Today's Topic is Shame and Guilt | Live Chat with Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to today's live presentation. Today we are talking about shame and guilt. And, you know, we will talk a little bit. Remember yesterday we talked about finding your power and becoming more empowered. You need to find the facts, look at your language, examine your interpretations, and look at the probability that something's going to happen. Today we are talking. So in this particular situation today, for example, I will, you know, kind of walk you through since we found out that unfortunately the president and Melania have both tested positive for Covid. So we're looking at the facts. What do we know? Well, we don't know a whole heck of a lot right now, except for they tested positive. We don't know if he's asymptomatic or how he's feeling. So we want to look at the facts, which is the fact that we don't know much. We don't know if he's, you know, severely ill or not. We're, we're hoping he's not because we don't want the leader of the free world to be ill. Language. We want to look at whether we're using extreme language or we're catastrophizing, thinking that, okay, since he got COVID 19 and he's older, then he's doomed. Well, that's not the case at all. There are people who are older who recover from COVID 19 just fine. So we want to use language that's a little more moderated. For example, you know, he may have difficulty recovering from this, but we don't know that that goes back to the fact. So you may not even want to say anything like that. Just recognizing that we don't have enough information to really get all that worried yet. Interpretations, are they based on the current situation? Absolutely not. We are basing our interpretations and our expectations and our anticipatory anxiety on a whole lot of weight. What ifs. And I will take you back. For those of you who are remember Reagan's presidency, my husband and I were talking about this this morning. And I very clearly remember when Reagan was shot. And I remember the anxiety, which is very similar to the anxiety I'm feeling right now when Reagan was in surgery, because you didn't know if he was going to come out of surgery. Things can happen. And, you know, it was a very tense time time for the nation. And, you know, I think a lot of us are experiencing that right now. Whether you like Trump or not doesn't matter. He is our president in chief right now, and we don't like ambiguity. So we do want to follow that follow up with probability. What is the probability that the worst case scenario is going to happen? Well, another fact we know is he got tested right before the debate and he was negative. And the next day when he got tested, he was positive. Which means the virus didn't have a chance to really proliferate in his body before they were able to start, you know, introducing lots of medications to try to stop the virus. So what is the probability that he is going to have a significant problem with this disease? Probably pretty small. So I, I want to, I wanted to just walk through that flip scenario for you using a real case study because a lot of us go through things like that. There are other people who are, you know, find out that they might have a tumor or something. You can go through these same steps in order to help yourself find your power, in order to help yourself not get all tied up, all overwhelmed with things that you can't control and may not even actually exist. You don't want to get caught up in the what ifs. So that was a review of yesterday's presentation, but I thought it was kind of important to walk through because so many people are still struggling with anxiety right now. So on to shame and guilt. Shame is defined as having feelings of being unworthy or bad. Guilt, on the other hand, means feeling bad or ashamed about something you did that you shouldn't have done or something that you didn't do that you should have done. So, you know, guilt and shame, there's some overlap, um, but they're not exactly the same thing. Shame and guilt are both emotions associated with self anger. In shame, we are angry at ourselves because we think we are not good enough. We think we are bad. With guilt, we're angry at ourself again for something we did that we shouldn't have or something we didn't do that we should have. Shame and guilt are natural emotions. We don't want to completely eliminate these. We've talked about this regularly. Emotions are very natural. When we have an emotion that is our body telling us, hey, there might be something going on. If it's a positive emotion, your body's saying, hey, there might be something good happening. If it's a negative emotion, your body says, hey, there might be something threatening or bad going on, but it's not a for sure. It is a good gut reaction. From there, we need to use that prefrontal cortex, all that higher order thinking, and examine the situation. A lot of times I make the analogy of a smoke alarm, but I'll give you a different analogy. If you have dogs or if you've ever had small children, both of them are little pooping machines. I want you to think of negative emotions or unpleasant emotions. I, I try not to use the word negative unpleasant emotions like poop. When you're sitting in the living room and you suddenly smell poop, whether you have a toddler on your lap or you've got a dog sitting next to you, you're going to go, okay, that's akin to having that emotion. And with me, when I smell poop, I get a little bit angry. So I'm having that emotion anyway. But it doesn't necessarily mean that anybody pooped. What it means is you need to get, get up and check if it's a child, check their diaper. If it's a dog, don't check in the dining room. That's where mine go and see if there's actually poop. Just because we are clued in, just because we have a thought that it might be happening doesn't mean it's necessarily happening. Now let's take that a little bit further. What happens if you don't clean up that poop? If you just sit there and, and stew in the smell of the poop, like stewing in the emotions that you're holding. Guilt, shame, you know, those unpleasant emotions, does it do any good? Does it make the smell? Does it make the problem go away? Well, heck no. The emotion tells you to get up and do something about it. If you don't do anything about the poop, guess what? Your whole house is going to start to stink. It's not just going to be the dining room or it's not just going to be junior's diaper. So it's important to address that. The same thing with our emotions. If we don't address these unpleasant emotions and figure out what the next step is to improve the moment, then we are going to essentially stink. We're going to carry that stink with us, carrying that bag of poop with us wherever we go. And that is going to permeate everything that we do. You know, most people are not going to want to be having a meeting with you or hanging out with you if you're carrying a bag of poop around with you. Well, same sort of thing. If you're carrying a bag of unpleasant emotions that is just, you know, emanating out everywhere. So going back, shame and guilt are natural emotions, but they're not meant to be nurtured and held on to, like, cherished prizes. They Use a ton of energy. They keep your HPA axis, your threat response system activated, but do nothing themselves to resolve the situation. It's just sitting there, like the fire alarm going off or the smell of poop. It's just, you know, glaring and triggering. Your, your central nervous system saying, hey, there's a problem. And if you're sitting there doing nothing, you know, it's a problem. What we need to recognize is shame and guilt generally have to do with stuff that happened in the past. Whether we feel ashamed of, of something we did, whether we feel shame as people because we didn't get the love that we needed, the, the attachment response we needed. You know, there are a lot of reasons that we're going to talk about, but ultimately recognizing that shame and guilt generally come from stuff that happened in the past. And you can't change the past, so you're stuck with it, right? No, you can make alterations and we're going to talk about things you can do to address shame and guilt. One of your two questions that I ask people that I work with that struggle with shame and guilt is what is the benefit to, to holding on to this shame and guilt? What is the benefit to continue to beat yourself up over something that you feel guilty for? What is the benefit to holding on to shame? And sometimes people are afraid that if they let go, let go of it, they'll do it again. Sometimes they don't know what to do because they've always held on to it. But that's a personal question you need to think about. And the other question is what might happen if you let go of that feeling, that shame or that guilt? And when it comes to shame, that means moving towards self acceptance instead of self hatred, which means growth. Maybe you're looking at yourself and you feel ashamed because you didn't do something that the culture says you, quote, should have done. Okay, well, if you decide that that's important, if you decide that it's something that's important for you, then develop those skills. If you are ashamed of yourself because you know that you've got a bad temper and you know that you tend to be irritable with people and, and you, you feel guilty about that and you feel ashamed of your lack of emotional self control. Okay, you know, if that's an issue that you think is important, then accepting yourself as you are and recognizing, okay, I have a weakness here, and then taking steps to figure out how to deal with it, how to improve so you don't feel ashamed of it in terms of guilt, it's important to look at what might happen if I engaged in self forgiveness doesn't mean saying it was okay. It means saying all right, it happened. Staying mad at myself over this isn't going to change that. What can I do to either learn from it or make amends? I remember when my grandmother passed away, I was out on a run and she had had cancer for a long time and you know, she'd been in hospice for quite a while and we never knew exactly when that time would come. But for the longest time I felt so incredibly guilty that I was not by her side when she passed away. And it was important for me to come to terms with that and forgive myself and saying, okay, you know, maybe I could have done something differently. You know, in retrospect, would I, would I choose to do something differently next time? And the answer is yes. You know, when my mother and my father were passing away from cancer, you know, I tended to not leave for such long periods of time. You know, I would be in and out, but that's how I handled it. But it was important for me to figure out, learn from it so I didn't have to incur, experience that situation again and carry with me more shame. So let's move on to what are we going to do about it? The causes, A few. There are lots of causes of shame and guilt, but we're going to hit three major ones today and we're also going to talk about a couple of interventions. There are tons of interventions. If you look on the YouTube channel and the long form videos, the hour long videos, lots of videos out there on dealing with attachment, self esteem, you know, a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about. So there are, there is more information, a lot more information. But I just kind of want to give you a couple of hints of directions you might think about going. So one of the first causes of shame comes from what I just largely call cultural messages. It could come from your school, from the media, from your family, family, other people telling you what you should do, what you should be, how you should act. Well, there's a lot of shoulds in life and it is exhausting. The first thing to that I encourage people to do when it comes to shoulds is asking themsel who says, you know, I should be able to do X, Y and Z. Okay, well what are the facts for that? What are the facts that say I should be able to do that? And do I believe it? Do I believe that it's important to do X, Y and Z and Sometimes it's not. I remember, you know, again, I will share my own stuff because, because that's not controlled by hipaa. When I had my children, you know, thinking that I should be able to be a, you know, full time mom and a full time student and a full time employee and manage all that and have full time sanity. And that just wasn't going to happen. Not for me at least. And so it was important for me to recognize what was important to me and get away from cultural shoulds of, you know, what my family may think or you know, what somebody else may think. It was more an issue between, in my nuclear family at that point. The second issue with cultural messages is you need to ask yourself why you care. If you're doing something that is not in line with what others say you should do, why do you care? And people who care have what I call hyperactive self awareness. They are chameleons. They want other people to approve of them. So they tend to care about more about what other people think about them than what they think about themselves or what they feel they need themselves. So it's important to find the fact that facts, you know, why is it that I care? Why do I need this person or this group's approval? Those are going to be things that are important questions to ask. Would you impose this should on your child or on your best friend? And, and that's another question. A lot of people hold themselves to this standard up here where they tell themselves they should be able to do everything and then some and be superperson and that's just not realistic. They wouldn't expect it from anybody else. So why do they expect it of themselves and then feel ashamed when they don't meet that excessive, what's the word I'm looking for? Excessive standard. The second issue we can talk about is self esteem. People may feel shame because they have low self esteem. This can result from fear, failure, you know, failure to meet those shoulds or even lack of attachment. When children don't have strong attachment in that first two year period, they have a lot of difficulty with self regulation and believing they're worthy of love. Attachment is when that primary caregiver teaches us that we're worthy of their attention, we're worthy of care and nurturance. And attachment is also during that period that priority. Primary caregiver also teaches the child how to regulate their own emotions. When that doesn't happen, then children grow up thinking, number one, they weren't worthy of love and number two, they don't have those Coping skills and distress tolerance skills that they may need oftentimes. Which leads back to that cultural message of shoulds, that we should be polite, we should be able to manage our emotions, et cetera. Etc. Failure and rejection can also lower self esteem and make us feel shame. And that largely relates back to cultural messages about failure and rejection. It's important to think about what these things mean to you. Failure. You know, if you look up memes about failure online, you will find lots of different ways to conceptualize failure. For example, failure means that you stepped out of your comfort zone. Failure means that you learn one way, one more way not to do something there. There are a lot of different ways to look at failure as a something that is growth promoting instead of shameful. But it's going to be up to the person to decide whether they want to embrace that or whether they want to embrace the rejecting side of failure, which takes us to rejection. It's important to recognize that nobody is going to like you all the time. I, I think I can be pretty comfortable saying that. And that involves a lot of extreme words. But it would be highly unlikely for somebody, for anybody to be liked by everybody all of the time. That's just really not fathomable. So recognizing that some people aren't going to like you and looking at it and trying to understand why, a lot of times it has more to do with them than with you. You may remind them of somebody from their past, you know, in your mannerisms or your movements or things that you say, or just your beliefs they may not like, but that has more to do with them than, than you. And check your language for personifying or overgeneralizing. A lot of times when we talk to ourselves, when we don't do something, well, we tell ourselves things like I'm so stupid. And that is a general generalized personified statement. I am. Fill in the blank. Well, you know, maybe I did something that was ill advised, but it doesn't mean I am as a person. It doesn't mean I am stupid. It means I made a poor choice. So checking languages and making sure you're not using negative adjectives after the word words. I am, you know, change that to I did something or I said something. You know, identify what it was because it's not you, it's something you, you may have done. And then thirdly, trauma and abuse may leave people feeling broken, unworthy or guilty. You know, there's a lot of survivors guilt, there's a lot of guilt that happens after trauma. But people who've Experienced trauma can also feel damaged in some way, like they're unlovable. And it's important to examine at a certain point whether you want to hold on to the victim narrative or move towards a survivor narrative. And that is a huge leap. It is not easy to do. But it is possible for people to address their shame and start looking at their experience as a building block in the structure of their life as opposed to something else. And exploring guilt in term as it relates to trauma and abuse is, is also really important. If you, you know, came from a household where there was abuse and maybe your sibling was abused a lot worse than you were, and you're holding that guilt still and you feel ashamed that you didn't protect your sibling more. Unfortunately, I've, you know, worked with people that that's been an issue. But it is important to address and explore that guilt. When you are 24, looking back at what you did when you were 8, you know, it's easy to say, well, I should have, but when you were eight, did you even have the capacity to do those things? And like I said, there is, what I'm touching on is the apex of a whole lot of really deep core issues. So this one, whatever it is, 10, 20 minute video ain't going to do everything for helping you address your shame issues. My goal was to help you explore your, the things that might be causing your shame so you can start doing more research and start examining it and maybe probing in those areas. And yes, the, the opposite of shame is often self esteem. So that is certainly important to look at. And I have a lot of videos on self esteem that you can start working on. A lot of people have difficulty developing self esteem because they were raised in an environment that was not compassionate and they were taught to feel guilty for feeling good about themselves. They were taught to feel guilty for having self pride. And that's important. If you look into compassion focused therapy, you can, you can look it up online. And one of the issues that compassion focused therapy addresses is the fact that, you know, some people, you know, they really want to feel better, they really want to be happy, but they have too much shame associated with that because the household they grew up in taught them that it was shameful to have their own feelings, to feel good about themselves, to, you know, do all these things that we're talking about. And it's important to recognize that, not say, well, just get over that, because that's what they were raised with. So it's important to encourage them to start examining what the beliefs that they were taught when they grew up, as they were growing up, and what their beliefs are. If they still believe those things, then you know, you're going to go in one direction. If they look at those beliefs and go, you know what? That was really not healthy, that was kind of toxic, then you, you will obviously probably go another direction with that discussion. And good morning to kim whitefeather, laura ipsum and real money. And, and yes, I would agree with you, Kim Whitefeather. I believe, you know, looking, it's been 20 years, so there may have been a case in there somewhere, but I can't think of any cases of people in recovery from substance use or even mental health issues that haven't had some shame and guilt issues that they've had to deal with that resulted directly from their substance use or their mood disorders. There's a lot of shame and guilt, for example, around depression when somebody is exhausted and they just, they can't take any more input and they're clinically depressed. They, they're not able to host those birthday parties and go to the soccer games and do that kind of stuff. And they often feel extremely guilty about those things. So there's a lot of shame and guilt that occurs as a result of not when people are not healthy, so to speak. So yeah, it's an important issue that we really need to address for all people the are coming through therapy. Forgiveness is another concept that a lot of people really, really struggle with in therapy, maybe especially in addiction. I don't, I try to look at forgiveness as what I call a power play. Forgiveness is not saying what you did was okay. Forgiveness is, is saying, I am not going to invest my energy in being angry over that anymore. What you did was not okay. But I am not going to tie up my energy in being angry about that. And whether that's talking to yourself about things you're angry at yourself about or talking to or, or forgiving other people. But forgiveness, a willingness to move forward, is essential to life, not just recover. It. And yes, the troll has been taken care of, allegedly. Are there other questions, comments, issues that are springing to mind that you might want to discuss regarding guilt and shame? And again, I can't emphasize enough that this is not, you know, 30 minutes is not a be all end all of the causes and interventions for shame. I could probably do four hours or more on different issues associated with it, but this may give you some things to think about and some directions to ponder with your therapist, with your pastor, whomever. Alrighty, everybody have an absolutely amazing, breathtaking weekend. Remember, it is important not only to try to mitigate the unpleasant feelings, but it is also vitally important to add in the positive. Do something today that is going to help you feel good, that's going to help you feel rejuvenated. That will help you have energy for some of the other things in your life to which you're committed. How do you forgive someone who is not remorseful? And remember, forgiveness is a personal choice. The person who did it may or may not be remorseful. What you're doing is choosing whether you are going to continue to invest energy in being angry, which is obviously not going to change that person's behavior or perspective, or you are going to choose to say, you know what? You're not worth my or that's not worth my energy, and take that energy back. Okie dokie. Have a great weekend. I will see you next week.