A man confesses to his wife that he's been unfaithful. A counselor explains why guilt and shame, though painful, are signals that push us toward honesty and change instead of staying trapped in secrecy.
To be 100% honest, I, um, revealed to my wife last night that I had, uh, stepped out of the marriage.
Yeah, how do you feel about telling her?
Nervous, honestly. Pretty nervous.
What are you nervous about?
Oh, just the unknown, the unknown part of life. We were already there before it, before that point. I just, uh, well, that's gonna—
well, that you're gonna find out about. You'll find out what she wants to do about that. A lot better, I'll tell you this, a lot better than hiding it and, uh, being nervous about either A, her finding out, or being haunted and tormented by shame and guilt because you're not being honest.
That's exactly what I have written down. My first things that I have written down are guilt and shame. Yeah, you know, just carrying that guilt and that shame for— I mean, I've been doing stuff like that throughout my whole marriage, just totally disregarding anything that she had asked of me in aspects of that, but I never had stepped outside with another person.
Well, the guilt and shame are a good thing. —situation.
It propelled me to, uh, to get honest. You know, that was one of the first things that I was told when I came into this program is that I have to get honest. And, uh, that's one thing that I've never been able to do with my life.
Complete and total transparency creates freedom. So the shame and guilt here is basically— I mean, if you never felt ashamed or guilty about it, you would never want to change. You would— there would be no motivation for you to modify your behavior if you didn't feel shame or guilt. So the shame and guilt's actually— it's a positive thing in this situation.
