Integrative Psychologist

• Specializing in depression, anxiety, AD/HD, women's issues and assertiveness training
• To feel good emotionally, take care of both body and mind.
• Incorporating diet, exercise and relaxation techniques with traditional psychotherapy
• Children, adolescents and adults. Indivdual, couples and family therapy

Guilt

People often confuse shame with guilt.  While we feel both, there is a difference between them.  Guilt is the uncomfortable or painful feeling that results from doing something that violates or breaks a personal standard or value, or from hurting another person, or even from breaking an agreement or a law.  Guilt thus concerns our behavior, feeling bad about what we have done, or about what we didn’t do that we were supposed to have done. Like most feelings, guilt can be a useful emotion to help guide us in our relationships with ourselves and with others.  People who never experience guilt or remorse after transgressions have difficulty in their lives, and are classically said to have an anti-social personality disorder.  Guilt can be relieved substantially by recognizing its presence and by then working it through.  This means that we experience it, and discuss it with trusted and appropriate others.  In its simplest resolution, we may apologize to the person whom we may have harmed or deceived, and ask their forgiveness.  In its more complex forms, we may have to talk about the guilt in more depth, perhaps in group or in individual therapy.

Shame

Shame is the uncomfortable or painful feeling that we experience when we realize that a part of us is defective, bad, incomplete, phony, inadequate, or a failure.  In contrast to guilt, where we feel bad from doing something wrong, we feel shame from being something wrong or bad.  Thus guilt seems to be correctible or forgivable, whereas there seems to be no way out of shame. We all have shame.  Shame is universal to being human.  If we do not work through it and then let go of it, shame tends to accumulate and burden us more and more, until we even become its victim. In addition to feeling defective or inadequate, shame makes us believe that others can see through us, through our facade, into our defectiveness.  Shame feels hopeless:  that no matter what we do, we cannot correct it.  People block out their shame, pretend that it is not there, and disguise it as if it were some other feeling.  But shame will not go away unless we learn what it is, experience it, and share it with safe and supportive others.

                                    From Healing the Child Within

                                      By Charles L. Whitfield M.D.