Let’s talk about one of the heaviest issues for humans: Guilt and Shame. Now they’re connected to each other and they’re similar, but they are different. And you’ve got to understand the distinctions if you’re going to get over them yourself or help your clients get over them.
Guilt and Shame are two of the nastiest human conditions. They’re like weights that so many people are carrying around in their lives. A lot of our sabotaging patterns are connected to the guilt and the shame that we are carrying and so they act like emotional anchors, holding us back from more success in business and more happiness in our lives. And because they are so heavy, guilt and shame are vicious emotions to try to live with.
For the sake of clarity in this conversation, I want to define guilt, shame, and resentment.
I’m going to use resentment as we apply it to other people. There is some self-resentment, but I’m going to use it in the way we resent other people for doing things or not doing things in the present and the past.
Guilt is when we’re holding ourselves in contempt for making the wrong decision from the past. Perhaps we feel guilty that we weren’t there for a big life event. For example, I have a lot of clients that feel guilty because they weren’t there when their parents passed away. Or people feel guilty for the decisions that they made when they were younger.
Shame is the emotional punishment that we use with ourselves. Shame can be attempted to be applied to other people, but I’m going to use it here as the shame that we put on ourselves. We do hear the phrase, “Shame on you” and a lot of times we hear that from parents to children, which is not an effective behavioral strategy. Please don’t use shame on your kids because those are the things that they end up needing a life coach or a therapist or a counselor for later on in life. Shame is not an empowering tool for manipulating behavior. It’s an effective one, but it’s not an empowering one. What happens is we take this phrase, “Shame on you” and we turn it to ourselves. “Shame on me for that,” and it’s like there’s this gigantic blanket of shame that we can’t free ourselves from in order to see our lives clearly enough to make better choices.
We’re holding ourselves in contempt for the choices that we made back then that were “wrong”.
When you are trapped inside the shame blanket there are only two options.
1. Continue making shame-filled decisions that will lead to shame-filled judgment because you’re under the shame blanket.
2. You make no decision because you don’t want to keep making the shameful decisions. Shameful, meaning full of shame. The decisions are made from a place of shame because we are full of shame.
So we have to get out of that experience of shame in order to make better decisions. But think about it, we’re essentially telling ourselves, “I’m not going to lift this shame blanket off of you until you start making better decisions!” But we can’t make better decisions under the shame blanket.
So it’s this perpetual catch-22 and it causes most people to essentially live their lives connected to all the shame of the past. And it’s an awful, toxic, poisonous energy for us to live in.
Nobody will ever experience happiness through shame. Nobody will ever experience joy through shame. Nobody will ever experience any level of success through shame.
As I shared earlier, shame is effective. You can use shame to manipulate your own behavior. You just can’t do it to produce happiness. So you can shame yourself into getting tasks done. You can shame yourself into or out of relationships. You can shame yourself into the gym to exercise. You can shame yourself into changing your behavior, but you will never produce happiness through shame.
It is impossible. That’s not what happiness is built upon. You might satisfy your ego through shame, but you’ll never make your heart happy.
In order to release the shame, we have to let go of the guilt. So here’s the concept:
We make decisions in our lives and nobody ever wants to make a wrong decision.
Nobody. Ever. Nobody has ever made a knowingly wrong decision in the moment that they made it.
Every single decision every human being makes is based on a need that that human is trying to get fulfilled.
Now it might be a very low percentage that the need is going to get fulfilled, but in the moment that we make the decision, there is a need that we are trying to get fulfilled that we are trying to meet through the decision.
Even if we only have 1% hope that this decision will produce the need that we’re trying to get met, we still have 1% hope.
So again, nobody has ever made a knowingly wrong decision.
Even with suicide, which is one of the things that some people say, “Well what about people that kill themselves? That’s knowingly wrong.”
No. To the suicidal brain, that’s not knowingly wrong. That’s the best option that they have in that moment. Because everything else that they’ve tried to produce happiness in their life hasn’t worked. The suicidal brain does not want to die, it wants the pain to stop and in that moment, it thinks that this is now the best option for the pain to stop.
I don’t want to turn this into a big morbid conversation, but I do want to address the extreme examples.
Every decision we ever make is based on a desired need hopefully being met. And then sometime later, we get new information. It doesn’t work out the way we wanted it to work out. Meaning, the relationship doesn’t work out, he ends up being abusive again, or she ends up being a liar again, or the business ends up failing again.
Whatever it is, the operating word is “AGAIN.”
Usually it’s a repeat pattern and then we use this “AGAIN” energy to turn around and deem from the future, (future being relative to when the decision was made) “Using the information that I now have, that decision that I made back there was wrong.”
I don’t know what could possibly be less fair than this scenario. We’re telling ourselves, “I want you to make a clean decision that’s going to change my life out there in the future, but it better not be wrong. And I won’t tell you whether it’s wrong or not until out there in the future.”
And here’s the interesting piece. Every decision that works out the way you hoped it would work out doesn’t produce growth because it fulfilled your
awareness from the time you made the decision.
Here’s what I mean: Essentially you said, “This is how I expect it to work from my current awareness.” If it works exactly like that, did your current awareness grow?
No, because the decision walked along the path that you laid out with the awareness that you had at the time you made the decision.
The decisions that don’t turn out the way we want are actually the best ones because they lead to an opportunity to learn something that can grow our
capacity.
The best decisions for us are the ones we deem wrong. The “right” decisions that work out the way we hoped they would and meet our expectations are the ones that cannot produce growth. They can only keep us inside the lane that we had laid out for it.
So what if we just simply understood the process of making choices with the current information that we have and then give ourselves permission to make a new decision when new information arises.
That’s the key: When you get new information, you can make a new decision.
So you can make a decision right now with all the information you have and it’s the right one. Why? Because it’s the one you made. And you need to trust that your human brain is designed to keep you safe.
The problems that so many of us are experiencing are because of the human brain’s desire to keep us safe. In this case, we don’t allow our human brain to do its job without judgment. We need to trust that our human brain will make every single choice based on safety, or at least with that consideration. It might not be the whole recipe, but a major ingredient is safety.
This will never, ever put us in danger according to the way it operates. So we need to trust ourselves that we’re going to take all the information we have, we’re going to search for a desired need, and we’re going to make the decision based on the need being met, hopefully. And then we’re going to take action.
And if 10 days later, you get new information around the corner that you couldn’t see from the time you made the choice, then make a new decision.
That’s it. It doesn’t mean that you suck. It doesn’t mean that you’re stupid.
You just make a new decision.
It’s the internalization of “stupid” that stops most of us from making bold decisions in our life.
So just make a new decision. If it’s 10 days from now, great. If it’s 10 years from now, great. If it’s 10 seconds after you made the decision, great. It doesn’t matter how long.
New information means all decisions from the past are absolved from judgment.
We see this play out in court all the time. I could get convicted of a crime based on the information that the court and the jury saw. Later on there might be new information. We might know that there was corruption. We might realize there was a witness that lied or witnessed that nobody heard from or we might see DNA evidence. And we get a new trial. If there’s new information, the old judgment is rendered useless. We’re absolved from that judgment because there’s new information.
When we apply this understanding to other people, we let go of our resentment.
Now resentment, in my experience at least, isn’t as heavy as shame because it’s not applied to ourselves. And it’s not such a self-punishment. But it is heavy.
And it causes us to be fearful or causes us to be angry. It causes us to carry around a lot of triggers.
Every decision that everybody else makes is also the best they can at the time with all the awareness that they have. And sometimes the new information that they don’t have is information that you have. So it might not be future information. It’s information that you have, but they don’t.
We need to stop expecting other people to have the same information we have.
So if we start judging other people by their intentions, and not just by theiractions, it’ll help us remove the resentment.
And similar to what I said about shame, so many people live inside of the essence of resentment. So they see it everywhere. And if you’re determined to find people and things to resent, you’ll find them. There’s 8 billion of us. There’s plenty of opportunity to find what you’re looking for.
And then we can apply the same thing to us. What if we were to judge our intention rather than our action? What happens is we get into a place of compassion and understanding, rather than judgment – especially the unfair judgment.
And then the shame… The shame goes away because the shame is essentially the punishment for the crime. If I didn’t commit a crime, then there’s no
punishment. So if we just try to deal with our shame, but we haven’t overturned our conviction of the crime, that’s just letting a criminal go. And none of us want to let a criminal go.
If we think there has to be punishment for a crime, instead of us trying to dissolve the shame, which is the punishment for the crime that hasn’t been overturned, we’re going to struggle with that. But if we look at guilt, and our “wrong decision” is the crime, and we remove ourselves from having created a crime, then the punishment goes away pretty much on its own.
Now we might still have some lingering effects of shame. We might have patterns of shame that we need to look at, but the shame blanket itself essentially dissolves.
None of us want to live in shame. Even though we might be familiar with it, none of us want it, we just haven’t dealt dealt with the guilt and unhooked ourselves from the shame.
I want you to look back on your life at a decision that you’ve been holding yourself in contempt over for a long, long time. Think about a decision that
you’ve been guilting and shaming yourself around. As long as you’re in this place of guilt and shame, every decision going forward is going to be hard.
So many of us have decision paralysis based on guilt and the shame we’re carrying.
So again, I want you to think about a decision that you made in the past, the one that’s been holding on to you for the longest. For some people that’s years. For some people it’s a couple decades, maybe even more than that.
What’s the decision that you’re still punishing yourself over that you know you need to let go of if you’re going to grow forward?
Once you’re clear on the decision, I want you to ask yourself the following 4 questions:
1) What information did you have at the time you made the decision?
2) What information did you not have at the time you made the decision?
3) What need were you trying to get met at the time you made the decision?
4) What lessons did you learn because of that decision that once upon a time was “wrong”? What lesson did you need to learn that will be important for where you want to go, or important to fulfill your purpose, or important to be available for the kind of relationship that you want?
If we remove the idea of right and wrong, we can look at our decisions and assess, are we going forward or are we going backwards? Most of the “wrong” decisions we make are ones that actually move us forward, as long as we learn the lessons.
Please get support in releasing yourself from the weight of guilt and shame. We all need support. We all need an external perspective. Most of us are trying to use the same entity to free ourselves that has been trapping ourselves. We’re trying to use the same entity that has created the problems to solve the problems and that doesn’t work.
So get support, however that looks and know that we’ll help however we can. If there are things that are going on in your head, things that you read that don’t make sense, things that perhaps triggered other stuff, get help.
Seeking help is not a sign of weakness. Seeking help is a sign of wisdom.
Please don’t waste a bunch of time and a bunch of energy trying to solve problems that are literally impossible for the problem to solve. You are not the problem.
The “problem” is the entity that is trying to keep you safe at all costs.
So let us see into your blind spots and help you liberate whatever needs to be liberated so that you can live the life that you want to live.
If you want a complimentary consultation to support you with anything from this article, clearing any fears or challenges, strategy for your business, or anything else at all, click here to schedule a free session with one of our certified coaches. This is no cost or obligation.
