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How Guilt Blocks You from Relationship Satisfaction
When people were being burned, drowned, hung and pressed to death during the Salem Witch Trials, that must’ve sent a chilling message to anyone who wasn’t among the two hundred accused practitioners of witchcraft.
The lesson being, anyone can accuse you of anything; it is best to just stay on people’s good side, stay out of trouble and blend in as much as possible.
Colonial Massachusetts at the turn of the 17th century was not the best time to be an individual. But perhaps we still suffer from the same shame of the pointed finger. Hopefully not to the same gruesome extent, mind you, but the finger exists nevertheless.
The question is, who is pointing the finger? But let’s begin by defining guilt and how it differs from shame.
Guilt is what you feel when someone condemns you as bad or wrong. Shame, on the other hand, is what you feel when you have internalized and agreed that you are bad or wrong. Shame tends to feel worse than guilt, but guilt is the gateway to shame.
People accuse others of being bad every day. The group that is most likely to buy into these accusations are children when reprimanded by their parent. The child is unable to understand that they are being reprimanded not because they are inherently bad or wrong, but because their actions…
