What You’re Forgetting About Guilt and Shame In Divorce
Facing dark emotions is a major task of healthy divorce recovery. While you will run the whole gamut of emotions as you walk this path, there are two emotions that you cannot escape - guilt and shame.
Even if you can escape your own sense of them, you will inevitably deal with someone else handing them to you. Friends, family members, and even our children can deliver these two emotional whammies to our hearts. They pack a punch and deserve our attention so we don’t inadvertently keep ourselves tangled up in them for longer than is useful.
Guilt and shame often get piled together, but they have distinctly different definitions. Let’s make sure we separate the two before we jump in.
Guilt is the sense that you have done something wrong.
Shame is the sense that you are something wrong.
Guilt crops up when you have the felt sense that you have somehow violated your own ethics, values, or morality. When you’ve not lived out the best of yourself, guilt steps in to remind you that it could have been different. Guilt is initially useful. Guilt shows up in little ways (I should have cleaned the house) and big ways (I should have respected my partner). Guilt centers around our actions and inactions that drive us away from giving our absolute best.
Healing from guilt is a simple, but not easy, two-part journey:
First, discern whether the guilt is healthy or not. Guilt is a useful tool that serves to keep us walking on a path of our own integrity. It can overreach at times into unhealthy guilt, or guilt that simply piles on for no reason. Check in with the guilt you are carrying - would it qualify as warranted? Or is it a guilt that truly could be off-loaded in exchange for a more gracious understanding of how life unfolded for you?
Second, change what you can. Healthy guilt gets processed through our systems when we open ourselves to the lesson learned and a change of action going forward. Unhealthy guilt stays with us because we perceive the only way out is to turn back time and take different actions. Shifting into changing that which can now be changed, rather than wishing for a different past, is key to shedding the kind of guilt that keeps us stuck.
Healing from shame can be more complex. Shame is not useful. Shame leads to depression and anxiety. It can subtract us from life and cloud our ability to live well in the present. It presents as a generalized sense of unworthiness and spreads into the specifics of your life reaching for ammunition to support the underlying belief that you are not worthy.
How do we face shame and develop healthy coping patterns around it, especially in divorce?
As is true in most mental health situations, recognizing the shame is a first step. Shame is not always loud and because it is shameful to have shame, we can outwit ourselves in covering it up. Ask yourself, are there situations in my life where I feel that I am a bad person?
The next deeper step is to ask, from where does this shame originate? Trauma is often a precursor to shame and while acknowledging trauma is vital, processing it is critical. Connecting yourself to therapeutic interventions that uncover the trauma serve to loosen shame’s root.
Sometimes shame serves a purpose, albeit rarely is it a healthy one. Empathetically approach your shame with this question - how does this shame protect me? If we perceive ourselves as less than, it keeps us from having to move forward. If we see ourselves as unworthy, it keeps us from having to date again. If we are inherently flawed, we are protected from having to answer for our career trajectory. We use shame to hold us back in a known spiral rather than risk a new one that finds us functioning more as the hero of the story.
Tell the story. Shame likes to live in the dark and it gets its power from secrecy. When you invite others into the shame, it dethrones the shame ever so subtly. It allows others to look at you with you and dare to tell the story from a different perspective. Our stories heal us. Untold, our stories can defeat us.
Divorce stirs us guilt and shame. Careful attention to separating the two and walking toward them helps us repair the darker emotions that drive them in the first place.
Here’s to your journey toward the better lessons guilt can teach us and toward the exposing of shame that keeps us trapped in old stories.
