Have you ever been on the receiving end of "being guilted," and you weren't even aware you'd done something wrong?
Have you ever been made to feel ashamed, but for the life of you, you couldn't manage to pull a shred of a lesson out of the interaction? After all, you care about people, and want to be thought well of by them, and if there was a chance to learn about them, yourself, to change and grow, you certainly would.
Have you ever felt like "less of a woman" or "less of a man" because of the ongoing presence of someone judgmental of you?
Maybe you were "one-upped," embarrassed, "made a laughing stock," knocked down, gossiped about or outright bullied by someone. At first, you were furious - no, enraged - but as the weeks or months went on, it crept under your skin and stayed with you. It even managed to make you wonder if there really was something wrong about you.
It could have been a boss, a coworker, a sister, mother, teacher, client, or even stranger who gave you this experience, some of whom you'll have to see again, or even regularly.
But you don't know what to make of it, and you don't know how you'll handle it if it happens again.
How about living guilt-free, shame-free, and empowered instead?
It turns out there may be some great lessons in the unexpected - the celebrity news.
There's a rising gladiator sport in recent years: making a spectacle of "celebrity shame" - the addictions, betrayal, infidelity, the rants, the nudity, the insensitive remarks, or the offensive in the form of out-of-context Tweets, the greed, impulsive loss of control, temper tantrums, physical abuse, domestic violence, and even scandals about adoption color the full spectrum of all the possible wrongful, unethical or even criminal behavior that our heroes-of-last-week-turned-rogues-gallery-of-today are capable of.
It's unfortunate we can be so inspired by their successes, but learn utterly nothing from their mistakes. And for us to be so unforgiving of them while we ourselves are no different in our imperfections. We lose heroes in the blink of an eye, and in the next blink realize that we are all just as fallible.
Celebrities are our "products," and we like our products to work in the way described on the box.
The old marketing saying used to be, "Sex sells."
In recent years, "Hate sells."
Presently, "Shame sells," and we buy it too, awash in sensationalism that doesn't instruct.
If left undeciphered, there is likely to be no behavioral change - for them, or for us.
You may be privy to the age-old distinction between shame and guilt - that guilt arises from inside us and is always good, but shame comes at us from the outside and is always bad. Still, as with much of life, it's rare that our social politics can be laid out in black and white, either all good or all bad.
Guilt is emotional, and about what is wrong in what we do.
Shame is instinctual, and about what may or may not be wrong in who we are.
Maybe there's more to scapegoating, sensationalism, and scandals than meets the eye - more than just globally "good people" and "bad people," heroes of yesterday and villains of today.
Maybe instead, we could actually learn something useful from such news stories, and use it to change our lives for the better. The key may rest in the instinctual differences between men, women, and how they communicate.
As we take a look at the practical taxonomy of guilt and shame, I'd like us to consider a useful tool not so often considered: Males and females feel shame differently, and for different reasons. In the public and private dramas of life, males and females have a different experience - and a different language for explaining them. Surprisingly, some time-honored stories - classic literature and myths with male and female characters - might even color how we see this.
GUILT - THE SAME FOR MEN AND WOMEN
Men and women feel emotions to the same degree - sadness, fear, worry, anger, frustration. You name it; we both experience it, and often for the same reasons:
Public speaking may give both men and women anxiety, rejection for that dream job we both tried for may give us sadness, and a taxi driver taking us on a twenty-block ride that could have taken five blocks may make both men and women equally angry.
Guilt is also an emotion - and in both men and women alike, it arises on the inside, an anxiety response to the realization we've done wrong, whatever that wrong may be. Often happening after the fact, and with the hurt feedback of others, it will with time catch up to the point of similar bad choices, then hopefully, precede us ever making them. We learn to punish ourselves in our heads, before we ever make a mistake, and therefore before anyone else gets the chance to punish us. Our morality matures.
Think about "Doing wrong" as actually on a spectrum - from the slightest annoying act, to the offensive, to the unethical but legal, all the way up to the downright criminal. Anywhere on that spectrum, from a social faux pas to robbing a bank, guilt inside us and social or civil consequences outside us are there to serve men and women equally.
Importantly, guilt is about a specific choice, a specific occurrence or event - for without that feature we couldn't use it to grow, to forgive ourselves or see others forgive us. We have the free will to change our choices at any moment, if only we can first find insight.
Our choices - what we do, not who we are - designed to spur us to change our future choices and the interpersonal habits decisions of any given type compose. Guilt is time-limited, until the point we have:
1.) Recognized the specific wrong, most often through the feedback of others we've hurt and now empathize with.
2.) Caught ourselves about to do wrong again, but stopped ourselves before the choice, making it right this time, and...
3.) Done so enough times to now have a new social, interpersonal, preventative moral habit.
4.) Forgiven ourselves the past, and with it, shed the guilty emotion - free to live with a sense of pride and self-respect, even as we go on respecting others more, and doing more right by them.
Once durable change in our choices, habits and morality itself transforms, guilt serves no further purpose. In fact, holding onto it - or being made to hold onto it - actually does harm to society through our non-participation in it. That would be a deflation of our assertiveness in the world at large. We become captive to the ongoing anxiety in guilty feelings.
In fact, ongoing trepidation about having a voice in the world - and hesitancy about taking action in it - might be because the experience of judgment by others carries other messages besides just those about a specific event.
They often carry shame served up from those around us too.
MALE AND FEMALE SHAME
Shame is a message that says there's not just something wrong with what we did on this occasion, but who we are.
We are talking about a different area of the mind from the emotions. We are talking about the seat of instincts, gender, and our very sense of self.
In the views of sociolinguist, Deborah Tannen, (paraphrasing) the worst thing a little boy could do to another little boy is to cut down his sense of rank or status - to win against him, defeat him, and in so doing, to limit his social permission to further take physical action in the group. This is one facet of male shame.
She goes on to say that the worst thing a little girl could do to another little girl is to exclude her - to banish her from the social circle, the circle of friends, and in so doing, from having a voice in the group. This is one facet of female shame.
These are not just experiences of inner guilt at the wrong in what we do, but shame about who we are in our gender.
It's well known that many men often shun the action of seeking out help (such as in getting depression treated), perhaps in part because it is felt as a public acknowledgment of weakness - of lesser rank or status. Better to go it alone than suffer more damage to the self. As a result, and by default, they may be complicit in denying themselves a voice of defense against the wrong done to them in gossip.
