**Attachment Vocabulary: Guilt Vs Shame โ€” Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/attachment-vocabulary-guilt-vs-shame/ Heidi Priebe explains the distinction between shame (identity-level: 'I am flawed') and guilt (behavior-level: 'I did something wrong'), tracing their developmental origins and implications for attach ## Key Takeaways - Guilt is about behavior and can motivate repair; shame is about identity and tends to be paralyzing. - Correctly identifying whether you feel guilt or shame is essential for effective emotional processing. - Shame develops earlier and is more instinctual, so it often feels more overwhelming. - Attachment wounds often fuse shame with self-concept, making healing require identifying and addressing shame directly. ## What the video covers - Shame and guilt are commonly conflated, though they are distinct emotions with different implications, especially for attachment healing work. - Guilt concerns behavior ('I did something wrong'), while shame concerns identity or sense of self ('I am a mistake'). - Shame is developmentally earlier, emerging around 15 months, often linked to disconnection from an unresponsive caregiver. - Guilt requires mentalizing, which develops around age four, and emerges roughly between ages two and six. - Shame is often experienced as overwhelming, body-based, and disintegrating, while guilt is more cognitive and mentally processed. - Shame can lead to self-berating that paradoxically absolves people from making amends, whereas guilt tends to motivate repair. - Drawing on Patricia DeYoung's work, shame is described as the sense of self disintegrating in the presence of a dysregulating other. - Shame can be felt about the feeling of shame itself, which complicates processing. - Mindful recognition of which emotion is present allows people to use guilt constructively to set internal boundaries and change behavior. - Understanding these emotions in the body helps people respond to them intentionally rather than unconsciously. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Channel introduction and video overview 2. 00:59 Why shame and guilt are commonly confused 3. 02:00 Core definitions: behavior vs. identity 4. 03:09 Developmental origins of guilt 5. 04:12 Early shame and infant disconnection 6. 05:31 Mentalizing and the emergence of guilt 7. 07:23 How shame and guilt feel in the body and psyche 8. 09:08 Practical implications for healing and self-awareness Answers ## Questions about this video What is the core difference between shame and guilt according to the video? Guilt is the feeling that you did something wrong, relating to behavior, while shame is the feeling that you yourself are fundamentally flawed, relating to identity. Heidi Priebe emphasizes that shame reaches into one's sense of self, whereas guilt can be resolved through understanding and repair. When do shame and guilt typically develop in childhood? The video suggests shame emerges around 15 months, often from experiences of disconnection with caregivers. Guilt requires mentalizing abilities, typically emerging between ages two and six, with mentalizing coming online around age four. Why does the video argue that understanding this distinction matters for attachment healing? Heidi Priebe argues that shame and guilt show up differently in the body and psyche and lead to different outcomes when handled unconsciously. Recognizing which emotion is present helps people process it mindfully, using guilt to set boundaries and change behavior rather than being overwhelmed by shame. ## Full Transcript โ€” Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A hey guys heidi preeb here welcome back to my channel if you are new here we use this channel to talk about myers-briggs personality types attachment styles and any other systems that can help us understand ourselves and other people 00:12 Speaker A better as well as how we can bridge the gap between ourselves and other people using these systems and how we can use different tools and different vocabularies to make changes in the way that we operate and show up in the world 00:24 Speaker A so today i wanted to talk about a specific vocabulary distinction that has actually gotten a lot of attention in recent years so shane kind of comes in and out of public awareness as a topic brene brown recently had a whole bunch 00:37 Speaker A of research on it that became super popular in the last like 10 years or so i think but she is very far from the first shame researcher john bradshaw did a ton of incredible work in the field of 00:48 Speaker A shame as did a plethora of psychologists before him so this is not a new topic but it is one that comes up over and over again because shame and guilt are two terms that are very commonly kind of 00:59 Speaker A mixed up psychologically when we talk about the negative emotion of having done something wrong but they're actually two pretty different feelings and i think it's really important to identify properly which one you're dealing with because i think a lot of 01:12 Speaker A the time we use those terms interchangeably in situations where they actually shouldn't be used interchangeably so here are some of the distinctions between those two terms and i should note that these distinctions are not commonly agreed upon like 01:28 Speaker A different theorists will talk about them in different ways some people say that you kind of can use these terms interchangeably other people will say not at all you should look at them differently i air a little bit more in 01:38 Speaker A that camp and i'm going to explain why as we go through this video because i think that specifically if you're doing attachment healing work those two terms are going to come up a lot and the way that you deal with them and the way that 01:49 Speaker A you process and react to them is going to have to be a little bit different because the way that they show up in the body and in the psyche are different and lead to different outcomes if they're dealt with unconsciously rather than 02:00 Speaker A mindfully and intentionally so the kind of core easy definition that i like to use when i think about the difference between shame and guilt is that guilt is the feeling of i made a mistake i did something wrong my behavior was wrong 02:13 Speaker A shame is the feeling of i am a mistake who i am as a human being my very essence is flawed there's something wrong with me i shouldn't exist that's kind of what's at the core of the feeling of shame versus guilt could at 02:28 Speaker A the core of it have the feeling i'm an okay person i'm a good person but i did something wrong right so it's not as extreme because it's not tied to your identity now you can have a shame-based identity so you can be a person who 02:42 Speaker A really does believe at their core that they're fundamentally flawed and there's something wrong with them every insecure attachment style to a degree has that belief about themselves and you can also feel guilt right so those things can co-exist but guilt is more about your 02:57 Speaker A behavior shame is more about your identity or sense of self and the reason this is the case is because guilt is actually a slightly more complex feeling than shame so to have guilt you have to have an inherent understanding of the 03:09 Speaker A fact that other people are processing and believing and thinking things that are different from the way that you process and think about and believe things and you have to notice the juxtaposition between what you did and the impact that it had on someone else 03:23 Speaker A so you can do something perfectly well meaning it can have a negative impact on someone else and you can feel guilt about that once you understand that person's perspective right versus with shame it's actually an emotion that we 03:35 Speaker A experience a lot sooner in life so shame most psychologists believe we start feeling somewhere around 15 months and our earliest experiences with shame is often a sense of disconnection so a baby goes to its parent and tries to engage 03:48 Speaker A it in some way and if the parent isn't available or isn't responsive or doesn't give the baby the warm response that the baby's looking for the baby feels a sense of disconnection of shame and of feeling almost like their sense of self 04:01 Speaker A is disintegrating and the reason it feels that way as a baby is because when you are that young you don't actually have a very clear idea yet of the fact that you and your caregiver are separate people babies look at their caregivers 04:13 Speaker A as kind of an extension of themselves for a very long period of time and during that period of time if they are not mirrored by their caregiver they experience that profound sense of shame is almost a part of their selfhood 04:24 Speaker A crumbling and that's often why when we experience shame as adults it truly feels like the words that people use very often are like a disintegrating feeling like oh i want to like sink into the ground and kind of let this terrible 04:37 Speaker A feeling just decompose me it's actually very interesting how similar so many different people's account of the word shame is and how many of them experience that same kind of somatic feeling of disintegration so there's a book that i'm currently reading called 04:49 Speaker A understanding and treating chronic shame by patricia deyoung and i'm probably gonna make a whole video on it once i'm done it because it's a really good look into how attachment and shame end up fusing together but basically what the 05:00 Speaker A author argues is that shame is the feeling of your sense of self disintegrating in the presence of a dysregulating other and that starts to happen very young and that's why from a very young age babies can feel and 05:11 Speaker A experience shame guilt cannot be experienced until there's argument over it but at least the age of three somewhere between two and six we start experiencing guilt and i think that that kind of grows and grows because before the age of six you don't have much of a 05:26 Speaker A moral conscience like children below that age aren't really able yet just developmentally to think in terms of right and wrong and to feel guilty you have to be able to have some awareness of moral consciousness right or at the 05:39 Speaker A least and this is the argument for children being able to feel guilt quite a bit younger than six years you have to have an idea that you are separate from other people and that you can do something that feels good to you but 05:50 Speaker A feels bad to someone else it's a process called mentalizing that we develop continuously over the course of our lifetime but that really starts coming online around the age of four and once you're able to mentalize you're able to 06:02 Speaker A understand i have a different mind than someone else so what's acceptable to me is not necessarily acceptable to someone else and it's not going to be a very sophisticated process at age 4 but it's going to be present enough that it's 06:14 Speaker A something the child can conceptualize of so once we're able to do that we're able to experience guilt because we're able to understand my actions that feel good for me didn't necessarily have a positive impact on someone else so guilt 06:27 Speaker A is a more sophisticated emotion solely because it requires higher level thinking to access whereas shame is an earlier emotion which means that our brain has been wiring itself around shame for a longer time than it's been wiring itself around guilt so shame 06:41 Speaker A often feels kind of overwhelming and all-consuming in a way that guilt doesn't necessarily always feel and the reason for that is because guilt is a little bit more complex so there's a much more mental component active to feeling guilty as opposed to shame which 06:55 Speaker A can be purely instinctually emotionally based when it comes up so i've kind of already talked about it but the second differentiation point between guilt and shame is that when you are feeling guilty you are by definition considering someone else's perspective versus when 07:10 Speaker A you feel shame you're actually very preoccupied with your own perspective even if it doesn't feel that way so you might feel like you're thinking about what everyone else thinks of you and you're thinking about judgments people might be making of you but shame is 07:23 Speaker A actually a very kind of all-consuming very internal experience where we often get kind of hijacked by the feeling of i am a mistake everything i've ever done is wrong i shouldn't exist and those thoughts are so huge and so overwhelming 07:36 Speaker A that it's actually very difficult to keep someone else's perspective in mind in a clean and true way when we're experiencing shame we are very likely when we're experiencing shame to assume that everyone is looking at us with all 07:50 Speaker A of the judgment and all of the maliciousness with which we are looking at ourselves and that's often not at all the case but it gets us into a little bit of trouble when we think that we're feeling guilt but actually what we're 08:01 Speaker A feeling is shame because and this leads me to the third and last distinction that i'm going to draw on today when we are experiencing shame we feel the drive to disconnect and to isolate versus when we are feeling guilt we tend to feel the 08:14 Speaker A desire to reach out and make amends and i think that many people particularly those of us who are insecurely attached in some way think that they are feeling guilty when actually they're feeling shame and it can feel like when we are 08:27 Speaker A in shame we are berating ourselves so heavily we are so focused on the terrible things that we think about ourselves that it might actually feel like we are absolving ourselves from the need to act and make amends because 08:40 Speaker A it can feel like okay well i've beat myself up so much i've judged myself so much for this that now i must kind of naturally be forgiven for the bad actions that i've taken because i've put myself through psychological hell over 08:53 Speaker A it but because shame is such an all-consuming emotion that is focused intensely on the self it's actually very easy to forget when we're feeling shame that the pain we have caused other people does not go away by us hating ourselves it only goes 09:07 Speaker A away by us showing up acknowledging which actions we've taken and making amends with that person so i had an experience recently where i was discussing something with a friend that had happened a very long time ago that i 09:19 Speaker A had felt so much shame over for so long that i just never brought this thing up i just kind of buried it in one of the drawers in my psyche and was like i'm never gonna revisit that and then it 09:29 Speaker A came up in conversation and i felt this like avalanche of shame like i was frozen i could barely speak my friend had to be like ooh breathe i left the conversation and was like oh my god i did not know i had so much shame about 09:41 Speaker A that thing and it occurred to me like three hours later after like meditating on it journaling a little bit about it oh i've been feeling shame over this thing for so many years because there's something i feel guilty about that i 09:53 Speaker A actually never acknowledged and that feeling of my own hatred towards myself and how i handled the situation and my embarrassment over how i handled the situation actually was shrouding me from the very simple solution to reaching out to the person that i may have hurt all 10:10 Speaker A of those years ago and just apologizing so that was what i ended up doing that night and it was totally chill they were like it's water under the bridge whatever forget about it but because i had buried the guilt of the experience 10:22 Speaker A under like layers and layers of shame it became this much bigger thing in my head right and that's very often what happens when an emotion is shame-bound so john bradshaw talks about shame-bound emotions as feelings that we have that 10:35 Speaker A we have shame around the very fact that we feel them so depending on what your attachment style might be or depending on myriad other factors related to how you were raised and what you came to view as acceptable versus non-acceptable 10:47 Speaker A emotionally you might feel shame around a variety of seemingly nonsensical emotions to feel shame around so anytime you feel weak and vulnerable you might automatically feel shame on top of that or maybe it's the opposite maybe anytime you feel proud and independent 11:01 Speaker A automatically that feeling gets obscured by shame depending on what it was that we were encouraged to feel or not feel very early on in our lives we can have patterns of certain emotions always being obscured by shame as soon as we 11:13 Speaker A feel them and it's incredibly important to figure out which emotions those are for us because those are the emotions where we're actually going to be blocked the most from feeling guilt around because remember as soon as an emotion 11:25 Speaker A comes up and shame comes up to cover it our instinctual response is to disappear get out of there and not feel that feeling at any cost but in order to feel guilt about things that we've done or said in relation to other people we have 11:38 Speaker A to be able to sit with those feelings for a while right so if this particular emotion that i had been feeling had not been a shame-bound one for me i could have just sat down looked at that situation all of those years ago and 11:50 Speaker A gone oh i think i hurt this person or i think i wasn't fair to this person let me go apologize and move on with my life but because i had an emotion around that situation that was shame-bound every 12:00 Speaker A time i thought of that situation i just wanted to disappear get out of that place in my head go do something that was distracting and so i was never able to actually sit down and look clearly at my own behavior and the impact that it 12:12 Speaker A had on other people and this is something that almost everyone in some large or small form struggles with but that we very rarely talk about the fact that shame-bound emotions are actually the things that keep us from doing the 12:25 Speaker A right thing much of the time because we believe that that form of self-punishment because it's so overwhelming is kind of a psychic means of making amends when in reality we might be completely and totally neglecting to look at the impact that a 12:38 Speaker A certain situation had on someone else because we're so overwhelmed by the shame that comes up for us when we process it and that's why understanding the difference between these two emotions as well as understanding what they feel like in our body so we know 12:51 Speaker A which one it is that we're experiencing is so important because guilt can actually be a very helpful self-monitoring process that helps us to understand where our behavior is and is not impacting others in a negative way whereas shame is actually going to 13:06 Speaker A obscure our judgment a lot of the time and keep us from seeing that and in any attachment healing journey which is going to involve frequent obstacles both personally and interpersonally figuring out which one you're dealing with and what the appropriate response is and or 13:22 Speaker A where you might have blind spots around a situation because it's being shrouded by shame is incredibly important because it helps you understand which actions need to be taken to repair relationships with other people when that's something you need to do and sometimes guilt isn't 13:36 Speaker A even about repairing relationships with other people you could have guilt over a situation where you think that you should not go and apologize to that other person because maybe that would be opening up an old wound that would not 13:46 Speaker A be helpful but you can use that self-awareness to understand why your actions were wrong and set some kind of internal boundary that can make you feel certain that in similar situations in the future you're not going to behave in 13:58 Speaker A the same self or other destructive way right okay that is all that i have to say for today on the difference between guilt and shame i probably will make a follow-up video on this because shame in particular is such an all-consuming 14:11 Speaker A emotion that comes up so frequently in the attachment healing process and it can be really difficult to manage our emotions around it when it does show up so we need tools for that and i'm going to work over the next little while to 14:24 Speaker A start developing my own tools for it and i will let you guys know of anything i find along the way or anything i already have found in follow-up videos so of course if you guys have tools for dealing with and managing shame 14:37 Speaker A internally let us know in the comments i love when you guys share what's working for you with each other because that is how we all collectively get better and until next time i love you i hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other 14:48 Speaker A and i will see you back here again really soon [Music] you Topics: shame guilt attachment styles attachment healing mentalizing emotional regulation Brene Brown self-concept developmental psychology Heidi Priebe Study this video - [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/flashcard-maker/?from=transcript&id=90032) - [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=90032) - [Crossword from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/crossword-maker/?from=transcript&id=90032) - [Word search from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/word-search-maker/?from=transcript&id=90032) - [Study guide from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/study-guide-maker/?from=transcript&id=90032) Free, made by AI from this transcript. 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