Relieving Yourself Of Shame, Blame, And Guilt
A quick note before anything else: this is not written for the sociopathic narcissist.
Picture the moment someone comes at you convinced you did something wrong. Do shame, blame, and guilt rush in all at once? That reaction came easily to me for a long time. I grew up in a strict Christian household, and when I misbehaved as a child, my mother's response was to pull her love back. She never had to spell out shame or accusation or guilt separately. Withdrawing her affection delivered all three in a single gesture.
Not long ago I was reading some Christian writing, and a particular idea stopped me. Once you ask God to forgive you and you genuinely accept that forgiveness, the shame is supposed to be finished. If it lingers, the reading suggested, you may not have actually accepted the forgiveness at all. There is no reason to keep carrying the unhappiness when it is no longer necessary. That does not mean you skip making amends where amends are owed. It means the self-punishment part can stop.
Plenty of people go through life hunting for good souls to wound. Making someone else feel bad is often how they avoid feeling bad themselves. In Christian terms you could call it the Devil's handiwork. Watch how the sequence plays out. First you feel shame, as if the accusation proves what a terrible person you must be. Then guilt arrives the moment you accept the blame and start imagining what your behavior says about your character. Now the pressure is on you to fix it, which conveniently lets the other person off the hook and lets them dodge any responsibility for their own retaliation. The spotlight slides right off them.
I think of a stretch when I was a student working in a clinic. My female supervisor pulled me aside to tell me the staff had been saying I smelled bad. This baffled me. I washed and dry-cleaned all my clothing, and I never once showed up without bathing first. Yet there she was, taking me off to the side with this. Each day in that trainee spot I felt lower than the last. If they barred me from coming in, I would lose the position, and the loss would follow me on my record.
On my own, with no help from anyone, I eventually traced it to my perfume. I wore that scent because I liked it; otherwise I never would have put it on. The whole episode scared me off perfume for good. The thing is, none of it was my doing and it never had been. Nothing like this had happened to me before, and I did not even know it was possible: my own body chemistry was reacting badly with the chemistry in the perfume. Someone on staff, or my supervisor, might have worked that out too. No apology ever came my way.
A lot of the time the operating rule is jump first, think later. Count up the shame and blame and guilt I waded through over a bottle of perfume. Even when you really are at fault, even when you fully intend to own it and set things right, how much do those feelings get in the way? You put off doing the right thing. You lie awake nights bracing for the self-righteousness of other people while your own gloom piles on top of it. Meanwhile you may be planning to make fair amends and hoping to feel decent again, decent enough that you are not pulled back into some addiction that offers a quick hit of relief and leaves you worse off, deeper in the hole, later on.
Confronting someone is delicate work even when you happen to be right. Many people charge ahead because righteousness feels good, and the rule-following, Bible-thumping types are often the quickest to do it. They tend to miss the quieter, more Christ-like responses that would actually fit the moment. Here is one of my own. When my children were small, no older than four, two, and one, I got all three dressed and drove them to church by myself. By the time we arrived I was spent. At least one of us had already needed a clothing change before we left the house. In the parking lot I lifted the little ones out of their car seats while keeping an eye on every car rolling into a space so none of them got run over. We sat in the back because there was no nursery. My oldest bolted straight for the altar, and I managed, barely, to rein things in. Not as well as I wanted, but I had no second pair of hands.
After the service, as Sunday school was starting, a very well-dressed older woman followed me into the bathroom and unloaded. Her children, she informed me, would never have behaved that way, and look how they had grown up: professionals, recognized in their fields. A second woman soon walked in and piled on. I drove home gutted and resolved to quit church altogether. Later the second woman phoned to apologize. Of course I felt shamed and blamed and guilty in the moment. But does it not seem that someone in that church might have offered to help a mother with three babies? That would have been the Christian move. I will add that on the occasions when my oldest acted up during the service, I somehow got him out onto the church steps and gave him a spanking.
Sometimes the better path is to take something you did, something still tugging at your guilt, and look clearly at how you handled it given everything you were dealing with. Then either file it away as experience or set it down and walk on, free of the shame and blame and guilt at least for now. One more note: hanging onto those feelings is often exactly what keeps you from laying a thing to rest and heading in a fresh direction. For me, God forgiving my sins means I can move forward from this point, put matters down, and still act on them if action is needed, without dragging all that extra weight along.