Definition, Types, & Differences Versus Shame

Guilt is an emotion that makes us think more about ourselves by having us reflect on how we have acted in the past. Psychologists call this a self-conscious emotion due to the focus on ourselves. We feel guilt “in response to a broad range of feelings, transgressions, and social blunders” (Kazdin, 2000, pg. 40). In other words, guilt is not limited to one certain action or event. What makes one person feel guilty might not make another person feel bad at all. However, when we do feel guilty, we are driven to act. Guilt is characterized by a willingness or readiness to try again to fix the wrong that has been done. 

Guilt has been studied a lot in psychology. Sigmond Freud (1856-1939) believed that we feel guilty when there is a disconnect between our moral conscience (the superego) and our innate desires and impulses (the id). He believed that guilt was an underlying factor in all psychological issues. In his view, guilt was also always negative. 

However, as research continued, people began to define guilt in other ways. Helen Block Lewis wrote an influential book (Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, 1971) which argued that guilt may have positive implications, unlike the related feeling of shame​ (this distinction is something we will look at later in the article). Her research promoted the idea that “rather than motivating a desire to hide, guilt typically motivates reparative behavior: confessing, apologizing, or somehow undoing the harm that was done” (Kazdin, 2000, p. 41). 

Because of how it drives us to reconnect, guilt can be considered a social emotion. It pushes us to act and repair what we feel we have broken. This is what makes a complete lack of guilt potentially problematic. It is good to have a sense of things we have done wrong in order to care for others well. In fact, no guilt at all is listed as a symptom of both conduct and personality disorders, and it may indicate a lack of empathy. 

While there may be positive effects from guilt, too much guilt has been tied to several mental health issues. This feeling has often been linked with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is a symptom of all of these in the DSM-IV. In one study, Saraiya et al. (2022) measured levels of guilt among patients with PTSD at regular intervals during their treatment. Results showed that lower levels of guilt were connected to fewer PTSD symptoms in patients. In other words, patients who were feeling less guilty were doing better overall. This study also showed that treatment helped reduce levels of guilt. This suggests that if you are often feeling overwhelmed by guilt, there are ways to get help.

Now that we know what guilt is, it is important to understand what it is not. Guilt is often confused with the related emotion of shame, but the two are very different emotions. Both emotions are self-focused, meaning that they make us think more and more about ourselves. However, guilt is focused on the action while shame is all about our identity. When we feel ashamed, we feel that our failures make us bad people. When we feel guilty, we feel that what we did was wrong. In other words, “guilt doesn’t threaten [our] core identity”, but shame does (Kazdin, 2000, p. 40). 

These two feelings also typically lead to very different behaviors. Because it is just about our behavior, guilt can lead us to others as we seek to apologize or repair the wrong. In this way, guilt can lead us out of ourselves. Shame, on the other hand, tends to turn us inwards and draw us away from others. Since shame makes us feel insecure about who we are at the core, we become insecure in our relationships. June Tangey, a researcher who studies these emotions, says that shame is also tied to anger while guilt is tied to empathy (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). 

Because it is such an unpleasant feeling, guilt often has a bad reputation. But studies in psychology show that the feeling of guilt may drive us to engage in positive behaviors. Guilt has been connected to helping behavior. That means that when we feel guilty we are more likely to help someone else (Miller, 2010). Guilt might also make us more honest. In one study Ma et al. (2022) found that preschool children were more likely to be honest about cheating when they felt guilty than when they felt sad. 

Additionally, guilt may make us more prone to empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings and point of view. When we are feeling empathetic, we are more likely to help someone and be less angry at them. Research has shown that when feeling guilty (instead of ashamed) we feel more empathy for the person that we have wronged (Kazdin, 2000).

We can end up feeling guilty when we do something that goes against our values. Here are some examples of when we might feel this type of guilt:

• forgetting your mom’s birthday
• yelling at a friend during an argument
• eating chocolate cake when we’re on a diet
• rushing through work that we were expected to work hard on.

Although less common, some of us (for example, those with codependency) can also feel guilt when we do what’s best for us—like put ourselves first, stand up for ourselves, or make decisions that are best for us. We might feel guilty if we choose a restaurant that we prefer over one that others prefer. Or, we might feel guilt for taking the time and space we need to be alone and engage in self-care. This type of guilt can often be toxic, as it may prevent us from doing what’s best for us and taking care of ourselves.

Guilt Complex
A guilt complex refers to when a person has an ongoing belief that they have done something wrong or will do something wrong. A guilt complex may emerge from imagined or perceived guilt. This worldview may emerge from an upbringing in which the child was made to feel guilty for normal experiences—like being sad, angry, or having normal developmental wants and needs. Or it can emerge from being scapegoated by others—being blamed for things that are out of one’s control or are the responsibility of others.

Now that we know what guilt is (and is not), where does it come from and when do we start to feel guilty about things we have done wrong? Growing up, we learn our sense of right and wrong from our parents. Researchers argue that this starts happening as early as 3 years old (Tilghamn-Osborne et al., 2010). 

One theory that may help explain where guilt comes from is Erik Erikson’s stages of development. Erickson was a psychologist who developed a theory that there is a series of eight stages we go through as we develop socially. His third stage explains where our feelings of guilt come from. This stage, “initiative versus guilt”, is from our preschool years—ages 4 to 5. In this stage, we are taking initiative and learning new things. We start to have more control over ourselves and interact with more people in new social settings. As we learn from these social interactions, we either feel encouraged to take more initiative or we feel that we have failed. If we perceive failure, we feel bad and guilt can develop.  

One model of guilt suggests that guilt emerges from the following conditions (Kubany, 2003).

1. A sense of responsibility for what happened
2. A sense of violation of your own personal standards or values
3. A lack of justification for doing what you did

At this point, you may know a lot more about guilt, what is it, and where it comes from. However, there are a lot of different types of guilt that we experience. Let’s explore some of those together. 

Survivor’s Guilt​
Survivor’s guilt is a specific type of guilt that arises from a traumatic experience. Trauma is anything that overwhelms your ability to cope or stay in the present moment. There are many types of traumatic events, from natural disasters to abuse. Often survivor’s guilt is experienced “in people who have been exposed to, or witnessed, death and have stayed alive” (Murray, 2021, p. 1).

Rumination is one key part of survivor’s guilt. Rumination is thinking about the event over and over again in a way that becomes persistent and distracting from the present moment. Rumination is also a factor in other mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety.

In many ways, survivor’s guilt is an undue burden because there often was no way the outcome of the traumatic event could have been changed. While ruminating on the event and feeling guilty may seem like the right response in the moment, it just keeps us trapped and holds us back from living mindfully. Luckily, research shows that by talking about the traumatic experiences with a trained professional, survivor’s guilt can fade. 

Guilt by Association
Guilt has been thought of as a social emotion because it serves the social function of repairing relationships. However, there can be another side to this social aspect of guilt. Guilt by association is when “responsibility for a misdeed” is “ascribed to an innocent person solely because he or she has some connection with the perpetrator” (APA, 2015).  In other words, we can see people as guilty or be seen as guilty ourselves simply because we have social ties with someone who has done something wrong. 

If you’ve seen Spider-Man No Way Home with Tom Holland you will find a perfect example of guilt by association. In that film, the public believes that Peter Parker (aka spider-man) is guilty of commanding drones to attack the public. MJ and Ned, Peter’s two best friends, are seen as guilty by association. Because of this, their college applications are denied simply on the basis of knowing Peter. That is one extreme example of guilt traveling through social ties. 

The Guilt Trip
While not a specific type of guilt, guilt-tripping is one of the most common ways that guilt can be twisted and used against us. A guilt trip is when someone uses the emotion of guilt to get another person to act a certain way or do a specific action. According to British psychologist George K. Simon, guilt-tripping is a specific type of intimidation and manipulation tactic which keeps us trapped in a self-doubting and anxious position (see his book In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People, 2005 for more on the topic).

Many of us experience guilt trips. If anyone has ever made you feel bad about your behavior and then used that to make you do something in the future, you’ve been guilt-tripped. Personally, I can remember my parents guilt-tripping me into doing the dishes all the time. They would comment on how hard they had worked on dinner and then remind me that I never cooked dinner. Feeling guilty when they asked me to do the dishes, I would always comply. Hopefully, through learning more about guilt, you will be empowered to spot and stop guilt-tripping.

When it comes down to it, guilt is an uncomfortable emotion, and, as we have discovered, feeling too much of it could lead to mental health issues. But we all know that we mess up and will probably feel guilty again. So how do we deal with that heavy feeling? Below we have outlined a few suggestions. 

Of course, these are not commands. If you are struggling with constantly feeling weighed down by guilt, there are people who can help you and there is no shame (or guilt) in seeking out help. These are merely themes that I picked up on while researching that may lend a helping hand in helping us in our moments of feeling guilty.

1. Tell the Truth
As awkward as it may be, telling the truth is one way to ease feelings of guilt. In a study done by Peer et al. (2014), people who confessed fully to unethical behavior (in this case, cheating on an exam) felt better than people who did not confess or only confessed partially. This tells us that coming clean may ease that burden of guilt we feel in our chest.  

2. Seek Repair While Avoiding Rumination
As discussed above, guilt can lead us to seek repair in relationships and fix the wrongs that have been done. Allowing guilt to drive us to these actions and then moving on from feeling guilty is one way that we can feel guilt and then move on. Connected to this is the idea of avoiding rumination. Once repair has been sought, nothing else can be done. Forgiving yourself and moving on is key to letting go of guilt. 

3. Be Careful Not to Fuse Guilt With Shame
Guilt and shame are not the same emotion, but they often go hand in hand. Parsing out shame and guilt could be helpful for self-awareness. Making sure that we do not generalize a mistake we made to our core personhood is key in making the most of guilt without succumbing to shame.

Check out these quotes to get a better understanding for how guilt may affect our lives.

• “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” ― Voltaire
• “Maybe there’s more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.” ― Veronica Roth
• “Calvin : There’s no problem so awful, that you can’t add some guilt to it and make it even worse.” ― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
• “There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.” ― Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
• “I would rather be punished for making the right decision than live with the guilt of making the wrong one for the rest of my life.” ― Shannon Messenger, Keeper of the Lost Cities
• The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt. — Ayn Rand
• Guilt is anger directed at ourselves – at what we did or did not do. Resentment is anger directed at others – at what they did or did not do. — Peter McWilliams
• People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on. — Eckhart Tolle
• Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups. — Cathy Guisewite

Here are some movies that feature guilt:

​Want to learn more about guilt? Check out these articles:​

• ​American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). 
• American Psychological Association. (2015). APA Dictionary of Psychology (2nd ed.).
• Day, M. V., & Bobocel, D. R. (2013). The weight of a guilty conscience: subjective body weight as an embodiment of guilt. PloS one, 8(7), e69546. 
• Kazdin, A. E. (2000). Encyclopedia of psychology. Washington, D.C: American Psychological Association.
• Kubany, E. S., & Watson, S. B. (2003). Guilt: Elaboration of a multidimensional model. Psychological Record, 53(1), 51-90.
• Lewis, H. B. (1971). Shame and guilt in neurosis. Psychoanalytic Review, 58(3), 419–438.
• ​​Ma, F., An, R., Wu, D., Luo, X., Xu, F., & Lagattuta, K. H. (2022). Guilt promotes honesty in preschoolers. Developmental psychology, 58(4), 693–699. 
• Miller, C. (2010). Guilt and Helping. Advances in Psychology Research. Alexandra Columbis (ed.). Volume 68. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, 117-138.
• Murray, H., Pethania, Y., & Medin, E. (2021). Survivor Guilt: A Cognitive Approach. Cognitive behaviour therapist, 14, e28.