Reclaiming Healthy Shame & Guilt So You Can Protect The Boundaries Of Others

How Good Boundaries Helps Us Contain Our Parts That Might Harm Others

In the last installation of The Boundaries Handbook, The Importance Of Boundary-Protecting Anger, we talked about how mission critical it is to be able to feel anger when others cross our boundaries and to be fueled by that anger, in a healthy way, to protect our boundaries from getting smashed. Karla McLaren, the author of The Language of Emotions, says that two emotions are essential for good boundaries- anger and shame. Anger protects us from other people crossing our boundaries, while shame protects other people from us being bulls in china shops that bulldoze through the boundaries of others.

Before we dive into this, let’s talk about semantics. Some people get their panties all in a wad when I suggest that there’s any such thing as healthy shame. But shamelessness is not a virtue, y’all! In Karla’s framework, healthy shame is the bad feeling we get when we break our own integrity, harm other people, or do something wrong, whether that wrongdoing is intentional or unintentional. Guilt, she claims, is not an emotion; it’s a state of being- guilty or not guilty, as in “I did it” or “I did not do it.” Guilty is what a jury decides you are or are not, whereas shame is what you feel when you get caught doing something wrong.

I know Brené Brown defines guilt and shame as the opposite. She says guilt means “I did bad” whereas shame means “I am bad.”

Whether you prefer to call it guilt or shame, there is a bad feeling we’re supposed to get when we cross other people’s boundaries or when we cross our own boundaries, when we do something hurtful to ourselves or others. Call it what you will, but for the sake of this chapter, we’ll define healthy shame as the natural, normal feeling you’re supposed to feel when someone else approaches you and says “Ouch, what you just did hurt me.” Guilt is when you hear what you’re being accused of and you issue a verdict- “Yes, I did that. Guilty as charged.” Or “No, I did not do that. There’s been a misunderstanding. Not guilty.”

If you need to flip the two words in your mind as you read on, that’s fine! Use whatever words work best for you, as long as you understand that it’s not healthy to be shameless or guiltless when you’ve messed up and done something hurtful, whether you intended to or not.

Why Trauma Survivors Struggle With Shame

Sadly, many people from abusive childhoods develop complicated relationships with shame that cause them to be highly sensitive to feeling any shame, healthy or not. They grow up thinking they have to be perfect, and if they do anything imperfect, they can get so flooded and overwhelmed that they act shameless. Instead of letting healthy shame motivate them to make repairs and make amends, they gaslight the people they hurt and claim “Not guilty” when they are actually guilty and should feel healthy shame.

It’s understandable from an IFS perspective why some people who have had their perpetrator’s shame projected onto them. When an abuser hurts a child, they should feel ashamed. That shame should make them stop and apologize. But if a perpetrator is shameless, they project their shame onto the child and the child grows up feeling ashamed for even existing, even though they’ve done nothing wrong. The child is innocent. The adult perpetrator is guilty and should feel ashamed. But instead, the child feels shame. We can call that toxic shame or, more accurately, projected shame.

As innocent, perfectly imperfect children, we tend to internalize the shame others ladled upon us- inappropriately pouring the shame that should have belonged to the boundary violators onto ourselves, misusing shame and causing more trauma, as when a parent sexually abuses a child and then shames the child for being bad, when the parent should feel the shame, not the child.

So if being shamed for someone else’s boundary violation is not the right use of shame, what is? Once we get healing for the wounded inner children that had shame misused and weaponized against us, we can start to garner the boundary protecting qualities of healthy shame, which can help us protect the boundaries of other people.