Coping with shame

[Mod note: comments on this post about how I’m a good person who should feel better about myself will be deleted. Please report them if you see them. I am writing this to make people who feel like me feel less alone, not to get reassurance, and as you will see in part 4 the reassurance often makes me feel worse.]

I.

My baseline emotional states are joy, shame, and guilt.

When you talk about mental health, it’s easy to make everything sound worse than it actually is. So let me be clear that I feel joy and contentment most of the time, less because I have a particularly high happiness set point and more because I’m an extraordinarily lucky person. I have a job I would (and did) work for free. I have a rich community of kind and interesting friends. I eat delicious food, have access to all the world’s knowledge and the greatest works of art ever produced, and can go to plays whenever I want. Sometimes I bake a cake and then everyone is pleased with me. The good people of YouTube have invented the genre “metal covers of Disney songs.”

Nevertheless, I think, if most people could read my mind, they’d be surprised by how much time I spend feeling guilty and ashamed. More than I spend thinking about my kid, or the people I love, or my friends. More than I spend writing blog posts in my head (and I spend a lot of time writing blog posts in my head). If you could take a random sample of what was going through my head at any given time, more likely than not it would be: I can’t believe I did something that stupid and cruel, I’m a bad person, everyone is going to be angry at me, I’m worthless, I’m disgusting, everyone hates me and finds me annoying, I am a burden on everyone I love, I hate myself, I deserve to be dead.

Probably this is called “depression.” But sometimes I’m not especially depressed: I feel happy, I have hope for the future, I can get my work done, I care about other people, I sleep well, I take pleasure in my ordinary activities.¹ And even so the tenor of my everyday life is guilt and shame.

I wish I could tell you Four Easy Tricks To Fixing Your Guilt And Shame Issues Forever. But that would be dishonest. I haven’t fixed them. I have, at best, made some amount of progress. But here are some things I’ve figured out that work for me; if you deal with excessive guilt and shame, I hope they spark thoughts that help you figure something useful out.

II.

What no one wants to tell you about dealing with excessive guilt and shame is that often you feel guilty and ashamed about bad things you actually did.

For example, I spent a lot of time the other day hating myself about failing to apply for my passport soon enough, so instead of doing my job I had to spend an hour on a train to get to the San Francisco Passport Office and then another hour waiting in line to beg for an expedited passport. That is, like, a bad thing? I have known I was traveling to Czechia in late July for almost a year. Not getting my passport six months ago was an unforced error, and I lost an entire productive writing day because of it.

I’m decent at cognitive behavioral therapy, so I’ve mostly stopped feeling guilty and ashamed about things that are actually unjustified. As far as I can tell, this is just worse. There’s a certain pleasure in feeling guilty and ashamed about things no reasonable person would hold against you. “I feel guilty about being sexually attracted to fat women, because what if I’m a Chubby Chaser (TM),” I’d say, and then my friends would go “no, no, that’s totally fine! You’re a good person! You don’t have to feel bad about that! The people who ought to feel bad are those people who think it’s fatphobic to prefer fat women, and fatphobic to prefer thin women, such that the only non-fatphobic opinion is complete indifference to the subject. You are an innocent victim who has done absolutely nothing wrong ever and is cruelly persecuted by annoying people on Bluesky.”²

But these days, with my guilt and shame, I don’t even get the perverse pleasure of victimhood.

Here are some things I feel guilty about: I’m chronically late. I cancel plans at the last minute. I am bad at promptly filling out forms, to the point that I once failed to invoice someone for $2000 for six months. I often fail to do work and instead spend all morning arguing on Discord about Catholic theology. I raise my voice at my child when I’m stressed. My child spends entirely too much time watching bad children’s cartoons on Netflix. I am atrocious at making deadlines. I spend an obscene amount of time deliberately reading takes that make me feel horrible so that I can feel horrible about them. I spend too much money. I’m normally a warm, friendly, and forgiving person, but on the rare occasions that I hate someone I am mean and vindictive. I keep deciding that, instead of communicating my needs to people I care about, I should maintain an elaborate web of deception about my emotions and state of mind. I am so lazy. I am so, so, so lazy.

All of those are, like, bad? Whatever approach I have to dealing with my excessive guilt, it can’t involve going “it’s fine to be lazy, spend too much, yell at your kid, viciously insult people you don’t like, deceive people you do like, and engage in bespoke and niche forms of self-harm.” All of those things are obviously not fine!

And guilt and shame do serve a role in the moral life.

A while ago, I was reading an article about the cultic Buddhist existential-risk monastery MAPLE, which includes the passage:

MAPLE Tales are short blogposts by residents—sometimes written during mandatory group sessions—about moments of teaching and insight with Soryu. The site describes them as “The tales describe an unexpected situation, how Head Teacher Soryu Forall responded, and the clarity discovered by the student. They are not concerned with the student’s or narrator’s opinions and feelings about the teaching.”

They are read aloud by the author to the whole community, edited by Soryu personally, and then published online (167 so far). Because each centers on an interaction with Soryu specifically, and receives his editing prior to publishing, they function as a distributed hagiography—painting Soryu as a wise figure of immense ability and world-historical significance—and their being read aloud is a means of spreading high-control memes prominent within one person across the group.

I do think I’m brilliantly wise.³ But even if I were somehow given a cult against my will, I wouldn’t force people to write blog posts about how great I am and then edit the blog posts myself before posting them on my own blog. Why? Because the thought makes me writhe with agony. I imagine someone referencing the latest Ozy Tale and feeling my cheeks burn and my shoulders curl in. I shudder at the thought of claiming that I’m important and cool enough to force people into talking about how important and cool I am. In short, I feel too much shame.

I ought to feel less shame. But Soryu should experience more shame. It is good, actually, for the thought of forcing people to write blog posts about how great you are to make your skin crawl with imagined judgment.

Nate Soares has made the point that guilt and shame should mostly be emotions that function by not happening. Your guilt is successfully keeping you from punching a baby, and you can tell, because you never punch any babies. Your shame is successfully keeping you from being a cult leader, and you can tell, because you don’t lead any cults.⁴

I’m not saying you should never feel shame or guilt. Sometimes you might feel shame or guilt about something you did—if you gave into a temptation you normally wouldn’t give into, or made a bad decision in an unusual situation, or learned that something you’d thought was okay had hurt someone. But if you feel shame and guilt every day, they clearly aren’t working to improve your behavior.

Sometimes I reassure myself that I might be a mediocre person, but at least I’m self-aware about it! At least I acknowledge the ways in which I’m mediocre! At least I beat myself up about my flaws! That’s gotta be at least half as good as actually being a good person, right?

This is a trap.

Now, of course you sometimes need to show regret for actions that you’re realistically going to repeat. People are often upset about your behavior for two reasons: first, because of the direct harm it causes them; second, because they think that you causing them harm means you don’t care about them. A sincere apology lets them know you do care about them, so they’re only upset about the first thing.

But once people are aware that you care about them, further punishment is pointless.

I think this point is made best in this David Foster Wallace essay, which is one of the most upsetting essays I’ve ever read, read at your own risk. The Depressed Person in the essay is a self-centered, tedious burden on those around her; she demands endless comfort and reassurance from people who have bigger problems than she has, without ever providing any support or empathy for those she drains. The Depressed Person is entirely aware of this fact. Indeed, much of The Depressed Person’s endless feelings-processing is about her fear that she is a self-centered tedious burden and about how guilty she feels about her endless demands for comfort and reassurance and about her inability to return her friends’ support.

Does that help at all?

No. Of course not. If anything, The Depressed Person’s self-awareness makes it worse. At least if The Depressed Person made her friends endlessly comfort and reassure her about her physical appearance, she wouldn’t make her friends think “I feel a sense of nauseated dread whenever I see The Depressed Person’s name on the caller ID, but I can’t ever tell her because that would only reinforce her self-hatred, so I guess I’m just never going to be able to set boundaries about The Depressed Person’s behavior.”

If you would like to improve a situation, you need to take different actions that lead to a better result. Punishing yourself is self-indulgent emotional masturbation. Feeling bad accomplishes jack and shit.

I realize this is a blunt way to put it, which risks that some readers will feel bad and punish themselves about the fact that they feel bad and punish themselves. But I think the bluntness is useful. Guilt and shame love to make themselves seem necessary. If I say to myself “be kind to yourself! your suffering matters too!”, then the guilt and shame say to me “ah, but you should be aware of the tradeoffs. You have to hate yourself if you want to be a good person. You’re this lazy now; imagine how lazy you’d be if you stopped punishing yourself. And everyone will be angry at you about your many failings unless you stop them by getting angry at yourself first. We’re protecting you. We’re keeping you safe.”

Like I said, this isn’t totally false? Sometimes people do want you to signal that you feel bad about doing something, or they’ll get mad at you. Sometimes feeling bad about punching babies keeps you from punching babies. Like all the best lies, there’s something true in it.

But the amount of guilt and shame I feel isn’t stopping me from being a bad person; if it was, I wouldn’t do the same bad stuff over and over again. And they aren’t protecting me from my friends’ anger; actually, my friends feel sad about my suffering, if not frustrated and manipulated because my own self-hate makes it harder for them to express their own annoyance.

I have a tendency to think of my guilt and shame as morally purifying. My suffering itself seems morally good. I might be a bad person, but at least I’m hurting myself about it. There is some sort of cosmic justice. But in fact all suffering is bad, whether or not the person suffering “deserves” it; my suffering is always on the cost side of morality’s great ledger.

As long as the guilt and shame is accomplishing something important, then I have to continue to allow it space in my emotional life. But there is no tradeoff here. I would be better off feeling less guilt and shame, straightforwardly, in every single way. Since I lose nothing by feeling less guilty and ashamed, I don’t have to try to figure out a moderate, appropriate amount of guilt and shame to feel. I can light it all on fire indiscriminately, like a controlled burn of my own psyche, and trust that afterward the sedges and wildflowers will grow.

(As long as I make sure to still feel guilt about punching babies and shame about being a cult leader. But that’s not in question.)