assault. Mel stopped her and pointed out that what she was really talking about was not guilt, but shame, and it seemed to me that this distinction is worth fleshing out here.

As defined by Brené Brown, guilt is when you feel bad because you’ve done something wrong. If you forgot to call your mother on her birthday, or if you yelled at your kids because you had a rough day, you feel guilty. Guilt can be a good thing, if it moves you to appropriate action. You’ve done something wrong, and you need to take action to fix it – call your mother and apologise, apologise to the kids, resolve to take a deep breath before coming into the house after work, whatever you can do to repair the damage your actions may have caused to the relationship. You want to make sure your actions align with your values, so you fix it and move on.

Shame, on the other hand, is never a good thing. Shame is when you feel somehow flawed, bad, broken or worthless because of something you’ve done, or had done to you. This is endemic in our society – Marisa Peer has made an entire career of telling people that they are enough. People tend to wallow and get stuck in their shame – they keep playing it over and over in their heads, and seem powerless to take any kind of action to repair the damage they may have caused. The really weird ones, like Mel’s client, happen when she did not do anything wrong – somebody else attacked her. But she was left thinking there must be something wrong with her, if this person thought it was OK to do this to her. I’m not blaming the victim here – but it’s important to be aware that this is not guilt, but shame, and should be treated as such. Mel told her she should get therapy, and I hope she did.

If you find yourself in a position where you are beating yourself up for something you did or didn’t do, pause and take stock – are you feeling guilt (I did something wrong), or shame (I am something wrong)? If it’s the former, you can take steps to fix the damage, and move on. If it’s the latter, I would recommend some serious thought-work, possibly with the help of a therapist or a life coach.