Guilt Brain vs Shame Brain: Your Inner Adult vs Your Inner Child
Guilt is what I feel when my bad advice hurts you. Shame is what I feel when you (rightly) don’t take my bad advice in the first place.
Researcher Dr. Brene Brown distinguishes guilt and shame by their effects on us.
Guilt motivates us to take positive action to repair a relationship because we feel we’ve done something wrong, but we can fix it.
Shame motivates us to withdraw and assume the relationship is irreparable because we are fundamentally broken, and you can’t fix a broken human.
Researchers in China used fMRI brain scans to understand brain activation during guilt and shame.
When people feel guilt, brain areas related to “theory of mind” processing, thinking about other people’s experiences, are more active.
(For reference, one of the most important theory of mind areas is called the “temporal parietal junction.” If you think of the brain as having flaps on the sides, the TPJ is in the corner where the flaps attach to the main chunk.)
When we feel guilty, we are thinking about the people we’ve hurt and trying to understand their experience, so that we can figure out what they need to feel better.
That’s a very adult thing to do.
This “adultness” (I almost wrote “adultery”) comes from the fact that, during guilt, our cognitive control areas in the prefrontal cortex are also more active.
We’re literally more in control of our own brain when we feel guilty than when we feel shame.
When we feel more control over ourselves, we have a greater ability to take positive action repair relationships.
When we feel shame, on the other hand, we don’t feel like we have control over ourselves.
In the fMRI study, shame came about like this: I offered you advice, you didn’t take my advice, and it ended up that my advice was wrong anyway.
What would I think in that moment?
“Are they thinking that I meant to give them bad advice? Or do they think I’m just stupid?”
Either way, I’m in a position of being not socially valuable, either because I’m devious or because I’m unintelligent.
And sure, maybe it’s just you thinking these things, but you have a mouth and legs.
How do we fix a situation in which someone else thinks we’re either of those things?
Unfortunately, without our cognitive control areas well activated, we’re not going to come up with many good ideas.
We are brought back to a state of childhood, and not the good kind.
Our inner child is always there because our inner adult is built on top of our inner child.
When our inner adult is not fully active, who do you think is running the show behind our eyes?
During shame, we go inward in a bad way, trying to figure out exactly where we’re broken.
This is almost a good idea, but the problem is that we’re all broken in so many ways.
Once we start going down that road, it bends and twists in on itself until we can’t find our way back.
If only we had our cognitive control going, so we could filter out the proactive problem solving and personal growth from the overflowing pour of self-negation.
Fortunately, Dr. Brene Brown has a really good answer to shame.
When we feel broken and unworthy of connection to other humans, the only true antidote is connection to other humans.
We need to do the most difficult thing to do when we feel shame. Act like an adult and use our words.
We have to reach out to someone we trust and know that we can connect with. We need to tell them what we’re going through.
The more we can tell them (what we did, how the other person reacted, how we feel, what it reminds us of from earlier in our life), the more potential for connection we create.
The person we’ve reached out to has to meet our story without judgment and with calm, clear alliance to us.
That connection is what our inner child needs.
And a connected inner child is what our inner adult needs to wake up again and get out of bed.
