Saturday, March 5, 2011

Guilt and Shame

They are used interchangeably.

Guilt and shame.  Shame and guilt.

But they're not the same.

Guilt is the feeling that you get when you've done something wrong and you feel bad about it - whether it's through getting discovered by another person, or by your own conscience. 

It hurts.  It's supposed to hurt.  It can be constructive; in the right circumstances, it serves a purpose.  Its purpose is to bring you to the place of making things right and changing your behavior.  Guilt is God-given, healthy, and meant to be a means to an end.  

It is never supposed to be dumped on you by another person because of their own dysfunction. That's not something another person has the right to do (that is, take the role of God or your conscience in your life.)  Neither is it ever supposed to be held onto when the wrong has been confessed and forgiveness sincerely sought.

Shame, on the other hand, thought it might feel very much like it, bears very little resemblance to guilt when you look at the root of it, the source of it. It hurts far, far worse than guilt ever could, goes deeper than any wound anybody could inflict, leaves scars that are ... permanent.

When you feel bad for who you are as a person in the centre of your soul - THAT is shame.  Shame is the evil one's counterfeit for guilt.  To be shamed is when another person makes a judgment about you at the very core of your being. A simple message planted in that very tender area at perhaps a very young age has the potential to cripple you emotionally for the rest of your life and becomes a target for the enemy to wreak further havoc in a vulnerable area.  

Shame makes you believe that you are worthless, that your opinion doesn't matter, that your life experiences are of little or no consequence. It can even go as far as to make you believe that your very existence is a mistake or a sham.  Its close relative is despair: a complete loss of even the slightest glimmer of hope.  It can keep you trapped in a cycle of abuse - or self-abuse - or letting people walk all over you - thinking that you deserve all of the bad things that keep happening to you.  

It's a lie.  It's all a lie.  

There is a way to emerge out of that dark and lonely place inside.  To believe that you have worth.  To shed the shame like a snake sheds its skin, and - come to think of it - that's a really good analogy that just happened to pop into my head!  

It starts with the simple admission that you can do nothing about your own inability to climb out of that place by yourself, then believing that God can give you that strength and asking Him.  Other steps follow - healing happens from the inside out... and before long that old skin of shame feels like it doesn't fit, that it's stretched to the max and you've grown bigger than that inside.  The growth sometimes hurts - mostly because of the stretching of the old person that once was, the one that doesn't want to give in to the new person that's emerging.  

Before long that old skin just peels off as you keep going forward and living life, really living it!  It's a new sensation, the silencing of those condemning voices in your head - they might disappear slowly, like turning down the volume bit by bit. And one day you don't hear them anymore.

I can't say that I have gotten to that point yet.  But I am getting there.  Slowly.

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