How Guilt Is Usually Beneficial. And Why Shame Is Not.
Shame is often confused with guilt.
However, they are different emotions.
Guilt is a feeling you get when you did something wrong, or perceived you did something wrong.
Guilt is often a positive/productive emotion.
It can move people to take personal accountability for their attitudes and actions.
Through these experiences, a person can become more pro-social, as they gain:
greater awareness of,
appreciation for,
and connection to:
self and others.
However, carrying too much guilt
over a prolonged period of time
can be detrimental.
In some cases, guilt can become so psychologically heavy that it can hurt a person's health, productivity, and relationships.
What, then, is the general remedy for too little or too much guilt?
1.
Simply recognizing that either extreme can happen.
2.
Offer to pay on those debts.
If the wronged-person agrees, then follow through.
If the wronged-person refuses, then your debt is nullified.
It's exactly like how a company is no longer owed payment on a debt once they refuse to accept that payment.
3.
BECOME someone who would never again do those things.
4.
Recognize when you've made good on that debt.
5.
Forgive yourself; even to the point of rightly praising yourself for the person you have become.
Old debts die
as the person who was dies.
That happens as the new incarnation of you comes into being.
Love is patient.
Love is kind.
~Seek balance, in all things~
--
However, ...
Some people are incapable of feeling guilt or the related sense of personal accountability.
This can make a person dangerous to others and (ultimately) to themselves via social and legal consequence.
Conscience-Disabled persons
can adjust to becoming socially-safe people with healthy and durable human relationships.
But first they must recognize their disability.
And then they must recognize the need to adopt a strong, unwavering set of self-imposed ethics.
--
Guilt, personal accountability, and other related mental states (such as compassion)
are generated via entirely physical processes in the brain.
Much of that physical process happens in the right side of a very specific part of the brain called the supramarginal gyrus.
The supramarginal gyrus (SMG) is a part of the parietal lobe of the brain.
The supramarginal gyrus can be either underdeveloped or dormant in people with certain Major Personality Disorders;
such as Sociopathy,
Psychopathy,
and clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
--
"Shame" is different than "guilt".
Shame is a feeling that your whole self is wrong.
Shame is not beneficial.
In fact, it's generally a profound form of vulnerability.
It can put a person at-risk of having their troubled, stained, or empty 'sense of self' exploited by predators; such as domestic and religious predators posing as rescuers.
It can also cause a child to develop into a dangerous clinical Narcissist;
with an unhealable sense of empty, ugly, or deficient self.
This is how unhealed shame
can result in the two sides of the coin we call authoritarianism.
Various authoritarian religions have evolved over thousands of years to lure, trap, and exploit people who have (or are susceptible to) intense personal shame.
They also lure and cultivate the types of people who think it's "good" to exploit that vulnerability.
Such religions may offer to "wash" and "redeem" (or otherwise lift up, validate, and vindicate) souls.
Such religions rely upon narratives that insist upon an "external locus of identity".
When a person's seat of identity is mentally displaced to being outside of themselves,
the person will feel a sense of need to be GIVEN purpose, value, and identity by someone external to themselves.
This is where we get predatory marketing slogans like "I am nothing without God".
In those God-themed groups,
"God" is a packaged set of mentally enslaving ideas they are trying to sell.
They market it as both "free" and "necessary".
But it's neither.
If you buy "God" from them, it will be the most expensive mistake you'll ever make.
The identity-displaced and "emptied" person will be susceptible and malleable to the idea of a larger-than-life Father who TELLS you who you are.
Though the idea of "Him",
predators can hold-hostage your sense of personal value and purpose;
along with your worthiness to EVEN EXIST.
Humans are psychology predisposed to child-state dependency.
That's because of leftover neurological wiring that developed between infancy and later childhood.
This vulnerability is the most intense for people who (as a child) had a growth-stunting relationship with a parent.
This is what makes the idea of a larger-than-life, hovering parental figure feel so familiar and safe.
It's also what makes the idea of a Super-Father seem so real.
Such religions graft their Father-concept onto existing neurological wiring.
But this only works on people who are still feeling a sense of need to be validated and supervised by a parent.
John C. Wathey has two great books on this topic.
As William Lane Craig has admitted,
he adopted Christianity on the BASIS of wanting to feel loved by a father.
That was missing from his life.
He has never healed from that.
He had never grown past a need for that.
He was even pretty sure he couldn't ever heal and grow past a need for that.
So when he found out there is a religion which CATERS to that vulnerability, he reasoned "even if there is only one in a million chance" that it's real, it makes sense to believe (or, at least, try to believe).
#LoveMeDaddy
#LoveMeHarderDaddy
Such religions have spent thousands of years developing and marketing such a "Father"; so that they can rule over others "in his name".
They posture as his humble puppets.
Granted, that might actually be how ONE PART of their hijacked (Link) and partitioned-brain thinks.
But that "God" is ALSO the mentally-constructed puppet king through-whom they speak OVER everyone else.
Some literally-existing, self-aware, Super-Beings might actually exist.
Perhaps some people really are intuiting or connecting with some such Entity(ies).
Either way, I'm not taking a stand on that issue.
I'm not arguing against the existence of any gods.
In fact, I think some gods do exist.
However,
this blog's journey
of discovery and introspection
isn't about whether or not any gods exist.
You can call any concept (or experiential state) a "God" if you want to.
It's a word rooted in certain emotions; such as awe, smallness, and dependency.
If you feel those sorts of ways, then you just do.
I'm not even here to shame you about it.
Instead, we're here to talk about the way certain types of people ARE prowling around
to foster and weaponize shame against you.
The King of sin-shaming, authoritarian ideological camps (or "faiths")
is (in every case) just a human invention.
He is only as "real" as the effect which the idea of Him has.
--
Shame can be related to a specific behavior or event.
But in some cases, someone might feel a persistent sense of shame without being able to explain why.
Significant positive changes in diet, activity, and environment (physical, social, and educational environment) have been known to gradually heal a persistent sense of shame.
In fact, this can change almost everything about a person, over time.
One example of that power is explained here:
--
Chronic shame is a pervasive and persistent shame.
It is frequently associated with political oppression and marginalization.
It is also a feature of certain psychopathologies such as:
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Body dysmorphic disorder
Social anxiety disorder
Pathological narcissism.
This what makes shame-based religions a "cope".
It's basically "making friends with the monsters under your bed".
For many people,
unhealed traumas cause codependency.
These can worsen into a master/slave social and psychological dichotomies.
If someone convinces you that you SHOULD feel shame,
and that the solution (the way you should handle that shame) is to submit to THEM (on behalf of Cosmic Daddy Dom), ...
Surrendering to them
may feel like consent;
but it's actually not.
It may even feel like liberation;
when it's not that either.
Sheep also feel protected.
But it never occurs to them that a "shepherd" doesn't shepherd for the benefit of the sheep.
They control the sheep; directing and limiting the range of roaming experience the sheep are allowed to have.
Worse yet, the real point of being a shepherd is to fleece and consume the sheep.
For them, the cross represents sacrificial slaughter.
And they openly admit trying to lead you to it.
They say "Jesus is the sacrifice".
But they aren't trying to lead Jesus to it.
They're leading you to it.
Your life is the sacrifice.
It's your precious time, energy, emotion, money, freedom, and identity that will spill (drop by drop) onto that alter.
And it's they (those people) who will be padding and easing their own lives (and their own egos) with it. 
Conscripted sheep accept that as a "necessary" reality.
But it's a desperate act of surrender.
For some people, that's just easier than growing up and taking personal ownership of
(and responsibility for) their life.
To justify refusing to grow up,
AND to shame any who "dare" grow up,
as if that's some terrible act of rebellion, ...
many will cite Adam And Eve.
- A story were where growing up
is the first and foremost crime against the Father.
In closing, instead of citing a scientist or some philosophical atheist,
I'll share two great and immediately relevant clips from my favorite Theist;
the late Bishop
John Shelby Spong.
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