Guilt, shame and the agony of self-loathing
WATCHING Anne Darwin paddle her own canoe of shame and guilt through the treacherous currents of the media, I was struck by how often the words, “guilt” and “shame” were used interchangeably, as if both meant the same thing.
Anne Darwin was married to John Darwin and in 2002, mired in debt, the couple decided to fake his death in a canoeing accident, claim the insurance and then flee to Panama for a better life. For various reasons, their best-laid plan crashed then burned and both ended up being sentenced to six years in jail in 2008.
There was a lot of collateral damage, mainly incurred by Anne keeping up appearances by maintaining the lie of John’s death to their two adult sons. This went on for five years, while the “deceased” father lived in a bedsit attached, via a secret door, to the family home in Hartlepool. It is difficult to imagine how Anne Darwin squared this crazy circle in her own mind. But she did until her then-husband, John, turned himself in at a London police station in 2007, claiming to have been suffering amnesia.
From Anne Darwin’s public appearances last week (to promote her newly published book), one thing is obvious: she oozes guilt and shame. These two moral emotions are quite different, however. Guilt is something we feel when we are consciously aware that our thoughts and actions could cause or have caused harm and injury to others. In order to feel guilt, we need to have a capacity for empathy because it is only by imagining how other people are affected by our actions that we are able to experience guilty feelings (interestingly, extreme narcissistic personalities rarely feel guilt because they don’t feel empathy for others). Feeling guilty can be an efficient moral barometer that keeps our primitive, animalistic tendencies in check. Feelings such as envy, jealousy, anger and, of course, sexual desire are great conduits for the guilt factory. How often have you felt guilty about the envy you feel when your pal lands a brilliant new job/takes a year off to travel the world/is in the first throes of a gushing romance? Or how bad do you feel when, snuggled on the sofa with your partner watching Strictly Come Dancing, you find yourself meandering into a fantasy about what it would be like to have sex with some- one who is really fit?
Most of us feel some measure of guilt some of the time. Extreme guilt can be a seriously unpleasant feeling that makes us deeply uncomfortable in our own skin. Moderate guilt can act as a kind of emotional sat-nav towards reparation. In this sense, guilt can be a positive motivation for change and act as an internal moral compass. It also plays an important role in keeping criminal activity in check (unless you happen to be a psychopath).
Shame, on the other hand, is a different beast. While the internal voice of guilt is “I have done something bad”, shame says: “I am bad. Bad to the core”. Shame is a considerably more complex and potentially toxic emotion. Unchecked, it makes us run for the hills where we can lick our wounds and hide from the scrutiny and criticism of others. It is less about the pain of others and much more about the agony of self-contempt. It is directed inwards, not outwards. It is a bleak and dark blot on our interior landscape and its stain is not easy to remove as its roots are usually set down by others, often parents and carers, in early childhood when we are too young and helpless to defend ourselves against it.
Victims of childhood abuse, particularly sexual abuse, are deeply vulnerable to feeling shame. This deep form of shame can span a victim’s entire lifetime, reaching into every corner of their being (as we saw recently in the case of Jimmy Savile’s victims). Its imprint is pervasive and can pass from one generation to the next, creating dysfunctional families who feel unworthy of achievement or happiness.
Shame is trickier to dissolve than guilt because it requires those who suffer from it to dig down deep to its roots in order to free themselves from its life-draining grip. A common side-effects of shame is warped self-perception where sufferers believe they are unworthy of love and not as good as other people. They will go to extreme lengths to hide their sense of shame, often masking it as anger, people-pleasing or arrogance.
Shame is one of the last great taboos. Those who manage to break free of it usually do so because they’ve realised how damaging it can be and make a commitment to stop punishing themselves. This usually means talking about it with someone they trust and unpacking the shame. More often than not, people find they have been carrying a heavy suitcase around for years, full of dirty old clothes that don’t even belong to them.