Guilt [shame] is the thing with a hunger that eats away at your soul
Catholic guilt, mom guilt, work/life balance guilt, eating chocolate guilt, post social event anxiety induced guilt, baby registry guilt etc etc. It is impossible to list the many different turns of phrase we have conceived of in order to try to put a name to the gnawing, beastly thing that hunts and haunts all of us to varying degrees throughout our adult life. We often conflate the word ‘guilt’ with an emotional experience that might be more correctly identified as ‘shame’. Much of this has to do with an accelerated changing in the linguistic landscape over the last few decades where nuance has been de-emphasised over time and words that are fast, memorable and fun shells are popularised for their commonality and approachability on a more global scale. The issue with this is we are coming to a place where it is harder to discern what the true emotions we are experiencing are and how to name and begin to work on and with them. We are also facing the reality of over simplifying complex, structural issues in our own lives by boxing them in neat little social media ready identity packages that can hold us back from doing the deep, long term and often private work on our internal environment.
Guilt has two faces, like the Roman god of duality Janus who presides over January and is the god of beginnings and endings, openings and closings. There is the guilt that comes from a moral and or spiritual conviction of wrongdoing that motivates us to shift, change, atone and can be “the beginning of knowledge” as Audre Lorde so beautifully puts it in her essays. Wrestling with this is lifetime work; learning how to navigate guilt without self-derision and how to respond in a way that honours the emotion and reflects, counterintuitively, a positive growth from the experience is a worthy effort.
Then there is shame-guilt which is something that I personally feel an over familiarity with and inevitably dis-empowers and drives us into a place of longing-that-pains and desperate self-serving. This shame that arises from unhealthy guilt absolves us of responsibility and true growth. It leads us into a place of dark and destructive thoughts and it pushes us down into a pit of despair that slowly grows over with vines that choke us from ever reaching the light. It is the kind of guilt that follows us as we try to rest when we work multiple jobs just to make ends meet and we fret away our days off thinking we are 'not doing enough’. It’s the type of guilt that leaves us wallowing in the sweet, positive memories of times past for how nostalgia paints them with ease and prevents us from living fully in the present and leaning into new experiences because ‘the doors are always shut in my face so why bother anymore’. It neuters us and numbs us or it holds us in a place of shallow, armchair opinion spouting that develops into half arsed attempts at virtue signalling. This form of guilt has been weaponised by industries that profit from us human people being worked to the bone, full of hatred for our beautiful little bodies and afraid of aging and the quiet of the natural world. It makes victims of us and we all see it growing in people and the world at large, spreading through a global discontentment, targeted malaise and divisiveness that has become violent. I have been personally fighting this for so long and these past months it’s been resurfacing time and time again especially as the reality of this broken world and system keeps making itself known in so many ways
Shame-guilt is not the end of the story. While these are some heavy thoughts to start a week on this Monday morning we can hold on tight to it’s opposite force-hope. I am trying to hold hope in the palm of my hand and shelter it from the exhaustion and overwhelm I feel. Part of that is in searching for practices and thoughts to strengthen my mental resolve and fortitude and to provide myself with safety rails to hold onto while the storm tries to sink my boat. Part is in acknowledging aloud to others that I am struggling and accepting that life is both the good times and the bad and I have been here before and made it through and sometimes it’s about patience and vulnerability. The largest part is telling the false narrative of shame-guilt that it is not true and refusing to allow these emotions that do not belong to us to dictate the story of our self worth and value. Next week I’ll chat a little about hope and how some of the things I am trying out this week to build that muscle back up in myself have worked out for me. In the meantime my dears let us all try to face down this reflexive response of shame-guilt that is so quickly to the trigger in ourselves and refuse to let it control us.
“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”