The more shame you feel about your past actions and behaviors, the more your self-esteem is lowered and the less likely it is you will feel motivated to change. And without self-forgiveness, your level of shame will cause you to defend yourself from taking on more shame by refusing to see your faults and not being open to criticism or correction. Let’s learn more about shame vs guilt, why they are common feelings in recovery and strategies for overcoming them.
Forgiving ourselves or others and releasing that choking experience of guilt is crucial to overcoming a relapse or pushing through on your journey of recovery. It’s important to forgive others too, as when you guilt and shame in recovery do so, you let go and accept. It may not make things right or just, but it means you are willing to let mistakes that happen, happen and you don’t want to feel responsible for the things you can’t control.
Supporting information
The “shame addiction cycle” refers to a pattern of substance use to escape or avoid negative self-conscious emotions that paradoxically leads to increased shame related to the stigma of being a person who uses substances [7, 19, 20]. From this perspective, shame and guilt may have the capacity to reduce the proposed cyclical relationship between negative self-conscious emotion and substance use. This emotion is also closely linked with depression and other mental illnesses, as well as substance abuse.
- Forgiving those who caused pain can also play a role in restoring self-esteem during recovery.
- However, if both unidirectional direct paths were significant, this represents a bidirectional relationship.
- Shame can be caused by a wide range of factors — such as trauma or challenging social environments — and often causes feelings of deep inadequacy, lack of worth and the need to hide.
- While guilt is acknowledging and feeling bad that you did something you should not have, shame is internalizing guilt and believing that you, yourself are bad because of the bad things you have done.
This speaks to the need for a supportive and safe treatment environment in which to do this type of work. Under those circumstances, a family can understand intellectually that their loved one has support and that the family doesn’t have to take on the responsibility.Still, we counsel families to step back. If they allow their loved one to take responsibility for their guilt, this empowers their loved one to make changes.
Associated Data
It can trigger a dependency on alcohol or drugs as a method of escape. The shame-addiction pairing can find an addict in a precarious cycle, as their addiction may lead to increased shame and a growing need to hide their reality from others and even from themselves. Shame and guilt are often used interchangeably but are in fact not the same. While guilt acknowledges negative feelings over an action taken, shame tells you that as a result of this action, you’re not a good enough person. Joining a 12-Step Program provides individuals with access to peers who have overcome similar struggles thus creating an empathetic environment providing comfort when needed.
Take the time
to evaluate your behavior and be aware of whether your actions are in line with
your beliefs. Thoroughly processing a wrong from your past can help you
not avoid the same mistake in the future. Many times we have values because they
were taught to us as children.