The Difference Between Shame and Guilt

Joseph Burgoin
Rules of the Road
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Shame/Narcissism
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Social Behavior
39

According to Wikipedia, the "dividing line between the concepts of shame, guilt and embarrassment is not fully standardized."  Many people use guilt and shame interchangeably, but from a psychological perspective, they actually refer to different experiences.   Quoting from Wikipedia:

"Psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis argued that 'The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus.'  Similarly, Fossum and Mason say in their book Facing Shame that 'While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.'"

I would go further and say that the action that inspires guilt usually involves the infliction of pain, either intentionally or unintentionally, upon another person.  As an example, in the anecdote I related in my post on envy and jealousy, I once said something hurtful at a dinner party, and on some level, I intended it to be hurtful.  Afterward, I felt guilty about my actions because I could see that I had hurt my friend.  More painfully, I also felt ashamed that I was the sort of person who would behave that way.  Guilt arose as a result of inflicting pain on somebody else; I felt shame in relation to myself.

As a therapist, I find this distinction to be  important and useful.  Many deeply troubled people have very little capacity to feel guilt, for example.  In order to feel guilt about the harm you may have done to somebody else, you must recognize him or her as a distinct individual, to begin with.  Thus a person who struggles with separation and merger issues might not feel true guilt even if he or she were to use that word to describe a feeling.  Many people who display narcissistic behavior often suffer from profound feelings of shame but have little authentic concern for other people; they don't tend to feel genuinely guilty.  This explains why an authentic sense of guilt rarely appears in narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder:  guilt depends upon the ability to intuit how someone else might feel and as a result to experience remorse for the pain one has caused.

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Pride and the Healing of Shame

Joseph Burgoin
Destinations
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Relationship Issues
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Self-Esteem and Self-Sabotage
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Shame/Narcissism
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Unbearable Emotion
55

Because I write and think so much about the psychology of shame and its toxic effects, I'm often asked about overcoming shame, to explain how one "recovers" from shame, or whether I have any guidance about "healing shame."  My answers in the past have felt inadequate to me, but a recent session with a long-term client helped me bring my thoughts on this issue into focus.

Stan, a middle-aged married man, has struggled with unbearable shame for most of his life and has relied on the typical defenses against shame described in earlier posts.  In particular, he relies on blaming as his primary mode of defense.  For example, he often rants in silence against his wife whenever they have a disagreement:  he'll mentally complain about her behavior with a sense of grievance, blaming her for the argument.
This has been a life-long pattern in his relationships.  Behind his defensiveness, he has suffered from the sense that he's emotionally damaged in some fundamental way.

During the economic downturn, Stan suffered some reverses in his business that have placed a great strain on his family, largely shifting the financial burden of supporting them onto his wife's shoulders for the time being.  She hasn't criticized him for what has happened nor complained about the weighty responsibility she now must carry.  She recognizes that the economic downturn wasn't his fault but Stan nonetheless feels humiliated and defensive.  It taps into a lifelong feeling that he is damaged and ineffectual.

Recently, Stan has remarked on his wife's increasing moodiness.  Even the smallest things seem to set her off; when they re-connect at the end of their work day, she instantly launches into an account of all the things that irritate her about her job.  She strikes him as angry.  Because he feels ashamed about his limited inability to contribute financially, he tries to be as supportive as possible but finds these "bitch sessions" increasingly difficult to bear.

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Defense Mechanisms I: Splitting

Joseph Burgoin
Defense Mechanisms
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Points of Departure
29

Although this post will look at splitting as one of the defense mechanisms, I'd like to begin by noting that splitting also represents a normal and constructive part of our mental processes.  We couldn't think or process our experience without it.  To understand the useful functions that splitting serves, we need to go through the same kind of imaginative exercise I presented in my recent post on post-traumatic stress disorder -- that is, to try to envision the emotional life of an infant.

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have debated whether human beings enter the world with some kind of a priori knowledge, but for this exercise, let's just imagine a clean slate.  Nearly everything the newborn experiences is thus brand new and unfamiliar; a central need is to make sense of it all, to attempt to understand the environment and its powerful effects.  From the beginning, maybe even in utero, the infant divides its experiences into those that feel "good" or gratifying vs. those that cause pain and/or frustration and feel "bad".  Good vs. bad (though not in a moral sense) is therefore the first organizing principle.  It depends upon the infant splitting the confusing mass of its experience into good and bad, dividing it up so that it becomes more understandable and predictable.

The accumulation of "good" experiences, linked to repeated sensory gratification, eventually gives rise to the idea of "mother"; the bad ones (a bit later) give rise to the idea of her absence or failure to appear.  An important developmental milestone occurs when the infant can understand (on a very primitive level) that the "good" experiences largely occur when this mother-entity appears and tends to it, and the bad ones (hunger, cold, etc.) tend to occur when she is absent.  At this point, the infant becomes aware that other people exist, and if you're a parent, you know that there's a noticeable difference when this occurs.  (I'm not going to talk about the good mother/bad mother issue just now; I'll save that topic for another post.)

Splitting as a mental process thus enables us to makes distinctions.  Throughout life, splitting serves this exact function:  it allows us to take an undifferentiated, confusing mass of experience or information and divide it into categories that have meaning.  Without splitting, nothing would make sense to us.  We wouldn't be able to understand because we couldn't divide the mass of sensory input into meaningful categories.  Projection likewise has valuable and normal functions, as do other so-called defense mechanisms.

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60 Minutes and Greg Mortenson’s Fraud: The Power of Sentimentality

Joseph Burgoin
Love and Hatred
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Social Behavior
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Society and Culture
19

As you probably know, Greg Mortenson is the best-selling author of two books that detail his efforts to build schools and promote the education of young girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools.  On CBS, 60 Minutes recently aired a segment which revealed convincing evidence that much of Mortenson's narrative is a fraud:  some of his heart-warming stories are exaggerated or mis-represented, others invented whole cloth.  The segment also highlights financial improprieties at Mortenson's charity, the Central Asia Institute, which Mortenson has used to pay millions of dollars for his book tours without sharing the proceeds of those books with his charity.  If you haven't seen the segment, you can view it here.

These books are required reading for U.S. servicemen deployed to Afghanistan.  In the liberal-minded district where my children have gone to school, Three Cups of Tea is assigned almost every academic year:  it exemplifies the values of altruism and social service heavily promoted by its instructors and administration.  According to the teachers who assign it, this book is full of tales that should fire your idealism, inspiring you to emulate Greg Mortenson's self-sacrifice and dedication to social service; it presents an alternative model to the egoistic, selfish approach to life that seems so prevalent in our society today.  My kids hated it.  My oldest son found it manipulative and preachy.

The 60 Minutes piece on Greg Mortenson's fraud shows that he used his stories, retailed in two best-selling books and hyped with promotional tours and speaking engagements, to solicit donations to the Central Asia Institute, which he used as his own "personal ATM."  Despite the way my own children felt about Three Cups of Tea, it apparently does the job Mortenson intended, for his charity has collected millions and millions of dollars in donations.  A look at some of his core stories -- his founding myths, so to speak -- will show why he has been so effective in bilking the public.

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Narcissistic Rage and the Sense of Entitlement

Joseph Burgoin
Depression and Bipolar Disorder
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Detours
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Shame/Narcissism
130

While the manic phase in what is commonly known as 'bipolar disorder' usually involves manic flight into grandiose fantasy and impulsive behavior, on occasion it leads to rage, violence, suicide and even murder.  The DSM-IV refers to this as "dysphoric mania" or a mixed state, where manic and depressive symptoms occur simultaneously.  Outbursts of rage also occur in other disorders:  they feature in Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and various types of narcissistic behavior; anyone dominated by feelings of shame may be prone to occasional outbursts of rage, which are often an intense form of blaming, one of the primary defenses against shame.  While the DSM-IV defines these disorders as unique categories of mental illness, with individual diagnosis codes, they actually exist along a spectrum and have much in common.  Most of the clients I've seen who demonstrated features of Borderline Personality Disorder or presented with Bipolar Disorder symptoms also displayed features of narcissistic behavior, often involving outbursts of rage.

In other posts, I've talked about the function of hatred and anger as a kind of psychic glue in the face of disintegration anxiety; I've tried to make room for the idea that rage, as destructive as its external effects may be, sometimes serves a positive psychic function when the alternative is the terror of a kind of psychic death.  Likewise, rage may function as a defense against shame that feels unbearable.  These two are connected:  shame, as I discussed in my early post on basic or toxic shame, is the emotional expression of our sense that we are damaged; that sense of damage can mean that the self is felt to be in pieces, in danger of collapse.  Hatred, anger and rage serve a defensive and cohesive function for these conditions, especially when there has been a narcissistic injury to one's sense of self that stirs up unbearable shame.

Narcissistic rage may also express a frustrated sense of entitlement, by which I mean the feeling that one has a right to be given something which others believe should be obtained through effort, and unrealistic expectations of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with one's expectations.  While this is a characteristic feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, I've seen it in every borderline client I've treated, and in many clients with Bipolar Disorder symptoms, as well.  A sense of entitlement reflects an inflated view of one's own importance and rights, which features intermittently  in many psychological states of mind.  No doubt you've known people who express this sense of entitlement, whether or not they fit into any of the diagnostic categories with which we've all become familiar.

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