Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Shame
Change the sentence from 'I am bad' to 'I am feeling bad right now'. It is a small grammatical move and it changes what you are actually dealing with.
One is a permanent description of you, the other is weather. Weather you can wait out, describe, get curious about, tell someone about. Try saying the second version aloud even if you do not believe it yet, and add when it started. Since the phone call. Since I read that message. Putting a beginning on it quietly implies an end.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The wording used is that someone 'has foolishly done a bad deed, and afterwards repented and mended his ways' (Quran 6:54). The deed is called bad without the person being renamed.
وَإِذَا جَآءَكَ ٱلَّذِينَ يُؤۡمِنُونَ بِـَٔايَٰتِنَا فَقُلۡ سَلَٰمٌ عَلَيۡكُمۡۖ كَتَبَ رَبُّكُمۡ عَلَىٰ نَفۡسِهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَةَ أَنَّهُۥ مَنۡ عَمِلَ مِنكُمۡ سُوٓءَۢا بِجَهَٰلَةࣲ ثُمَّ تَابَ مِنۢ بَعۡدِهِۦ وَأَصۡلَحَ فَأَنَّهُۥ غَفُورࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
When those who believe in Our revelations come to you [Prophet], say, ‘Peace be upon you. Your Lord has taken it on Himself to be merciful: if any of you has foolishly done a bad deed, and afterwards repented and mended his ways, God is most forgiving and most merciful.’
Qur’an 6:54read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A validation study comparing shame and guilt questionnaires in a shame prone clinical sample showed the two emotions can be told apart empirically and are not interchangeable. In a separate clinical sample, proneness to shame was linked with anxiety symptoms while proneness to guilt was not once shame was accounted for. Both were cross sectional, so they establish that the distinction is real and worth making, not that changing your wording changes symptoms.
Rüsch N, Corrigan PW, Bohus M, Jacob GA, Brueck R, Lieb K. (2007). Measuring shame and guilt by self-report questionnaires: a validation study.. Psychiatry research doi
Fergus TA, Valentiner DP, McGrath PB, Jencius S. (2010). Shame- and guilt-proneness: relationships with anxiety disorder symptoms in a clinical sample.. Journal of anxiety disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A feeling with a start time is something passing through you rather than something you are.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When someone tells you they have failed, the most useful thing you can do is nothing clever. Let your face stay soft and keep looking at them.
Telling someone it was not their fault often bounces straight off, and there is a reason for that. Self blame can be the safer of the two stories, and you are asking them to give up shelter.
A friend or a counsellor telling you that you are not a monster helps, and it only takes you so far. The shame usually sits with one particular person, and it eases most when that person hears the thing and stays.