Shame or Guilt

The moral high ground you imagine for yourself may vanish when your hand is on the handle

Would you rather feel guilt, or shame?

I don’t have a neat answer. I’m not even sure there is one. What follows is less an argument than an excavation, an attempt to look closely at two states we all think we understand, and to ask whether we would still feel so certain if the choice were ours to make in the heat of a real moment. Because this choice is rarely abstract. It is not made in the calm of a well-lit room, but in the dim corridors of fear, loss, and survival, often guided less by reason than by the oldest reflexes we learned as children. Some of us were raised to fear “being bad” above all else, trained to protect the fragile perception of our worth even if it meant denying the truth. Others were taught to fear “doing bad”, to live in dread of crossing a moral line, even in secret. We inherit these reflexes long before we have words for guilt or shame, and by the time the choice comes, we mistake them for moral convictions. Most of us have already made the choice without realizing it, and we’re simply living inside it now, carrying it so long we no longer notice its weight.

Imagine standing in a dark room with two doors, knowing you may only open one: behind one waits guilt, behind the other, shame. At first glance they look alike. Both are uncomfortable, both hurt, but they are different. Dictionaries define guilt as the feeling of having committed an offense or failed in an obligation, and shame as the painful consciousness of humiliation or disgrace. But psychologists like June Tangney and Ronda Dearing, in “Shame and Guilt”, draw a sharper line: guilt is a negative evaluation of an act, a wound that can sometimes be repaired, while shame is a negative evaluation of the self, the belief you are fundamentally flawed, unworthy, and beyond redemption. One condemns the act, the other indicts the identity. Guilt is a slow poison swallowed in solitude, while shame is a public execution, sudden, absolute, and without appeal.

Guilt and shame are also not just emotions, they are strategies. We do not simply “feel” them, we deploy them, consciously or not, in the service of survival. Guilt is containment. It keeps the harm hidden, preserves the underpinnings of our lives, buys us time. Shame is detonation. It exposes everything at once, razes the structures we’ve built. Which we choose depends, more often than we admit, on whether we are trying to keep our life intact or burn it to the ground.

I kept circling this difference after rereading Anaïs Nin’s “A Spy in the House of Love”. In the opening pages, there is a phone conversation between Sabina (the lead character) and a man she called, a stranger, who suspects her of betrayal:

“It’s true. Yet you wouldn’t have called me if you were innocent. Guilt is the one burden human beings can’t bear alone. As soon as a crime is committed, there is a telephone call, or a confession to strangers.”

“There was no crime.”

“There is only one relief: to confess, to be caught, tried, punished. That’s the ideal of every criminal. But it’s not quite so simple. Only half of the self wants to atone, to be freed of the torments of guilt. The other half of man wants to continue to be free. So only half of the self surrenders, calling out ‘catch me,’ while the other half creates obstacles, difficulties; seeks to escape. It’s a flirtation with justice. If justice is nimble, it will follow the clue with the criminal’s help. If not, the criminal will take care of his own atonement.”

“Is that worse?”

“I think so. I think we are more severe judges of our own acts than professional judges. We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.”

It is the perfect description of the psychic split: guilt is chosen because it can be hidden, managed, and yet, over time, the very weight of it breeds its own seduction, the longing to be caught, to end the endlessness. Nietzsche once wrote that it is not suffering itself that destroys us, but the senselessness of suffering. And guilt, left unconfessed, becomes exactly that: a sentence with no end date, an eternal recurrence in miniature, where every day is lived under the same shadow. Shame, for all its violence, at least offers the possibility of finality.

I recently came across something Rousseau wrote in “Confessions”, where he recalls stealing an old pink and silver ribbon as a boy. When confronted, he accused Marion, a young servant girl, of giving it to him. She was innocent, bewildered, loyal…and now condemned by his lie. Rousseau writes:

“I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace. But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. My invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything. The more wickedly I behaved, the bolder my fear of confession made me… I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed to my face as a thief, a liar, and a slanderer. Utter confusion robbed me of all other feeling.”

He chose guilt over shame, even if it meant destroying another’s life. And yet, by writing it down, he confessed, perhaps because guilt’s slow corrosion eventually makes shame feel like mercy.

After reading these books, I wanted to run a short thought experiment of my own, and I turned to my followers on Instagram and asked what they’d choose. Then I made up several different scenarios, to see if people would change their answer based on context and circumstance. One was where shame would only affect you in your personal or work life, one where it would affect you and your family/loved ones, and one where you break a taboo to save a life, but you and your entire family are shamed and punished for it, or you protect the expectation and do nothing, and someone suffers.

Almost everyone chose feeling shame over feeling guilt for all scenarios (with a few private replies saying, “It depends on context”). I believe they meant it. But what we choose in the cold light of a hypothetical is rarely what we choose in the heat of reality. There is even a term for this in psychology- the “hot–cold empathy gap”, which refers to the arrogance of assuming that the calm, unthreatened self will be the same self under fear, desire, or loss. From a distance, shame looks survivable, a brief flare of exposure, a sting time will dull. Guilt sounds like an indefinite sentence. So we pick living with shame, imagining it as a clean wound.

I was surprised at how many assumptions were made in the answers given to my Instagram questions. Quite a few sent me DMs along the lines of: “I would never do anything wrong on purpose. I’d never hurt or harm someone intentionally. My reputation speaks for itself, so people would know it was an honest mistake. And if some can’t see that, if they want to shame me, they can go ahead. It wouldn’t bother me, because I don’t care what people like that think.”

But intent and perception are not twins. You do not control the lens through which others will see you, nor the story they will tell in your absence. A pure motive will not shield you if the outcome wounds someone deeply, or if the narrative that spreads is the opposite of your truth. Even believing you were justified offers you no protection, because what you see as reason, others may see as betrayal, especially when they are looking through the prism of their own values, wounds, and interests. The belief that shame cannot touch you because you meant no harm is a dangerous illusion; shame is not self-generated, it is assigned. And the assignment is not in your hands.

Shame does not always wait for facts. It does not pause for character references or investigate motive. It often moves fast and publicly, carried on rumour, inference, and the momentum of other people’s outrage. In that space between what happened and what people think happened, even the innocent can burn. You may not care what others think in the quiet safety of abstraction, but when the eyes that judge you belong to the people who decide whether you keep your job, your children, your marriage, your freedom, or your safety, the cost is no longer theoretical. Shame is never yours to refuse, only to survive. And guilt is never theirs to take from you, only yours to endure.

When the stakes are real (a marriage, a child, a career, a name your entire identity is shaped around), shame can become the threat of social death. And guilt, corrosive as it may be, lets us keep the architecture of our life intact. So despite the confident answers I received to my thought experiments, I still believe the first instinct in reality for a lot more people than would care to admit, is often guilt. It buys time. It preserves control. Only later, when its endlessness becomes unbearable, do we crave shame, not for justice, but for an ending, just like Sabina.

And nowhere is this more visible than in intimacy. Infidelity is often imagined as a single act, but more often it is two betrayals: the act itself, and the silence that follows. I’ve known people who cheated once, in a moment they could barely explain even to themselves… a night that was part loneliness, part impulse, part hunger for something they didn’t even understand. They woke up horrified, swore they would never do it again, and at first, decided not to tell. “Why detonate the life we’ve built?”, they thought. They could still sit across from their partner at breakfast, still say “I love you”, still tuck their children in at night. Outwardly, nothing changed. But inwardly, every gesture was haunted by its opposite: the smile both comfort and condemnation, the kiss both tenderness and reminder.

Others I have known lived in longer duplicities. One man told me that the year he cheated most often was also the year he felt most tender toward his wife. The guilt made him more attentive, more affectionate, almost as if he were trying to pay off a debt without ever admitting the debt existed. But every touch carried static, and the more time went on, the louder it became. At one point, he told me he could no longer look at himself in the mirror. Eventually, he confessed.

These are often the same people who would have sworn, in abstraction, “I’d take shame over guilt.” But when faced with the collapse of a marriage, the loss of a home, the shattering of children’s trust, they chose guilt, at least at first. Because guilt lets them keep their world standing, at least for a while. Until it doesn’t. Until one day it becomes unlivable, and then shame, the thing they originally fled, becomes the mercy they crave….Again, just like Sabina.

And it’s not only in love. Consider a career built over decades. You make a wrong call, bend a rule, or sign off on a decision that backfires. If no one knows, do you confess? If by not confessing, someone else takes the fall, could you live with that? What if confession meant losing the job that supports your family? And while some people do survive public error with their reputation intact, not everyone does. Context decides whether you are forgiven or finished, and context is never really in your control. Would you still confess right away, or carry the guilt in silence, at least for a little while, telling yourself you’ve learned from it?

This pattern plays out on the public stage too, in the constant theatre of scandal. Secrets are kept as long as they can be borne. When they break, shame is staged as performance, confessions filtered through legal teams and brand consultants, reduced to statements that regret “how people felt” without naming the harm or how repair will be made. It is Rousseau with a PR department, the fear of disgrace dressed in euphemism. The choreography is always so predictable: “values were not upheld”, as if values were autonomous beings that wandered off., “mistakes were made,” “standards were not met”, no subject, no hand on the lever…And then, “decades of service,” “philanthropic commitments,” “a journey of learning,” as if good deeds could be tallied against harm. Finally, the horizon move: “it’s time to heal,” which means it’s time to stop asking questions.

And the crowd plays its part. Public shame masquerades as justice, and we mistake humiliation for repair. The toppling of a reputation gives the heat of moral satisfaction without any real labour of restitution. And without restitution, shame is just a spectacle, a burning that leaves the harm untouched.

And the reason I am asking these questions is twofold. First, because when we punish, we so often reach for shame as the blunt instrument, as if exposure and humiliation were the surest way to provoke meaningful change. But if guilt is, in truth, the more unbearable state, the one that eats you from the inside until it compels action, then is public shaming really the most effective way to inspire transformation? Or does it simply feed the onlookers, giving them the spectacle of a reckoning without the slower, harder work of remorse? This is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking. Shame is faster. It is easier. But is it effective? Should we consider the context in which we deliver it, or does context, in the end, matter at all?

Second, because we are quick to label certain acts as “shameful,” as though shame were the obvious and natural consequence (“how could they do something so humiliating, disgrace their family, stain their name?”). Yet we rarely pause to consider that sometimes, the choice to step into shame is not a miscalculation but an escape. That the person may already have been living under the slow, airless suffocation of guilt, and that shame, regardless of how public, devastating, and absolute, was the only way to end it. Perhaps, as with many who answered my question on Instagram, they once believed they would choose differently. Perhaps it was, in their own mind, a mistake. Or perhaps it was simply the only way they saw to stop the endlessness.

So the question remains. Would you rather carry guilt, or shame? In the cool light of theory, most seem to choose shame. In the heat of reality, many choose guilt. Across a lifetime, we will likely walk through both doors: guilt to preserve the life we know, and shame to finally end the guilt.

But whichever door you choose, there is no clean escape. Guilt is the death that happens inside you slowly, in private, like a quiet asphyxiation you learn to disguise, even from yourself. Shame is the death that happens outside you all at once, in the open, a sudden collapse under the weight of other people’s eyes. One buries you over years, the other burns you in a day. And yet both keep you alive just long enough to let you know exactly what they are taking.

Is there one you are already living with now, or have you been carrying both?

Until next time,
Mihaela