Of all the themes I’ve seen most consistently in practice, guilt and shame are definitely among the most common. These insidious, powerful, lurking ideas can colour one’s identity and view of the world in really limiting ways.

For many people going through a self-reflective process like engaging in psychotherapy, shame is a theme that unveils itself in many layers, often over many years, and its complexity and potential dominance over our personality and self-expression make it one of the most common issues referred to by people as one of the underlying sources of their mental health challenges.

It can also be something they feel very afraid to let go of.

Guilt might be comparable to anxiety in the sense that we do need some amount of it for healthy function. Whilst anyone with anxiety issues might fantasise about being ‘anxiety free’ this would actually be a dangerous state. We need some anxiety to keep us safe – to stop us from walking into traffic or taking unsafe risks, to help us remember important things and give us some drive to complete tasks and responsibilities. Anxiety becomes dysfunctional when we use more of it than we need, and instead of being helpful it can become a debilitating state of fight/flight or freeze.

Similarly, we do need some guilt to help us notice our morals and values. If we are mean to someone, or do the wrong thing, some guilt as a response shows us we are compassionate and social beings. We are motivated by healthy guilt to obey the law and respect others in our society. In fact, a marker for psychopathology is lack of guilt.

However, when we feel guilty beyond this and feel guilt not in reaction to our morals and social values but just for existing, guilt might be dysfunctional and likely shame is involved in the experience becoming something more sinister.

Guilt is about what you do – Shame is a about who you are.

Shame is related to power. Shame keeps people from being powerful and makes them easier to control. A Shameful person is not an empowered person. They will not likely challenge, stand up for themselves, demand their rights or liberate themselves.

We confuse shame sometimes with humility, and in certain contexts sometimes it can be put on pedestal. Shame makes one non-threatening which can be seen as ‘obedience’ or compliance.

If you are in Shame, you are giving away the power of your life. You are allowing yourself to be puppetted by something else, as a means to amend whatever it is you feel so shameful about.

We become characters in someone else’s telling if we don’t voice our own stories. Signing our story under another story or archetype already told, means we never get to ‘digest’ the true process of our own experience. Shame makes people fearful of being seen and this is a vicious cycle, because being seen – and then validated – is what heals shame.

When we share our story in a safe place and it is heard and acknowledged by others – we are healing.

Your story is precious, and its audience needs to be carefully selected to be able to hold how important your voice is.