Mistakes, Shame, and Guilt: Friends or Foes?
Imagine you are driving home from work at 9:00 p.m. You are tired, hungry, and operating on autopilot when you suddenly miss a turn. Your immediate internal reaction is, “Stupid!” Within seconds, you turn around, return to the correct path, and the situation is resolved.
This is a common example of an everyday error. However, it raises a significant question: why must a missed turn imply a lack of intelligence? In reality, the mistake wasn’t caused by low intelligence, or being “stupid”; it resulted from fatigue and distraction. Yet, instead of accurately evaluating the situation, we often jump straight to judgement and self-shame. Ask yourselves: does this approach to self-correction really work, or is there a better way to learn from mistakes?
The aphorism “everyone makes mistakes” doesn’t mean that you are a bad person because you were wrong about something; having made a mistake On the contrary, it is intended to offer us the grace to learn and grow. Unfortunately, in our current culture, errors are often met with a “buffet of gloominess”—a collection of negative meanings and punishments: shame, guilt, judgements, insinuations, and personal indictments. We live in a world governed by a “crime and punishment” mentality, where successes are met with indifference and presumption while mistakes are used as evidence of personal inadequacy. This is wrong, wrong, wrong, not to mention hurtful, unhealthy, and destructive. Shame, guilt, and judgement are not your friends, they are your foes.
This article won’t argue for no punishment. But it will argue against the misuse of punishment. Research is, and has been clear: punishment is not a productive means of learning, or at least it isn’t the most productive means of learning. Punishment may establish behavioral compliance, “or do as you’re told,” but it won’t offer lasting learning based on insight. You can punish yourself through shame, guilt, and self-disparagement. But that sort of punishment does not encourage long-lasting learning. We at SkyLark Behavioral Health have a learning strategy that aids to eliminate shame, guilt, awfulization, and catastrophization which will discuss in a later article. But, for the purposes of this article, we can agree that learning based on insight is significantly stronger than the mere association between action and consequence, or the short-lived consequence of negative emotions, such as shame and guilt. Again, these negative emotions are not friends.
What about the power of shame and guilt? For sure, they have the power to motivate in the present moment. However, the problem with shame, guilt, or any negative emotion lies in the disappearing nature of emotion over time. As time goes on, they just get weaker and provide less motivation. Initially, negative emotions have the power to motivate. Over time, however, the power and efficacy of negative emotions weaken, likely resulting in making the same mistake repeatedly. Think about a decision you made that had unintended consequences and about which you feel shame or guilt. But only later, forgetting that shame and guilt, you make the same decision resulting in the same unpleasant outcome along with shame, guilt, self-recriminations, and the buffet of gloominess. Perhaps, after several instances of making the same mistake, you’re going to change your behavior. Behaviorally, simple association generally requires several occasions to reach long-term memory. We call that the learning curve. Imagine something new you are learning, it generally takes a few to several mistakes to reach mastery. We don’t often criticize ourselves when we are learning, do we? Why is that? That is because we give ourselves permission to make mistakes during the learning process. Grace and permission to learn are your friends.
When we label ourselves as “stupid” for a mistake, it isn’t only shame-based punishment, it quietly shifts life-goals from seeking fulfillment to simply trying to be “less stupid.” This belief—that everything is terrible until it isn’t—is a form of negative reinforcement. It forces us to live life through the lens of crisis avoidance, where every error serves as proof that we are flawed. Moreover, this belief system has unintended consequences. As we look for “the other shoe to drop,” or anticipate bad things happening, we actually train our brain to become hypervigilant to anything negative. And the result of this habit? We will find crises where there are none; and we will miss opportunities to take advantage of positive opportunities, or opportunities to create positive things in our lives. When we look for trouble, we find it. Thus blinding us to positive prospects in the future. Furthermore, living this way limits and handicaps our range of feeling. The best we can hope for is the feeling of relief that the bad thing didn’t happen. This philosophy prevents our ability to feel content, joy, bliss, or happiness because we are so narrowly focused upon what might happen that we lose focus on positive prospects. This article argues to the contrary if for no other reason than that is a really hard way to live. Life will always be harder when we are surrounded by the foes of shame, guilt, and judgement. Life doesn’t have to be that hard. Make it easier by embracing the friendliness of possibility and growth.
We don’t have to feel great, or even good about our mistakes, although we can feel hope for the future through our mistakes and wrongs. Mistakes, indeed offer chances for self-betterment. In other words, we don’t have to like all of our choices. But we can learn from our own experiences, thus enjoying hope that tomorrow can be better. First let’s address the elephants in the room that we aren’t addressing. The first of which is the spectre of perfectionism. How many of us expect ourselves to be perfect? It isn’t just about getting it right; it’s the asinine and unreasonable expectation that we be perfect. And what happens when we expect to be right or perfect and find that we are, indeed not? Here comes the buffet of gloominess. We punish and condemn ourselves rather than coldly examining what happened. The second elephant in the room is the assumption that we should have learned everything about life by a certain age. Where does it say that there is a certain date or age whereby all about life must be learned? Let’s dispel this silliness and disabuse ourselves of such nonsense. Life is learning. While some may disagree, in this writer’s view, the purpose of life is to learn and grow, a process shared by all living things. We all have the capacity, abilty to learn and grow, from our first breath to our last. Think of it, this isn’t uncommon. Alarmingly, this is all too common. Just imagine, life is so much harder when we expect perfection from ourselves, and assume we should have learned everything by now. In future articles, we will explore alternatives to this mindset and examine the true nature of perfectionism and the reasons behind our errors.
In the game of life, we are either in the game of becoming, or we are riding the pine on the sidelines. We are either making life happen by learning and growing, or letting life happen and learning nothing. “Life is a lesson, boy. One long lesson. But you gotta look to learn them, and you ain’t […….] looking. There’s two roads in life. One is you’re winning [and] learning, and the other is that you’re losing all the way to the […….] grave. Boy, you better choose quickly, or life’s going to choose it for you.” -Rip Wheeler, Yellowstone, Season 4, Episode 8.
While this article profiles current common assumptions and premises many people work under, it also suggests affirmatively productive bases for how we want to think about mistakes. Let’s think about mistakes as opportunities to make life easier and better, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In other words, think of mistakes as beautiful.
Joel T. Meyer, MA, LCPC