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Distinguishing between remorse and guilt is important and helpful to our understanding of how to heal and grow. Many people, including well-known lecturers and researchers, view the two terms as synonymous, but the two are not interchangeable. Remorse leads to healthy outcomes, while guilt does not. Confusion between these terms can cause us to believe that we should value guilt, because it is supposed to be a good thing; we think it should remind us that we need to change something about ourselves to be better human beings. But guilt is not a moral compass to keep us from doing ‘bad’ things. It splits our sense of self into warring factions, entraps us in the past, and diminishes our self-worth.
Guilt is essentially a synthetic emotion in that it acts on us in a way that produces a negative feeling like certain real emotions might. But guilt is not an emotion; it is an inner experience of conflict of the self against the self that produces feelings and harsh inner dialogue. Guilt is the result of our self-image being in contradiction with our imaged ideal self (how we wish to be, strive to be, or believe ourselves to be), particularly as expressed through our actions. Guilt serves no useful purpose. On the contrary, it serves to arrest growth and transition specifically through the grieving process. Remorse, on the other hand, can lead to healing through penance.
Guilt can produce a felt sense of shame in us, which makes us feel unworthy of forgiveness. Shame is felt throughout our whole body and its effects are toxic to our sense of the self in mind, mood, and body. Shame is experienced as something we are incapable of resolving when we are in it and the best we can do is to try and dump it (usually onto someone else). Similar to depression, only much more insidious, when we are in a state of shame all the wonderful insights, healing tools, and techniques we may normally have at our disposal are rendered useless.
WEBSITES WITH HELPFUL INFORMATION
- Good Therapy A website with orienting information
- Center for Healing Shame
- Working with Shame
- Ways to Move Through Shame
- Guilt vs Remorse
RESOURCES