GUILT AND SHAME

by Rebecca Walters

Art by Susan Aaron

The difference between guilt and shame, to put it simply: Guilt is about what you did, shame is about who you are. Guilt is how we judge ourselves, shame is often about how we imagine others will judge us.

In her TED talk, Brené Brown said:

“Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is, “I am bad.” Guilt is, “I did something bad.” How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake?” How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.

Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders.

Here’s what you even need to know more: Guilt is inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we’ve done, or failed to do, up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s adaptive.”

When one feels guilty one can apologize, change behavior, find a way to make up for the error, insult, violation, start new, etc. However, guilt over choices one made long ago often does not have an easy resolution, possibility for apology, forgiveness, or for redoing in real life. Psychodrama is uniquely situated to address this sort of old guilt in three scenes.

Scene one: done Playback Style, with the protagonist off the stage, telling the story of what happened, with auxiliaries taking all the roles.

Scene two: a conversation between the protagonist of today and the auxiliary from scene one, playing the protagonist at the time of the guilt producing behavior. The protagonist reverses into the role of themselves at the time of the incident(s) and spends most of the scene in that role.

Much time needs to be taken in this scene so the protagonist can get in touch with the situation at the time; what was going on for her/him, the stressors, the lack of options, whatever went into the decisions made or the impulses followed at the time. The goal is to help the protagonist gain some understanding of why they did what they did and hopefully develop some compassion for the self they were at that time. The group can be of much help here if the protagonist is struggling with this, through doubling and identification.

Scene three, the protagonist moves into the original scene, takings his/her own role and redoes the story with the resources, knowledge, skills, etc. they have now. This enables them to see how differently they would handle things today.

Here are two examples: The first is from an ongoing, multi month, personal growth psychodrama group and the other is from a psychodrama group on an inpatient adolescent unit.

Denise was a 35 year old mother of two daughters, ages 14 and 15 and a half. She is divorced from their father and remarried. The presenting problem is her difficulty in setting limits with her 14 year old daughter which was negatively impacting the teenager and the family. She knew the connection between her current difficulty and what happened 14 years earlier. It was a story she had never told anyone until she felt safe enough in her ongoing psychodrama group.

Denise was at home with her then three month old and toddler. The infant kept crying and crying. Denise shook her. The child lost hearing in one ear. We began with the two of us sitting on the edge of the stage. I was very clear we were not going to make what she did out to be OK but would look at what was happening in her life that led to it. She agreed and was quite relieved I wasn’t going to try to sugarcoat what happened. She was very clear she didn’t want to absolve herself from her sense that shaking her baby was wrong. She just didn’t want it to get in the way of her being spontaneous in the role of mother, today.

The story she told was of an overwhelmed and isolated mother, with what today would be diagnosed as postpartum depression, being totally unable to handle a colicky infant and an active toddler. Babies are up at night, she is sleep deprived. Her husband refused to help. He would come home from work, disappear into his den with a beer and the TV and tell her “You wanted these kids, you deal with them.” Her mother in law and mother would come over, not to help out but simply watch her because they “think she can’t handle things”. One day, unable to console the crying infant, she snapped, and shook the baby, damaging the baby’s hearing in one ear. Move forward 14 years and her guilt is so enormous it prevents her from setting limits with her now teenager.

Scene two: I asked Denise, from off the stage, what she saw when she looked at herself on the stage, age 21. I asked her to reverse roles with her younger self and interviewed her. She began to weep “No one, I have no one, no one to help me. I am scared, I don’t know what to do, who to talk to. Other women can handle their children, can soothe their infants. I am a failure as a mother. I don’t have any way out. I want to die.”

Back in her own 35 year old role she begins to speak to her 21 year old self.  “I feel so badly for you. You are so young, so overwhelmed. How could you know what to do or to whom to turn? They left you to handle things on your own. You didn’t know, it wasn’t your fault, no one helped you. No one could handle this on their own. ” She spontaneously moved onto the stage and held her young self close, weeping together.

Scene three: I invited her to redo scene one but this time with her current husband and current mother-in-law. Denise reversed roles with both current husband and mother-in-law in turn and demonstrated how these two kind and loving people would behave in this situation. Husband stays close, lets her know he loves her, suggests they speak to the doctor about her depression, find a therapist, decides he will take a few days off from work to help out. Mother-in-law comes in during the afternoon and takes the children to the park so Denise can sleep. Mother-in-Law reminds her that this, too, will pass.

Denise experiences, from inside the scene, that when she gets overwhelmed. She is able to hand the baby over to the other supportive adults on the stage and that she no longer shakes the baby.

The sharing, as you can imagine, was deep and meaningful, especially from other parents in the group. Denise finds out she is hardly the only person who felt an impulse to hurt their child but that other group members had the support they needed to avoid harming their babies. This helped alleviate the deep shame she was carrying with her.

As the group continued for several more weeks, Denise reported that she was setting appropriate limits with her teenager and that family life was improving.

Jennifer was fifteen. She was hospitalized for serious suicidality. She was experiencing profound shame created by unresolved guilt. Her story was that when she was seven years old she was watching TV in the living room with her three year old cousin. Her mother an aunt were in the adjacent room, the kitchen. A fire broke out in the kitchen, blocking the door to the living room. Her mother and aunt managed to get out the back door. Jennifer ran out the front door taking her cousin with her. Her cousin pulled on her hand, pulling it out of Jennifer’s hand. Jennifer got out the front door. The three year old perished.

Scene one was a painful one to reenact. We did it in very slow motion with Jennifer deciding how fast and slow the action should go, how close or far to the action she wanted to stand, giving her the option to stop at any time.

When we began scene two, Jennifer was quite angry at her seven year old self. Giving her the opportunity to express some of this allowed her vent what she had been holding onto in private. Her peers doubled her and were able to help her move from anger to sadness to recognition she had been a very little girl at the time of the incident.  In role reversal with her seven year old self she got in touch with how totally terrified and truly helpless she had been, how she couldn’t make her three year old cousin hold on, and, with doubling from her peers, she was able to find compassion for her scared seven year old self.  Back in her 15 year old role she told her seven year old self “ You are only seven , how could you possible know what to do.”

In scene three we invited her to replay the original scene with herself as a 15 year old. As the teenager she is today she simply picked up the three year old in her arms, crouched low to avoid the smoke and got them both out. She screamed to her mother and aunt she would meet them on the front porch. She accessed her competency and found it gratifying to note that as a 15 year old she knows what to do and has the physical strength to pick up a three year old and run.

Jennifer had begun the session pale and quiet, shrunk down in her chair. She ended the session with color in her cheeks, a clear and louder voice and an empowered stance.

Jennifer left the session immediately upon its conclusion for a family session with her mother. Her therapist  later told me that Jennifer had entered the therapy room and told her mother about her psychodrama. Her mother had begun to weep, told Jennifer that she, too, had felt enormously guilty that her child had survived while her sister’s had not and that it made her pull back from Jennifer. Jennifer was able to tell her mother than she had always thought that Mom’s pulling back was a result of Jennifer’s failure to save her cousin. They ended up crying in each other’s arms after for the first time in eight years telling one another their truths.

Copywrited 2018 Rebecca Walters Hudson Valley Psychodrama Institute Highland, NY  hvpi@hvpi.net