Dealing With Guilt & Shame in Recovery

When we ignore our feelings of guilt and continue to do what
we believe is wrong, we feel shame. Shame is when we internalize guilt and
begin to believe we are a bad person because we did something wrong and ignored
our feelings of guilt. The purpose of shame is to make us feel so bad that we
try to make right the wrongs we have committed. If
others discover the wrongs we have committed, our shame increases. Instead of doing something to make
it right, we hide what we have done. Of course, addicts aren’t the only people who feel guilt and
shame.

• Understanding how to process shame and regret via addiction recovery is critical.
• Understanding that the trauma(s) you experienced created problems within you that were out of your control can go a long way toward forgiving yourself for the ways that you have hurt others.
• Forgiving yourself and asking for forgiveness from others will help to heal the emotions of shame and guilt.
• Your tendency to be a victim or your tendency to be abusive did not just happen.
• Guilt, shame and depression in clients in recovery from addiction is also common, requiring support for a dual diagnosis.

This is exactly why breaking free from addiction and shame are vital. Here’s the role of shame and guilt in addiction recovery, along with how guilt and shame in recovery to process shame and regret of addiction; necessary to recover. Overcoming shame and guilt are imperative if you are suffering from addiction.

Overcoming Shame and Guilt

While shame is a natural offshoot of guilt and remorse, internalizing it in recovery is dangerous. When shame becomes part of your self-identity, it can prevent you from moving forward in recovery. A deep sense of shame sets up the broader feeling of unworthiness, of being unworthy of love, support, or help. Shame can become toxic to your recovery efforts, even set you up for a relapse.

I discovered that shame was one of four main barriers to entering treatment, with 75% of participants identifying shame and stigma as a primary roadblock to treatment. I’ve been made fun of publicly, I’ve been shamed in the privacy of my own home growing up, I started thinking of myself as a “no-good loser” having heard it enough. When you stop seeing yourself as your label, as your problem, as your addiction, the shame begins to fall away. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. All data used in this manuscript are included in the attached Supporting Information file titled 110 PLoS One. The rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield, it’s easy to look back but looking ahead and staying positive is always worth it.

Professional Treatment Options for Shame and Guilt

It can maintain addictive behaviors, but shame also gets in the way of recovery, self-acceptance, and accessing help. In addition to addressing the reviewer comments below, please provide more information on the pattern of missingness in the data, especially with respect to attrition. Any variables predictive of missingness should be included as auxiliary variables in the latent growth models to correct for any potential bias. Even without an addiction, people who seek out treatment for mental illnesses such as depression are often portrayed in popular media as weak or dangerous to themselves and others. In the U.S., around 6.7% of adults — 16.2 million people — live with depression.

Engaging regularly in self-care activities helps prevent relapse during addiction recovery by helping one cope better with stressors and challenging emotions like shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct differences. While guilt is a feeling that arises from one s actions, shame is feeling bad about oneself as a person.

Q: Can professional counseling help with addressing shame and guilt during addiction recovery?

It asks people to define guilt and shame for themselves, and then identify the stressors that lead them to guilt and shame. Another study examined the prosocial role of guilt in moral comparisons (Zhang et al., 2017). Early conceptualizations of shame and guilt claimed that shame was a public experience (caused by the reactions of others) while guilt was a private experience (caused by internal conflict about morality) (Ausubel, 1955). In the U.S., only 10% of people struggling with some form of addiction actually get help. It may seem like you’ll always feel this way, but research shows that shame diminishes during the treatment process. It means you will feel a hell of a lot better once you take that first step in accessing help.

In order to recover, individuals must let go, they must aim to forgive their addiction. On the other end of the scale, have you ever felt shameful for something you’ve done, where you cannot forgive yourself? If so, it’s likely that your view of yourself has changed, that you’ve tried to run away from problems in shame. Shame is a much harder emotion to overcome, now linked to mental health issues, addiction diagnosis, and irrational behaviours. While guilt is in relation to your behaviours, shame is linked to you as a person, making it a painful feeling to continuously experience.

Mood Disorders: What They Are, Symptoms and Treatment

This will allow people like healthcare workers, therapists, and those in your support system to help you in the best way possible. First, main effects of positive emotion were examined followed by entry of interaction terms. Interaction terms were defined using the XWITH command which creates a latent interaction term, which is needed for an interaction between a latent factor and an observed variable in a structural equation model [50]. Any significant interaction was then probed for simple slopes by rerunning the model with a centered moderator at +1 standard deviation (SD) above the mean and -1 SD below the mean. For correlational paths, standard errors (SE) and p values are reported for the standardized beta coefficient (β). For the direct regression and moderation paths, SE and p values are reported for the unstandardized regression coefficient (b).