Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains why anger, shame, and guilt are tangled together. Anger is a threat response. Shame says I am bad as a person. Guilt says I did something wrong. The difference matters for recovery.
Hey there everybody. Welcome to this video on getting to know anger's buddies. Shame and guilt. And anger has a lot of buddies. Anger is a response to a threat. Remember we've talked in other videos about the fight or flight response and anger is the fight part. It says I don't feel safe and I need to fight in some way. Now, shame is anger at yourself for feeling like you are not okay, like you are a bad person. Guilt is anger at yourself for something that you did or that you shouldn't have done or you should have done that you didn't do. So they're similar but different. Shame is about you as a person. Guilt is about a behavior. But they're both anger at yourself. And it's important to recognize that. In what ways. Remember I said anger represents a reaction to a threat. In what ways does your behavior in terms of guilt represent, Represent a threat to your self esteem or represent the potential that you will be rejected by somebody else? When we feel guilty of a lot of times it has to do with should, shoulda, coulda, woulda, and exploring, number one, whether that's even accurate. But the likelihood that we will be rejected or that that behavior is incompatible with our self esteem is really important. And we'll take a simple example. Guilt about taking a break. Guilt about relaxation. There's a lot of us who've been taught that sitting on the couch watching TV all day is not okay. You're supposed to be up doing something. And when we allow ourselves to rest and relax and restore, we feel guilty for it. We feel like we should be doing something else. So we need to look back and go, where did I learn that message and do I deserve to be rejected? Do I deserve to reject myself? Or do I deserve to be rejected for this behavior, for taking care of myself? And I have other videos that are specifically dedicated toward guilt. But it is important to evaluate all of those big and little guilts that we experience because that's a lot of unnecessary anger. Shame, as I mentioned, is anger at ourself for feeling like we are not enough, like we are broken, we are not good enough. So it's anger at ourself for who we are, not what we've done. And many times when we step back, we figure out that we learned that behavior. We learned that message from people when we were growing up because instead of saying you did a bad thing, they said you're a bad person. And yeah, I feel bad when I do a bad thing. I feel bad when I make a mistake. But I can fix that if I'm a bad person, I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to fix me, if you will, I. I can fix my behaviors. And it's really important that we look back and evaluate the things that we feel ashamed of. Are those things core parts of us that make us, quote, bad people? Or are. Are we feeling ashamed of behaviors, things that we did? And a lot of times, like in addiction, for example, people, when they're in active addiction will often do things that they have a lot of guilt for, they feel bad about. But their behaviors when they're in active addiction don't make them a bad person. It makes them a person who made bad choices. And I know it's semantics, but I think it's important when we start trying to figure out the recovery process. If you don't believe that you are lovable, if you don't believe that you are worthy, it's going to be a lot harder to move forward. If you believe that people at their core are lovable and worthy, even if they make bad choices, then that's something different because you can make different choices. That is my brief little introduction to anger, shame and guilt. And maybe in the next video we will talk about jealousy and envy, which are also two of anger's buddies.
