What's the matter with "Guilt"?

 It's not uncommon for people to seek help from a therapist to alleviate the guilt that results from something(s) they have done which they do not approve. They see therapy as resembling confession to the priest and expect to be given a punishment commensurate with their "crime",  Somehow they have come to the belief that causing themselves pain (or allowing others to cause it) wipes out their slate and they will be guilt-free.

The notion that you can reduce your guilt through suffering is clearly absurd.  Whatever harm you have done to yourself or others "proves" that you deserve suffering. More suffering is better than less, and the history of religions is witness to that belief. The focus is on the reduction of the feeling itself, not on attempting to repair the damage done to self or others.

Somehow the guilty person believes that suffering and self-blame is enough to undo the bad behavior.  Is the world a better place as a result of your pain?  Exactly how does this take place?  If you take the time and trouble to consider this belief, its absurdity becomes obvious. The bad behavior is ignored. Only the relief from guilt matters. 

Guilt is the recognition that you have done something damaging to your world, combined with the belief that if you can manage to feel badly enough, your guilt will go away.This belief is clearly self-serving. You have done damage. How exactly does your personal pain take that damage away?

Following this line of thought results in the recognition that your interest is not in making the world a better place, but in a magical belief that there is somewhere a cosmic accountant who keeps track of the good and the bad that we do, and that we can bribe him/her/it with a gift of additional misery to clean our record.  Seeking help in therapy to get rid of therapy is exactly the same reasoning: a magical cleansing.

What the guilty person has not done is recognize and take responsibility for what he has done, and try his best to do enough good that the bad is countered. If you break something, fix it.  If you can't fix it, do enough good that you have more than made up for it.

If you follow this rule, you will leave the world better than you found it. Punishing yourself does not typically result in benefiting you. And it certainly does not help the people affected by your behavior. 

 And shame and guilt are not illnesses.  They are both learned and built in, and they serve a useful and valuable purpose:  to encourage people to adhere to the rules of their tribe. Don't expect your insurance company to reimburse you for feeling guilty or ashamed of bad behaviors.

What's the matter with 'Shame'?

Lately I've seen some advertisements for workshops purporting to be in the service of banishing shame from people's lives.  The reasoning seems to be something like "If it feels bad, it must be bad".  I think this is a gross simplification, perhaps to help people or perhaps to provide a salable product. I propose to take a deeper look at shame and how it functions.  

Firstly, shame is a phenomenon that only exists in group settings.  If you were hopelessly alone on an island in the middle of an ocean, would shame be relevant to your experience?  Would you blush if you were nude in the open?  Would remembering some social gaffe you perpetrated earlier in your life embarrass you?  Probably not.  If you were giving a lecture to a hundred people and discovered that your fly was unzipped (assuming only for the moment that you are male) or loudly farted, would you be humiliated?

Shame appears when the unacceptable behavior is known to other people in your group.  To feel shame you would have to have done something others in your group would find unacceptable.  When you are a young adolescent, for instance, wearing the "wrong thing" can be catastophically shameful.  If nobody notices you would not be embarrassed.

Shame is experienced when we deviate too far from the norms of our group.  Partially it includes fear, fear of rejection in the form of being laughed at or jeered.  It is an emotion that operates to push our behavior back within the range of acceptance of our group.  It encourages conformity to our particular group norms.  Deviating from the norms of a group to which we do not belong is not shaming.  Something in us tells us that being excluded from our group is awful-bad-dangerous.  We are urged to change our behavior to fit in.  Think of The Scarlet Letter, for instance.

What happens in a world in which there is no shame?  There is nothing to encourage conformity.  There are few prohibited behaviors, and we can do pretty much what we want.  But do we want to live in a shameless society?  We would be confronted with behavior that is now strictly prohibited.  We would live in a world in which little is forbidden other than those things we prohibit by law.  Our behaviors would be wildly divergent. Breaking the law would still have consequences, but shame would not be among them.

It would be a lot like it is now, only more so, wouldn't it?  I leave you to decide if this is a good thing.

A therapy problem

At an out-of-state convention I was talking with another therapist who presented an interesting treatment problem.  I had no really adequate answer, and after having been a therapist for 60 years that's at least a little unusual.

His patient told him that many years previously he had committed some terrible crimes.  Without going into detail, the patient stated that he had accepted money to kill several people. More recently he had gotten sober for the first time in many years and had subsequently fallen into a severe depression.  He had become suicidal and been hospitalized.  

His therapist told me that later on in the therapy his patient recognized his nearly unbearable guilt as undoubtedly the driver for his suicidal impulses and depression.  The patient's depressive thoughts were severely self-blaming, and in some ways even appropriate.

Here are the questions the other therapist asked me.  Should he even be assisted in recovering from his depression?  Isn't his guilt an appropriate response to his behaviors?  Is it an appropriate use of psychotherapy to be relieved of the guilt for his crimes?  Is it acceptable to kill people and then expect to be relieved of the psychological cost of committing such awful crimes? Is that even ethical?

I thought a long time before I was able to give the other therapist any answer at all.  After some thought my initial response was that the first and second principle of the psychologist's ethical code is:  Do no harm. Act to help the patient.  There are no exceptions to those principles, and to me there should be none. 

That being said, the other questions are open for your answers.  I'll be glad to hear any comments.