I often ask my clients if they know the difference between shame and guilt. It’s an important question. Since I can’t ask each of you reading this what your definitions are, I’ll offer mine here as a place to start this conversation:
Guilt is I did a bad thing
Shame is I am a bad person
That’s a huge and important distinction to get clear on. We all do bad things sometimes, often totally unintentionally. We make mistakes, we say something that hurts someone’s feelings, we act out in frustration or anger and regret it later on. That’s part of being human. One bad moment, or even a series of bad moments, does not make you a bad person.
Shame thrives on secrecy. Like something in a petri dish, it grows in the dark, unseen and buried deep. Once we take the brave step to let someone else see that petri dish, the thing that we thought was so dark and horrible no one could know it and ever love us completely, the cause of the same is shown to be much less horrible than we’d ever thought. When we share our stories they loose the power to control and separate us. As a client recently said, “my shame can’t withstand the light of sharing.”
Children’s brains’ are still learning and growing. They often have a tendency in earlier years to see things very literally. Black and white thinking lends itself to right and wrong, which leads to seeing someone as bad or at fault.
We can help our children learn about the range of gray in the world by letting them see our own struggles and how we deal with mistakes and unintentional harm to others in our own lives. Perhaps you get to the car and realize the cashier forgot to ring up the large bag of cat food on the bottom. Maybe you said something in jest, and then realized it hurt another person’s feelings unintentionally. Or maybe you had your own shame trigger about body image that came up in a conversation with someone.
By letting our own vulnerabilities shine through and sharing these stories with our children, we can empower both ourselves and our children by naming what is happening. Sharing those stories, and talking about the difference between shame and guilt, teaches again and again that making a bad choice does not make us a bad person. Even more powerfully, in doing so we make ourselves safe people to come to when they are feeling guilty or ashamed about something that has happened.
Our culture encourages shame as a motivator. “Shame on you.” Without realizing it, we can create deep harm in our children if we do not look at our own relationship with shame and how we have internalized messages ourselves.
The #MeToo movement has been a powerful example of this. My stepson contacted me to ask if I had a #MeToo story when he started seeing friends sharing their stories on social media. We had a rich conversation about both of our experiences and how to support his friends who were sharing. Instead of being ashamed about my own stories or keeping a secret to “protect him” from what can be hard to hear, I was able to share them in way that was open and honest and lead to a deeper connection in how we choose to show up in our lives when hard things happen.
Because no matter how much we do to protect those we love, scary things do happen.
Being both fully human and vulnerable and a parent is a challenging combination. Our children look to us for so much, and we want more than anything to protect them. If we never acknowledge or talk about the tough stuff, it can be so easy for children to feel like they are the only person this has ever happened to, to be alone with the fear and the guilt.
And when we sit alone with our fear or guilt, that petri dish grows and we begin to internalize those feelings into shame, to feel like we did something to deserve the bad thing, or that we are a bad person because of a poor choice we made.
Children need to know that we are all human, that we all make mistakes, and that we are still lovable and worthy even when we do. We can do that by loving them in all their moments, by letting them know that we might now always like what they do, but we always love them. We can also do that by sharing our own moments as they arise, letting them witness us making our own mistakes and figuring out how to move forward with integrity and grace. And by tracking when our children might be starting to say things that show shame is taking root – and seeking to support them when that happens, so that their petri dish doesn’t keep growing in the dark and begin to overwhelm them.