A couple weeks ago, I went “shopping in Manhattan” around noon and didn’t get home until the next morning. In a parellel universe, this would be the ideal post-quarantine anecdote. It would track exactly with my dramatic overtures last year about how much I was going to party when this was all over. If only I hadn’t ended the night by typing “ASMR panic attack” into my YouTube search bar.
Haley, I’m punching the air while reading and re-reading this piece!!
After force-withdrawing small ‘vices’ during quarantine (the Wednesday glass of wine out, group dinners with friends), these minor, privileged, pleasures are accumulating into a snowball of guilt. As most, I am my harshest critic, so now a ‘night out’, or big splurge, leaves me with a 24-hour physical hangover, and 72-hour brain hangover.
I’ve talked to a lot friends about guilt and the common response is, "we’ve been locked up for a year, let yourself be!", but I am realizing some (many) things just don’t feel as good anymore.
I read this quote awhile ago relating to guilt, shame, and sin, and it came to mind while reading your newsletter:
David Brooks: That’s a concept from the great theologian Augustine. And he asked the question, what is sin? When we use the word sin now, we only use the word in the context of fattening deserts. But in traditional morality, it’s the sense that we have something broken. And I don’t like the word sin when it’s meant to suggest we’re dark and depraved inside. But Augustine had a beautiful formula. He said, “We sin when we have our loves out of order.” And what he meant by that—we all love a lot of things. We love family. We love money. We love a little affection. Status. Truth. And we all know that some loves are higher. We know that our love of family is higher than our love of money. Or our love of truth should be higher than our love of money. And if we’re lying to get money, we’re putting our loves out of order. And so sometimes just by our nature, we get them out of order. So, for example, if a friend tells you a secret, and you blab it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And we know that’s wrong. That’s the wrong order. And so it’s useful to sit down and say, “What do I love? What are the things I really love? And in what order do I love them? Am I spending time on my highest love? Or am I spending time on a lower love?”
Maybe extra guilt comes from out of order sins like over-indulging and over-splurging? Anyways, your words really resonated - as always!!
I am also v susceptible to guilt and shame and have been since a very small child.
BUT I do find that it has indeed changed a lot for me and I partly own that to years of therapy, but a lot of it came from living in a different culture then before.
I am Hungarian, which is a very "blame the victim, it's your fault if anything bad happens to you" culture, and I moved to Norway two years ago. Of course people judge each other and themselves here too, but the baseline is incredibly different. Mistakes are accepted as a part of life and trust in each other is normal. If you leave your front door open and you get robbed people will feel sorry for you and not neccessarily think you are an idiot who had it coming (granted, this is mostly true in the countryside, where people do actually leave their houses open all the time).
Most of my colleagues are perfectly fine with making a mistake. People get months of paid maternity and paternity leave off work and noone I know feels guilty about it causing hardship for their employer. Same with illness.
I am writing a novel, but what I want to convey is that I feel like my experience points to the incredibly big effect the culture you live in has on how you feel every day. From what I understand the US is also v focused on individual responsibility and each person having to deal with their hardships on their own (probably even more than Hungary tbh).
I think an important distinction is definitely whether it’s guilt shame or just regular garden variety anxiety. Breaking down those moments in my life to better understand each feeling and it’s root has helped decide how to properly move forward, but it’s definitely a pain in the ass. I recently came to a realization that I do not like who I am when I drink, and I have trouble controlling my threshold between casual and drunk. At first I would come home and think I was just experiencing social anxiety from being out in the world again (“oh that’s so dumb why would I say that” is a typical response for my brain in most social situations sober or not) but as I started to realize that it was in fact guilt for being an un beautiful version on myself I addressed it differently. I then looked deep into my “shame” of preferring weed to alcohol (this is a ridiculous societal standard designed to oppress black and brown people) and why I couldn’t just say, “I’d rather be high”. I think overall my guilt was trying to direct me to something better for myself but it took understanding the difference in all my self pressure style emotions to know what it meant and why it was there. It’s similar to feeling you get when it’s beautiful outside and all you want to do is play Mario World. That pang of guilt is about why you think you should be outside instead of doing what serves you in the moment or even a form of FOMO and as my mom has told me “it’s never the last beautiful day”. A lot of it comes from a comparative standpoint of someone else is doing something better or being a better person which can sometimes serve you but sometimes does not, which again, is where the introspective assessment comes in handy. We should challenge ourselves always to be better versions of ourselves but balance it with appreciation and gratitude for the version of ourselves that we currently are if it means we are fulfilled.
I had a very similar experience about a month ago. Went out for drinks, dinner and had a small spontaneous dance party with some close friends. It was a great night. On the way home I was flooded with shame.
For me it has a lot to do with control. When I let loose, I loose control and it's the best feeling. It's a high. But in the aftermath I start picking apart the whole experience, searching for the mistakes I must've made during a time, where I wasn't in control like I usually am.
Rationally I knew, I didn't make any mentionable mistakes, but the rational analysis was not enough to stop the spiral. It's a difficult state of mind to handle and I'm very much in the process of learning. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Sometimes a looser newsletter is good! One of the things I love about your newsletter is that it always feels conversational, like I’m hanging with a friend and hearing about something they’ve been thinking about a lot, and sometimes (in real life) conversations like those aren’t totally formed thoughts and they need dialogue and response. So not to be the person that says “no need to be guilty”… but for me, looseness isn’t necessarily a negative.
For reference: 31, no kids, no steady career, no degrees. Working towards a degree finally now. Feeling a LOT of guilt and a LOT of shame about it.
Guilt and shame are both ever present for me. I use the idea that “everything is data" to help myself not be constantly frozen because of it. I like this framework because in science, collecting data is nonjudgemental, requires careful (aka slow, not panic-spirally) thinking, and once data is analyzed it shows trends that can be used to make recommendations for change if needed. So, by collecting data in this way about yourself, you are framing your decisions/actions learning opportunities, and once you have enough data points to see a trend, you can make a data-based recommendation to yourself for change. Guilt doesn't have to come into it because the decision for change/no change doesn't come from an emotional place, it comes from the data of your existence.
Doesn't always work! I still feel guilty about things I don't need to feel guilty about. But it's a useful tool for me.
I think it’s interesting that you tie your feeling of guilt to fun/spending rather than safety. I think this summer will entail a lot of navigating feelings of guilt around health and safety for me. So many of us in America are fully vaccinated and able to slowly shake away our fear of becoming infected with Covid by a friend or accidentally infecting a loved one. These are deep feelings of fear and anxiety we’ve held for such a long time and it feels insane to be relieved of them while most of the world isn’t able to access vaccines in the same way. I think anyone who reads world news and has a sense of awareness around this disparity will understandably feel some sense of guilt after fun carefree summer afternoons. It sucks and it comes from a silly sense of personal responsibility for much larger systems but I wonder if that might explain your freak out a bit better?
I feel guilty all the time, mostly about privileges I've been afforded in my life. It goes like this in my head: "I've already had such a lucky life relative to most people on earth, so how dare I have fun/fluidity with that life?" It gets me nowhere, and I can't figure out how to turn the guilt into action (not that I know what that action would be, anyway). Then I get into a loop of accusing myself of attempting to exonerate myself by way of "vaguely feeling bad" — that is, using guilt as a vehicle for self-absolution. Which then means that the guilt itself is a selfish feeling, one I use to performatively (even just to myself) feel better, but not to actually resolve the tensions of privilege in any concrete way.
All of this is to say, yes, I relate to your newsletter, lol.
The act of writing this is precisely what Brene Brown would recommend doing when dealing shame (i.e. the Shame Resilience Theory):
1. Recognizing the personal vulnerability that led to the feelings of shame
2. Recognizing the external factors that led to the feelings of shame
3. Connecting with others to receive and offer empathy
4. Discussing and deconstructing the feelings of shame themselves
This is a big topic for me too. I feel some form of shame pretty much any time I let loose or do/say something that was impulsive or vulnerable without having evaluated the short or longterm effects (I know, how exhausting). Circumstances in which I pretty much always feel shame: when I drink, when I hook up with someone I didn’t plan to, when I share my own writings, when I cry in front of someone, when I post something that reflects my inner self on instagram. It feels like the emotional backlash of my perfectionism and anxieties about public perception.
They feel especially heightened on social media and during the pandemic - most likely because we display ourselves in new ways but don’t see our own vulnerability honored and reflected back. I didn’t feel as much shame when I would wake up after a late night next to my best friends and we’d share in the experience together. Given the circumstances and generally where culture is heading, I don’t have as many moments of being actually seen through my shame and instead feel alone in wondering how my actions may have come across. It feels even further heightened by the fact that I feel more lonely than usual and thus care more about peoples approval.
In addition to sharing the experience of shame, it’s also really helped me to change my own framework when it comes to how I characterize success and failure in those moments. Instead of measuring my actions against my idea of perfectionism, I measure it against how authentic I was being. That way, things that I may have considered shameful become markers of success. For example: the other day I posted an excerpt of a writing I liked on my IG. Someone I look up to messaged saying “Oh no.” INSTANT SHAME FLOOD. I was about to take it down. I replied with a “whaaaaat?” And he said “this stings with truth.” Such a relief. The moment in between his messages I was able to make an important shift. I first noticed the shame, then reconnected to the fact that my goal isn’t to appease this one person, but to have courage to expose and express myself wholeheartedly. It's those subtle moments of recalibration that make all the difference for me.
Brene says "shame happens between people and it heals between people." My instinct is to run and hide when I feel it, it keeps me alone, unable to ask for help. I feel so far away from everyone, like I'm the only person in world having this experience. But the most therapeutic moments are like these. Despite the online nature of this conversation, it's being able to expose ourselves and simply having someone else acknowledge the feeling and share vulnerability back.
I relate to this!! On a number of levels but one thought that struck me was the role control plays for me in shame spirals, particularly related to drinking. If I were in your shoes, panicking at 4 a.m., I think part of my anxiety would be stemming from the fact that I hadn't planned on having that day, on getting tipsy or high etc. When something like that isn't planned, it triggers the same anxious/shameful part of my brain that is triggered when I drink way more than I planned to/do something embarrassing /anything that feels like I let myself get "out of control." Even when I did nothing embarrassing, acted completely appropriately and decided with full consciousness to get a little tipsy, my brain alert signals go off being like "YOU WERE OUT OF CONTROL" when I have a big night and didn't plan on it. And being out of control defffinitely makes me feel ashamed, for whatever reason. Twisted brain!!! Probably you don't relate to this analysis at all lol, but thanks for writing your piece and helping me verbalize a feeling I've often had.
I think you kinda nailed it with the section on shame. My therapist helped me transform my relationship to guilt with that framework--guilt is a useful feeling (just as you say! We are supposed to feel guilty when we fuck up haha), shame is not. I think in both of the main examples you described here (your night out and the looseness of this newsletter, which lol it's your work so I won't tell you how to feel, but as a reader it felt clear and enjoyable and interesting) the emotion/feeling you described sounds much more like shame.
Some markers I have used to identify shame are some of the ones you mentioned in relation to guilt: childhood experiences/family rules, part of you understanding you did nothing wrong while the larger part of you roils around, and what degree of ridiculous it would be to "atone" for the action (e.g. it's silly to "atone" for eating pastries for breakfast by eating salad for dinner because it's not wrong to eat pastries for breakfast).
Idk. For me, taking a moment to think through guilt vs. shame is really what works. Living w/ shame is so painful and unnecessary, and quieting it/tending to the parts of myself that feel shame helped to reorient my relationship to guilt so that's it's a healthier, and even useful. I don't mean to extrapolate that experience too far, but I do think we tend to conflate guilt and shame a lot in the US, and separating their existence within ourselves can be healing and clarifying.
I think I’m a bit older than you (37). My relationship to guilt has changed dramatically in the past year. I’ve realized, as you referenced in your article, how much my perceptions of what was right were tied up in my nuclear family upbringing. It was an environment where I wasn’t pressured not to be myself exactly, but found a lot of my natural inclinations made me feel like an outsider and I myself tried to change to fit in. Now as a grown ass adult, who has children of her own, I am trying to find my way back to myself. I can acknowledge that much of the corrective behavior I had instilled in myself was not true to my nature. It is harder to trust yourself than to follow a set of guidelines laid out by a family. And by finding my own path it doesn’t mean I don’t love them, but I do have to sacrifice some of that feeling of oneness to have a greater inner peace. ( P.S. all realizations made were thanks to a series of solo mushroom trips 🙏🏼)
35, married with no kids here and I don’t think guilt gets any better with age. I specify my demographic because it’s probably an entirely diff playing field of guilt if you have kids. Take for instance, the literal past 24 hours. We took a road trip and our transmission went out on the highway. So we either had to drop $5k to fix it or we could drop $5k on a down payment for a new car. We knew this day was coming, but weren’t prepared to be backed into an either-or corner. I immediately began regretting any splurge or unnecessary purchase I’ve made in the past 2 years (which I obviously keep a Rolodex style list in my brain at all times), as if that would’ve made any significant impact on these exact events. Or, after eating anything we could find within reach of the highway or the car dealership all day, I’m now planning out vegan meals for the week cause I feel I super guilty that I stuffed my body with junk (ofc, more to unpack with my own diet and food issues- working on that). I’m actually really tired of feeling guilty, but I don’t actually know how to stop. We make our own choices. So if we’re feeling guilty all the time, does that mean we’re just out here living a lifetime of wrong choices?
I think as an eldest daughter and a lesbian who was raised Southern Baptist during the unfortunate intersection of the purity culture boom and the rapture industrial complex, I was primed for persistent feelings of guilt and shame from the jump. I've been out for 8 years now and I left the church around the same time, so I've had some time to unlearn the needless shame I had around "sin", but the grooves f that damage are worn deep in my psyche. A lot of my guilt/shame now is around body image and money. I'm in grad school and work part-time so my wife is the breadwinner right now, and financial stuff has just been hard for our whole relationship. I'm starting to understand that the chips are stacked against us as far as getting out from under debt as millennials set up to fail by late-stage capitalism, but I still feel guilty for spending money on basically anything. I feel irresponsible and burdensome since our income is so uneven and I'm contributing so little. Also, I straddled the line between plus-size and straight-size for most of my late teens and early twenties, but since about age 25 (the same year I came out), I put on a lot of weight and never lost it again. That was 8 years ago, too, but I'm still not at peace with my body or food or exercise, and I feel a low-level hum of shame about what I'm doing or not doing to "be healthy" or whatever. It's not that I don't work to combat these attitudes toward myself - I've been in and out of therapy for most of my adult life, I read and journal and listen to podcasts and talk it out with my wife all the time, but it's so constant that it's really difficult to ever actually give myself a break. Brene Brown talks about the insidiousness of shame - that really important distinction between "I did something bad" (guilt) and "I am bad" (shame). The former can empower you to correct a behavior without eroding your self-worth, but the latter is self-defeating because it implies that there's something inherently wrong with you. I feel like both the shame and guilt I have about all these peripheral things (money, food, body size, how I spend my time, my relationship with my family, etc.) is rooted in like an ancient foundational shame that was etched into me from a young age, mainly by religion. Unlearning all that is a long game I guess.
Your story made me think of a bosnian saying my mother would warn me with when I was having too much fun or laughing, "ne smij se, oplakaćeš" - which google translates to: "don't laugh, you'll cry". I always interpreted it as a warning that if I have too much fun something bad will happen...as if there was such a thing as a right amount of fun and that it all had an equilibrium I was disturbing. I still reflect on this often and catch myself thinking about it after a good time...waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sorry this is off topic!
What you are feeling is a very common symptom called, hangover guilts. It's when the alcohol and sugar wears off and your left feeling low. A comedown, basically. Lucky you for getting this far without ever feeling it 😂
THIS. All of it! I had a recent similar debate with one of my friends. Being single at 34 and feeling lonely but then meeting someone I find not to be my match and feeling guilty to cut things off because "what are you complaining about, then?"
Or the constant panic I feel when things go well in my life, because the Universe will collect something out of it. It reminds me of your guilt/shame feelings when enjoying a night out, as if I don't actually deserve things to go my way because so many bad things are happening to good people that I feel guilty when something good happens to me.
I don't know if I actually have a conclusion about this, but like we say in Argentina "two in distress makes sorrow less". I feel better knowing we are all constantly struggling with our thoughts and not just living.
Haley, I’m punching the air while reading and re-reading this piece!!
After force-withdrawing small ‘vices’ during quarantine (the Wednesday glass of wine out, group dinners with friends), these minor, privileged, pleasures are accumulating into a snowball of guilt. As most, I am my harshest critic, so now a ‘night out’, or big splurge, leaves me with a 24-hour physical hangover, and 72-hour brain hangover.
I’ve talked to a lot friends about guilt and the common response is, "we’ve been locked up for a year, let yourself be!", but I am realizing some (many) things just don’t feel as good anymore.
I read this quote awhile ago relating to guilt, shame, and sin, and it came to mind while reading your newsletter:
David Brooks: That’s a concept from the great theologian Augustine. And he asked the question, what is sin? When we use the word sin now, we only use the word in the context of fattening deserts. But in traditional morality, it’s the sense that we have something broken. And I don’t like the word sin when it’s meant to suggest we’re dark and depraved inside. But Augustine had a beautiful formula. He said, “We sin when we have our loves out of order.” And what he meant by that—we all love a lot of things. We love family. We love money. We love a little affection. Status. Truth. And we all know that some loves are higher. We know that our love of family is higher than our love of money. Or our love of truth should be higher than our love of money. And if we’re lying to get money, we’re putting our loves out of order. And so sometimes just by our nature, we get them out of order. So, for example, if a friend tells you a secret, and you blab it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And we know that’s wrong. That’s the wrong order. And so it’s useful to sit down and say, “What do I love? What are the things I really love? And in what order do I love them? Am I spending time on my highest love? Or am I spending time on a lower love?”
Maybe extra guilt comes from out of order sins like over-indulging and over-splurging? Anyways, your words really resonated - as always!!
I am also v susceptible to guilt and shame and have been since a very small child.
BUT I do find that it has indeed changed a lot for me and I partly own that to years of therapy, but a lot of it came from living in a different culture then before.
I am Hungarian, which is a very "blame the victim, it's your fault if anything bad happens to you" culture, and I moved to Norway two years ago. Of course people judge each other and themselves here too, but the baseline is incredibly different. Mistakes are accepted as a part of life and trust in each other is normal. If you leave your front door open and you get robbed people will feel sorry for you and not neccessarily think you are an idiot who had it coming (granted, this is mostly true in the countryside, where people do actually leave their houses open all the time).
Most of my colleagues are perfectly fine with making a mistake. People get months of paid maternity and paternity leave off work and noone I know feels guilty about it causing hardship for their employer. Same with illness.
I am writing a novel, but what I want to convey is that I feel like my experience points to the incredibly big effect the culture you live in has on how you feel every day. From what I understand the US is also v focused on individual responsibility and each person having to deal with their hardships on their own (probably even more than Hungary tbh).
Tldr; move to Scandinavia😬
I think an important distinction is definitely whether it’s guilt shame or just regular garden variety anxiety. Breaking down those moments in my life to better understand each feeling and it’s root has helped decide how to properly move forward, but it’s definitely a pain in the ass. I recently came to a realization that I do not like who I am when I drink, and I have trouble controlling my threshold between casual and drunk. At first I would come home and think I was just experiencing social anxiety from being out in the world again (“oh that’s so dumb why would I say that” is a typical response for my brain in most social situations sober or not) but as I started to realize that it was in fact guilt for being an un beautiful version on myself I addressed it differently. I then looked deep into my “shame” of preferring weed to alcohol (this is a ridiculous societal standard designed to oppress black and brown people) and why I couldn’t just say, “I’d rather be high”. I think overall my guilt was trying to direct me to something better for myself but it took understanding the difference in all my self pressure style emotions to know what it meant and why it was there. It’s similar to feeling you get when it’s beautiful outside and all you want to do is play Mario World. That pang of guilt is about why you think you should be outside instead of doing what serves you in the moment or even a form of FOMO and as my mom has told me “it’s never the last beautiful day”. A lot of it comes from a comparative standpoint of someone else is doing something better or being a better person which can sometimes serve you but sometimes does not, which again, is where the introspective assessment comes in handy. We should challenge ourselves always to be better versions of ourselves but balance it with appreciation and gratitude for the version of ourselves that we currently are if it means we are fulfilled.
I had a very similar experience about a month ago. Went out for drinks, dinner and had a small spontaneous dance party with some close friends. It was a great night. On the way home I was flooded with shame.
For me it has a lot to do with control. When I let loose, I loose control and it's the best feeling. It's a high. But in the aftermath I start picking apart the whole experience, searching for the mistakes I must've made during a time, where I wasn't in control like I usually am.
Rationally I knew, I didn't make any mentionable mistakes, but the rational analysis was not enough to stop the spiral. It's a difficult state of mind to handle and I'm very much in the process of learning. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Sometimes a looser newsletter is good! One of the things I love about your newsletter is that it always feels conversational, like I’m hanging with a friend and hearing about something they’ve been thinking about a lot, and sometimes (in real life) conversations like those aren’t totally formed thoughts and they need dialogue and response. So not to be the person that says “no need to be guilty”… but for me, looseness isn’t necessarily a negative.
For reference: 31, no kids, no steady career, no degrees. Working towards a degree finally now. Feeling a LOT of guilt and a LOT of shame about it.
Guilt and shame are both ever present for me. I use the idea that “everything is data" to help myself not be constantly frozen because of it. I like this framework because in science, collecting data is nonjudgemental, requires careful (aka slow, not panic-spirally) thinking, and once data is analyzed it shows trends that can be used to make recommendations for change if needed. So, by collecting data in this way about yourself, you are framing your decisions/actions learning opportunities, and once you have enough data points to see a trend, you can make a data-based recommendation to yourself for change. Guilt doesn't have to come into it because the decision for change/no change doesn't come from an emotional place, it comes from the data of your existence.
Doesn't always work! I still feel guilty about things I don't need to feel guilty about. But it's a useful tool for me.
I think it’s interesting that you tie your feeling of guilt to fun/spending rather than safety. I think this summer will entail a lot of navigating feelings of guilt around health and safety for me. So many of us in America are fully vaccinated and able to slowly shake away our fear of becoming infected with Covid by a friend or accidentally infecting a loved one. These are deep feelings of fear and anxiety we’ve held for such a long time and it feels insane to be relieved of them while most of the world isn’t able to access vaccines in the same way. I think anyone who reads world news and has a sense of awareness around this disparity will understandably feel some sense of guilt after fun carefree summer afternoons. It sucks and it comes from a silly sense of personal responsibility for much larger systems but I wonder if that might explain your freak out a bit better?
I feel guilty all the time, mostly about privileges I've been afforded in my life. It goes like this in my head: "I've already had such a lucky life relative to most people on earth, so how dare I have fun/fluidity with that life?" It gets me nowhere, and I can't figure out how to turn the guilt into action (not that I know what that action would be, anyway). Then I get into a loop of accusing myself of attempting to exonerate myself by way of "vaguely feeling bad" — that is, using guilt as a vehicle for self-absolution. Which then means that the guilt itself is a selfish feeling, one I use to performatively (even just to myself) feel better, but not to actually resolve the tensions of privilege in any concrete way.
All of this is to say, yes, I relate to your newsletter, lol.
The act of writing this is precisely what Brene Brown would recommend doing when dealing shame (i.e. the Shame Resilience Theory):
1. Recognizing the personal vulnerability that led to the feelings of shame
2. Recognizing the external factors that led to the feelings of shame
3. Connecting with others to receive and offer empathy
4. Discussing and deconstructing the feelings of shame themselves
This is a big topic for me too. I feel some form of shame pretty much any time I let loose or do/say something that was impulsive or vulnerable without having evaluated the short or longterm effects (I know, how exhausting). Circumstances in which I pretty much always feel shame: when I drink, when I hook up with someone I didn’t plan to, when I share my own writings, when I cry in front of someone, when I post something that reflects my inner self on instagram. It feels like the emotional backlash of my perfectionism and anxieties about public perception.
They feel especially heightened on social media and during the pandemic - most likely because we display ourselves in new ways but don’t see our own vulnerability honored and reflected back. I didn’t feel as much shame when I would wake up after a late night next to my best friends and we’d share in the experience together. Given the circumstances and generally where culture is heading, I don’t have as many moments of being actually seen through my shame and instead feel alone in wondering how my actions may have come across. It feels even further heightened by the fact that I feel more lonely than usual and thus care more about peoples approval.
In addition to sharing the experience of shame, it’s also really helped me to change my own framework when it comes to how I characterize success and failure in those moments. Instead of measuring my actions against my idea of perfectionism, I measure it against how authentic I was being. That way, things that I may have considered shameful become markers of success. For example: the other day I posted an excerpt of a writing I liked on my IG. Someone I look up to messaged saying “Oh no.” INSTANT SHAME FLOOD. I was about to take it down. I replied with a “whaaaaat?” And he said “this stings with truth.” Such a relief. The moment in between his messages I was able to make an important shift. I first noticed the shame, then reconnected to the fact that my goal isn’t to appease this one person, but to have courage to expose and express myself wholeheartedly. It's those subtle moments of recalibration that make all the difference for me.
Brene says "shame happens between people and it heals between people." My instinct is to run and hide when I feel it, it keeps me alone, unable to ask for help. I feel so far away from everyone, like I'm the only person in world having this experience. But the most therapeutic moments are like these. Despite the online nature of this conversation, it's being able to expose ourselves and simply having someone else acknowledge the feeling and share vulnerability back.
I relate to this!! On a number of levels but one thought that struck me was the role control plays for me in shame spirals, particularly related to drinking. If I were in your shoes, panicking at 4 a.m., I think part of my anxiety would be stemming from the fact that I hadn't planned on having that day, on getting tipsy or high etc. When something like that isn't planned, it triggers the same anxious/shameful part of my brain that is triggered when I drink way more than I planned to/do something embarrassing /anything that feels like I let myself get "out of control." Even when I did nothing embarrassing, acted completely appropriately and decided with full consciousness to get a little tipsy, my brain alert signals go off being like "YOU WERE OUT OF CONTROL" when I have a big night and didn't plan on it. And being out of control defffinitely makes me feel ashamed, for whatever reason. Twisted brain!!! Probably you don't relate to this analysis at all lol, but thanks for writing your piece and helping me verbalize a feeling I've often had.
I think you kinda nailed it with the section on shame. My therapist helped me transform my relationship to guilt with that framework--guilt is a useful feeling (just as you say! We are supposed to feel guilty when we fuck up haha), shame is not. I think in both of the main examples you described here (your night out and the looseness of this newsletter, which lol it's your work so I won't tell you how to feel, but as a reader it felt clear and enjoyable and interesting) the emotion/feeling you described sounds much more like shame.
Some markers I have used to identify shame are some of the ones you mentioned in relation to guilt: childhood experiences/family rules, part of you understanding you did nothing wrong while the larger part of you roils around, and what degree of ridiculous it would be to "atone" for the action (e.g. it's silly to "atone" for eating pastries for breakfast by eating salad for dinner because it's not wrong to eat pastries for breakfast).
Idk. For me, taking a moment to think through guilt vs. shame is really what works. Living w/ shame is so painful and unnecessary, and quieting it/tending to the parts of myself that feel shame helped to reorient my relationship to guilt so that's it's a healthier, and even useful. I don't mean to extrapolate that experience too far, but I do think we tend to conflate guilt and shame a lot in the US, and separating their existence within ourselves can be healing and clarifying.
I think I’m a bit older than you (37). My relationship to guilt has changed dramatically in the past year. I’ve realized, as you referenced in your article, how much my perceptions of what was right were tied up in my nuclear family upbringing. It was an environment where I wasn’t pressured not to be myself exactly, but found a lot of my natural inclinations made me feel like an outsider and I myself tried to change to fit in. Now as a grown ass adult, who has children of her own, I am trying to find my way back to myself. I can acknowledge that much of the corrective behavior I had instilled in myself was not true to my nature. It is harder to trust yourself than to follow a set of guidelines laid out by a family. And by finding my own path it doesn’t mean I don’t love them, but I do have to sacrifice some of that feeling of oneness to have a greater inner peace. ( P.S. all realizations made were thanks to a series of solo mushroom trips 🙏🏼)
35, married with no kids here and I don’t think guilt gets any better with age. I specify my demographic because it’s probably an entirely diff playing field of guilt if you have kids. Take for instance, the literal past 24 hours. We took a road trip and our transmission went out on the highway. So we either had to drop $5k to fix it or we could drop $5k on a down payment for a new car. We knew this day was coming, but weren’t prepared to be backed into an either-or corner. I immediately began regretting any splurge or unnecessary purchase I’ve made in the past 2 years (which I obviously keep a Rolodex style list in my brain at all times), as if that would’ve made any significant impact on these exact events. Or, after eating anything we could find within reach of the highway or the car dealership all day, I’m now planning out vegan meals for the week cause I feel I super guilty that I stuffed my body with junk (ofc, more to unpack with my own diet and food issues- working on that). I’m actually really tired of feeling guilty, but I don’t actually know how to stop. We make our own choices. So if we’re feeling guilty all the time, does that mean we’re just out here living a lifetime of wrong choices?
I think as an eldest daughter and a lesbian who was raised Southern Baptist during the unfortunate intersection of the purity culture boom and the rapture industrial complex, I was primed for persistent feelings of guilt and shame from the jump. I've been out for 8 years now and I left the church around the same time, so I've had some time to unlearn the needless shame I had around "sin", but the grooves f that damage are worn deep in my psyche. A lot of my guilt/shame now is around body image and money. I'm in grad school and work part-time so my wife is the breadwinner right now, and financial stuff has just been hard for our whole relationship. I'm starting to understand that the chips are stacked against us as far as getting out from under debt as millennials set up to fail by late-stage capitalism, but I still feel guilty for spending money on basically anything. I feel irresponsible and burdensome since our income is so uneven and I'm contributing so little. Also, I straddled the line between plus-size and straight-size for most of my late teens and early twenties, but since about age 25 (the same year I came out), I put on a lot of weight and never lost it again. That was 8 years ago, too, but I'm still not at peace with my body or food or exercise, and I feel a low-level hum of shame about what I'm doing or not doing to "be healthy" or whatever. It's not that I don't work to combat these attitudes toward myself - I've been in and out of therapy for most of my adult life, I read and journal and listen to podcasts and talk it out with my wife all the time, but it's so constant that it's really difficult to ever actually give myself a break. Brene Brown talks about the insidiousness of shame - that really important distinction between "I did something bad" (guilt) and "I am bad" (shame). The former can empower you to correct a behavior without eroding your self-worth, but the latter is self-defeating because it implies that there's something inherently wrong with you. I feel like both the shame and guilt I have about all these peripheral things (money, food, body size, how I spend my time, my relationship with my family, etc.) is rooted in like an ancient foundational shame that was etched into me from a young age, mainly by religion. Unlearning all that is a long game I guess.
Your story made me think of a bosnian saying my mother would warn me with when I was having too much fun or laughing, "ne smij se, oplakaćeš" - which google translates to: "don't laugh, you'll cry". I always interpreted it as a warning that if I have too much fun something bad will happen...as if there was such a thing as a right amount of fun and that it all had an equilibrium I was disturbing. I still reflect on this often and catch myself thinking about it after a good time...waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sorry this is off topic!
What you are feeling is a very common symptom called, hangover guilts. It's when the alcohol and sugar wears off and your left feeling low. A comedown, basically. Lucky you for getting this far without ever feeling it 😂
THIS. All of it! I had a recent similar debate with one of my friends. Being single at 34 and feeling lonely but then meeting someone I find not to be my match and feeling guilty to cut things off because "what are you complaining about, then?"
Or the constant panic I feel when things go well in my life, because the Universe will collect something out of it. It reminds me of your guilt/shame feelings when enjoying a night out, as if I don't actually deserve things to go my way because so many bad things are happening to good people that I feel guilty when something good happens to me.
I don't know if I actually have a conclusion about this, but like we say in Argentina "two in distress makes sorrow less". I feel better knowing we are all constantly struggling with our thoughts and not just living.