Guilt is often treated as a feeling to turn away from, something that is detrimental to our pursuit of happiness. But Chris Moore, psychologist and professor in Dalhousie University’s department of psychology and neuroscience, argues that guilt can be a powerful force for accountability, repair and healing. In his new book, The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal, Moore challenges popular assumptions about guilt and explains why this uncomfortable, even painful, feeling may be one of our most socially useful emotions.
The Conversation Canada: From an evolutionary perspective, why does guilt exist at all? What function does it serve?
Chris Moore: Guilt is a complex set of emotions. One of those emotions is fear for the health of a relationship. Second is empathy. If you do something to hurt somebody else, you feel sadness for them. Then third is remorse — the wish that we hadn’t done it. Those three emotions combined into a cocktail is guilt.
Human beings are arguably the most social of all species, and social networks depend upon healthy relationships between individuals. You have to have mechanisms for keeping social networks healthy because, inevitably, there’s going to be conflict. Guilt is one of those mechanisms. It serves to motivate the individual to repair relationships that are important to them. Psychopathic individuals don’t feel guilt, for example, and the corollary of that is that they tend to have dysfunctional relationships.
TCC: You distinguish between shame and guilt. What is the difference, and why is the distinction important?
CM: Guilt is feeling bad about something that you did (an action), whereas shame is feeling bad about yourself (being a bad person). Shame is more person-focused; guilt is more action-focused. And if you think about what those emotions are for and how they motivate our behaviour, they can have different effects.
If you feel guilt because you performed a bad action, then you can work to heal that by reaching out and apologizing, for example. Shame makes people shy away from relationships because they feel like they’re a bad person. Shame is much more destructive, particularly for relationships.
TCC: You argue that guilt is not a harmful emotion. How so? Why, then, has guilt developed such a bad reputation?
CM: The ultimate point of guilt is to motivate us to try to heal our relationships. That’s why guilt is good for us if we act on it honestly and with genuine motives, although it feels bad. But I do want to emphasize that there are two sides. The antidote to guilt is forgiveness from the other person.
There are a number of reasons for its bad reputation. One is that it feels bad, and so we don’t want to experience it. We may try to ignore it, or we may try to push it away or not act on it. Additionally, it’s often associated with objectively bad things — things that have been deemed to be bad actions by society, whether that’s through religion or through the law. The notion of guilt under the law, for example, is that you’ve done a bad thing and that you need to be punished for it. That is a negative connotation.
TCC: What should we do with guilt when we feel it in the moment? Lean into it? Question it?
CM: Certainly lean into it. I do want to emphasize, however, that guilt is a gut reaction, so we also need to interrogate its accuracy. Do we really have responsibility in the situation for the harm that has come to the relationship that we care about? That’s especially important in situations where other people may be inclined to take advantage of our guilt through guilt-tripping, or what is called guilt induction.
Have you done all that you should do in the context from which the guilt arose? If you have, then you need to be able to let go of the guilt. That is an important part of it because people who are very guilt-prone — people-pleasers or people who score very high on agreeableness — tend to feel guilt a lot. It may not always be justified, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t feel it.
TCC: How do power dynamics in families shape how guilt is experienced?
CM: The origin of guilt, according to Freudian psychoanalytic thought, is that the child first feels guilt in relation to their parents — something that they did which led to anger from their parents. Guilt can arise when there’s an asymmetry in power, but if you’re feeling guilt all the time in the context of a particular relationship, then it may not be you.
That can happen in child-parent relationships, particularly when parents have a very strong sense of filial obligation, which means that the children should be doing what the parents say they should be doing. And if they use guilt to achieve those ends, that can quickly lead to resentment as the child ages into adolescence and adulthood. That is quite a toxic situation for child-parent relationships, and it can lead to estrangement. Estrangement is obviously very unfortunate, but the question becomes: is it for the best?
TCC: How does guilt intersect with collective responsibility such as historical guilt tied to colonialism?
The term “collective guilt” was popularized after the Holocaust in the context of German guilt. Collective guilt has two aspects. “Objective collective guilt” can be thought of as a legal form of guilt. For example, after the Second World War, Germany accepted its collective guilt for the Holocaust and paid reparations to the state of Israel for what was done to the Jewish population. But then there is also the “subjective collective guilt,” which is the guilt that individual people may feel because of their identification with the group that did the damage.
Interestingly, subjective collective guilt can occur in people who have no individual responsibility for those acts. There was a great increase in German guilt in the 1970s in the generation born after the Second World War, for example. There is no clear antidote for subjective collective guilt. There’s nothing you can do, ultimately, that will lead to forgiveness because there’s nobody who can actually act on behalf of the group that was oppressed to offer that forgiveness. There are a number of writers, for example, who have written on white guilt, in relation to racial issues, being dysfunctional.
There’s no point in continuing to harbour collective guilt if you’ve done all that can be done. Now, determining whether you’ve done all that can be done … that is complicated.
This interview has been condensed for length and edited for clarity.
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