Guilt vs. Shame

My niece, Amy, and I got into a strong difference of opinion this morning over the difference between shame and guilt and whether either or both were feelings that one should encourage or reject.  Our differences reflected the vastly different ways we were defining those terms.  Amy maintained that she was not speaking so much out of personal experience as she was reflecting the views of an author she had just read, but I sensed (possibly mistakenly) that she had internalized the author's perspective, so that in effect I was arguing with her.  What follows is a kind of p.s. to our discussion this morning.  I hope she realizes how very much I value having her around to talk about serious topics with.

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The point, I repeat, should not get lost that our argument was entirely dependent on how the terms guilt and shame were being defined.  Your author, you said, claimed that while guilt had utility, because it could lead to action-to-repair, shame is a destructive term because it involves assuming the person feeling the emotion is motivated to translate shame into self-loathing.  In other words, guilt is tied to action, while shame is a function of being.

But that's putting the cart before the horse.  Guilt is to doing what shame is to being only if you choose to define the two terms that way.  I have never defined them that way.

Way back when I first began my quest to understand the difference between Japanese and American national cultures, I encountered the claim that Japan was a shame-based culture while the U.S. was a guilt-based culture.  The reason, so the theory went, was that Japanese were inherently collectivist, that the individual Japanese was subjected (or subjected themselves) to the collective. The Japanese way of expressing this phenomenon is to say "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down."  The saying is so familiar that one need not say the whole thing.  Just mentioning deru kugi - the nail that sticks out - is enough.  Mothers teach their children not to be a deru kugi.)

In contrast, so the theory goes, the individualistic American culture reflects the Protestant view that each individual has a personal responsibility to God and to no one else.  Right and wrong are therefore not determined so much by community standards as by individual conscience.

Never mind that this social theory is oversimplified, reductionist and overgeneralized and should not be considered anything more than suggestive; for a time I internalized it because it was widespread and could be found in almost any book you might pick up on the subject of Japanese culture. And to this day, I still believe there is more truth in the cultural analysis than overgeneralization.  And this affects the way I define both guilt and shame.  Except that (possibly because I have never completely shed my Protestant cultural values) I see guilt as useful because it is at the heart of one's conscience and the motivator for doing the right thing in the end, once you have awakened to responsibility.  And I see shame as a useful tool for making someone else want to straighten up and fly right.  

In the end, neither guilt nor shame are ends in themselves.  You need to shed guilt the moment you sense it rising up within you and replace it with a sense of responsibility, by which I mean a resolve to "fix" the harm or damage you've done. As quickly and as cleanly as you possibly can.  Shame is a form of embarrassment, the feeling you get when you get caught with your pants down. It usually passes with time and you don't need to do anything about it.  Just make sure you're not mixing it up with guilt.

The author you cited who claims that guilt is good and shame is bad has it completely backwards.  Consider how these words are used in public.  When we are outraged at a crooked politician, we don't shout "Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!"  We shout "Shame! Shame! Shame!"  That's because we instinctively understand guilt to be something for an individual to work through in their own time, and shame to be something to shed light on.  In that sense, you don't shame yourself; you shame others who do wrong.

Bottom line: Neither guilt nor shame are positive notions.  Shame others if they've done something wrong and you have half a chance of tweaking their conscience.  Never take it on yourself if you can help it, and if you feel it, wait and let time take care of it.  And don't waste a single moment on guilt.  Move directly to responsibility.  It's the adult thing to do.