I Did Something Bad, or I Am Something Bad

There is a thing people carry after a leader's failure that they will describe to almost nobody.

I defended him. To a friend who had doubts. From the stage. In a small group, firmly, maybe unkindly.

I brought people here. A neighbor. A coworker. My sister. My kids.

I noticed something once and said nothing.

I was the one he chose, and I have spent a long time wondering what that says about me.

If any of that is yours, this is the guide for you, and it opens with the most useful thing in it: what you are feeling has two forms, they are easy to confuse, and only one of them helps.

Two feelings, one distinction

June Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University, has spent a research career on what are called the self-conscious emotions. The distinction at the center of her work is simple enough to hold onto in a hard moment.

Guilt is about an action. I did something bad.

Shame is about the self. I am something bad.

The same event produces either one. You defended him publicly, and later learned what he had done. Guilt says: I said something that turned out to be wrong and that may have made things harder for someone. Shame says: I am the kind of person who is fooled, who takes the powerful person's side, who cannot be trusted to see clearly.

Both hurt. They do not do the same thing to you.

Why the difference matters

Across a substantial body of research, guilt and shame behave very differently.

Guilt tends to point outward and forward. Because it is about a specific action, there is a specific thing to do about it. It is consistently associated with empathy, constructive coping, and repair.

Shame tends to point inward and stop. Because it is about the whole self, there is nothing to fix, only something to hide. It is consistently associated with withdrawal, depression, and anger.

That last one is the finding worth sitting with. One of Tangney's papers on this, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1992, is titled "Shamed into Anger." Shame and anger travel together. When someone feels globally exposed and there is no action available to repair it, anger frequently arrives as the way out, because being furious is more bearable than being humiliated.

You are probably watching this happen around you right now. The angriest people in your congregation are often not the ones who were harmed most. They are frequently the ones carrying the most shame about their own part, and they have no way to say that, so it comes out sideways.

That is worth knowing about other people. It is worth knowing about yourself.

One honest note. Most of these findings come from one widely used measure, and there is real scientific debate about whether shame is uniformly harmful or whether both emotions can help or hurt depending on the situation. The distinction below holds either way. What the research does not support is the idea that shame is uniformly productive, which is roughly the opposite of what many of us were taught.

Sorting out which one you are in

Take the specific thing you keep returning to and run it through these.

What is the sentence? Write down what you actually say to yourself about it. If the sentence has a verb, describing something you did, that is guilt. If the sentence has an am, describing what you are, that is shame.

Is there an action available? Guilt comes with a possible next step, even a small one. Shame comes with a wish to disappear.

Would you say this to a friend in your position? People will not extend to themselves what they would obviously extend to someone else. If your friend told you they had defended him, you would say how could you have known. Notice that you are not saying it to yourself.

Does it grow when you look at it? Guilt tends to hold its size. Shame expands. One comment you made becomes a pattern, then a character trait, then an explanation for everything you have ever gotten wrong.

What to do with the guilt

Guilt has a use. It is worth taking seriously rather than talked out of.

Name the actual action, precisely. Not I was part of the problem, which is shame wearing guilt's clothes. Something specific: I told Maria she was being unfair when she raised a concern, and I was sharp about it.

Work out whether there is a repair. Sometimes there is. An apology to a specific person for a specific thing, with no explanation of your reasons attached, is one of the few genuinely useful acts available here. Sometimes there is not, either because the person is gone or because contacting them would serve you more than them. That is worth being honest about.

Then stop. Guilt that has done its work and keeps running is no longer guilt. It has turned into the other thing.

What to do with the shame

Shame does not have a use in the same way, and it does not respond to argument. Telling yourself you should not feel it does nothing. A few things do help.

Convert it back into guilt. This is the core move. Take I am the kind of person who gets fooled and find the actual behavior underneath it. What did you specifically do? Usually the honest answer is much smaller than the feeling: you trusted someone whose job was to be trustworthy, which is not a defect.

Get accurate about what you knew. Shame runs on hindsight. It presents information you have now as information you had then. Researchers who interviewed people about how these situations unfolded found something worth knowing: observers who noticed concerning behavior consistently distrusted their own perception, because the only available category for what they were seeing was affair, and affairs are private business between adults. So they concluded they were overreacting.

You were reasoning with the categories available to you. Nearly everyone was.

Say it out loud to one person. Shame is maintained by concealment. It is the only one of these emotions that weakens simply by being witnessed. One person, not a group, who will not rush to reassure you.

Watch where it goes when you refuse to feel it. If you notice contempt rising, for the people who stayed, the people who left, the board, anyone convenient, check whether you are angry or whether you are ashamed and it found an exit.

The particular one

If you were the person the leader singled out, some of what you are carrying is not either of these. It is shame that was put on you and that does not belong to you.

The research is clear that a leader in that position holds spiritual authority, often counseling access, and private knowledge of your life, which is exactly the asymmetry every other helping profession has rules about. What happened was an abuse of that position. The shame you are carrying is a description of what was done to you, not of who you are.

That is easy to write and hard to feel. It is also the thing worth taking to a counselor who works with this specifically, rather than working through alone.

When this is more than a guide can hold

If any of this is where you are, it has moved past what a document addresses:

• The self-talk has become constant or vicious
• You are withdrawing from people who care about you
• You are not sleeping, or drinking more than you want to be
• You believe on some level that you deserved what happened
• Any thought of harming yourself

Talking to a licensed counselor is not an escalation and does not mean you are worse off than everyone else. It means the thing is large.

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Sources

• Tangney, J.P. and colleagues, research on shame and guilt as distinct self-conscious emotions, including Tangney, Wagner, Fletcher and Gramzow (1992), "Shamed into Anger? The Relation of Shame and Guilt to Anger and Self-Reported Aggression," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62.
• Tangney, J.P. and Dearing, R., Shame and Guilt (Guilford, 2002).
• Garland, D. and Argueta, C., qualitative study of first-hand accounts of clergy sexual misconduct, Baylor University School of Social Work, on how observers interpreted what they saw.

This guide is educational and is not a substitute for counseling or medical care. If you are in crisis, contact a licensed professional or call or text 988 in the United States.