Guilt is good....

An article NOT written about Wall Street......or is it?

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Guilt gets a bad rap a lot of the time in popular culture.

“Don’t guilt trip me man!”

Meaning, don’t take me on this bad trip where I’m feeling responsible for something I’m not, or I’m being invited to stay on the trip once I’ve already taken responsibility.

Sometimes, we’re not actually talking about guilt when we have these conversations.

We’re actually talking about shame.

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Shame is an intensely painful emotions for us as humans. Its function is to promote social cohesion. As social mammals, we survive and thrive through the formation, cohesion, and stability of our social groups. Social death is analogous to physical death for us. We are so exquisitely dependent on care and relationship from the moment of conception, in utero, and then in our early lives. We’re unique in so many ways. We’re born with these relatively enormous heads and brains, that prevent us from doing what so many other mammals can do almost immediately- to walk and move independently. Without care, we cannot develop optimally. We can be emotionally and relationally malnourished, not only physically.

So in relationships, shame triggers an intensely distressing physiological response. Way bigger than embarrassment. It triggers an intense internal response that is designed to limit further undesirable acts from occurring. It’s extremely effective in the short term. It feels so painful that we will do almost anything to avoid it at all costs, even if it means lying, denying, deflecting, or blaming others. In the short term it motivates social cohesion extrinsically (from a source outside of the individual).

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So, it has a valid function in this way. However, what happens when shame is left to sit with the individual for extended periods? If we’re repeatedly shamed without any assistance being provided to help reduce the intensity of the shame (to co-regulate it)? What happens when for various reasons, such as transmission of trauma intergenerationally (from parent to child and on), shame becomes habitually used as a motivator of compliance? Then, shame becomes internalised as a stable and predictable (though unconscious) part of the self. Rather than believing;

• What I did was bad,

we learn to believe;

• I am bad

Shame becomes ‘stuck on’. Indistinguishable from the core self. Toxic. It blocks other potential motivating emotions for action, such as joy, contentment, gratitude, sadness, or pride from motivating action. And because it partners so well with fear. Fear of further shaming, fear of judgment, fear of exclusion, etc. They tend to form a system of ‘negative’ motivation. If this becomes embedded, then it can result in us habitually using survival responses in social situations to avoid feeling shame, such as aggression (fight), avoidance (flight), numbing (freeze), loss of consciousness/fainting/dissociation (flop), and people pleasing/over accomodating (fawn).

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When we’re helped with our shame, something different happens. When we’re not left alone in it. It can start to transform and feel less painful. We learn, that shame was part of our initial reaction at having done something that hurt another person through commission or omission, and that once we realise we will not be rejected or excluded for the act we committed, we can start to reflect on our actions. Our brains can recover the capacity to think and reason that went offline because of the intensity of our shame reaction.

And when it transforms by being held and supported, guess what? It may well become guilt (provided we did something that warrants it). If there is something we did that we need to reflect on, then we can feel guilty about it.

This is why guilt gets a bad rap.

Because shame hides away from view. We develop shields to protect us from it that are forms of dissociation (automatic disconnection to create safety). It’s only when we’re helped with it, can it transform into something more tolerable. And then acceptable, like guilt. Guilt is actually desirable because it’s a sustainable pro social emotion that helps us to appraise our actions, and learn new things; preventing us from repeating the same mistakes.

I bet you never though you might start to feel like……

guilt is good!

Sources

Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham Books. [1, 2]

Golding K, Hughes D (2012) Creating Loving Attachments: Parenting with PACE to nurture confidence and security in the troubled child, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child's developing mind. Bantam Books

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and Guilt. Guilford Press. [1, 2, 3, 4]

https://apn.com/resources/fight-flight-freeze-fawn-and-flop-responses-to-trauma/ Accessed 2nd of June 2026.

https://www.futurity.org/shame-evolution-survival-1866792/ Accessed 2nd of June 2026.

https://www.ptsduk.org/its-so-much-more-than-just-fight-or-flight/ Accessed 2nd of June 2026.