{Non, je ne regrette rien…}

May is National Mental Health Month! And I totally didn’t even remember that until I was halfway through writing this post and thought, “what does all this crap about guilt have to do with anything???” At the mo, since I’ve talked a bit before about the joy of it, today I want to talk about the toll that being raised in faith takes on a person. This is also my moment of giving you fair warning: today’s post is about religion in the broadest sense, and if that’s not your gig, here’s where you can find some adorbs pics of baby capybaras. I’ll see you around.

(So, April was relatively benign acrostics, and now May is religion AND shame. How did you luck out like this???)

It isn’t all bad, being raised in faith. In so many ways, for those who have sought shared identity in ritual and words and music — there can be, in faith, something life-giving, affirming, and precious. However, there also lurks in many practices a great many lies. Willing to disbelieve the lies I encountered, I consciously avoided the negatives for a lot of my life, but I know that’s not only deliberately disingenuous, willful blindness is not particularly helpful if I’m going live my own truths, much less write anything true about young adults being raised in/with/avoiding faith. It’s a tough and weird dichotomy, is this Judeo-Christian thing; basically Christianity is meant to be about love, but the hyperfocus tends to be the tension between “You should be a super good person” and “Basically you’re a terrible person.” The Christian world I grew up with seems to have concluded, “Right, you should be a good person, but we’re none of us great, and you particularly are crap and there’s really nothing you can do about it… but pretend.” Which is a complete fallacy and un-everything we’re supposed to be doing. But, here we are.

It is a hard unlearning, learning not to pretend. It’s a full-time job.

Sooo, Tech Boy and I had one of those long meandering conversations this morning (why do they always happen on Mondays? Or else Sunday nights? Methinks there’s something within me stalling about beginning a new week) wherein his degree in Philosophy trumps my “well, I think …” statements. It’s not as easy to argue with someone who can throw down a quote from Nietzsche at need, but someone has to be blindly optimistic in this world, right? Right.

Our discussion parsed the minor – but important – variances among regret, remorse, shame, and guilt.

First, you’ll note the absence of contrition – because that one seems fairly easy from both a philosophical and psychological point of view. Contrition is being sorry for wrongdoing — sorry enough to make restitution. A healthy response to the realization of wrongdoing, yes? So while we can continue to disregard that one, I wanted to mention it, because it exists within this same close linguistic and philosophical relationship. Regret also goes with it — people talk about having “no regrets,” but that’s actually a little worrisome, to me. Psychologists describe regret as having to do with wishing one hadn’t taken a particular action — for whatever reason. It might be just be because you got caught taking the action, it might be that the result of the action blew up in your face, or because the action made someone take additional action which was unexpected or upsetting. Remorse, however, is about the emotion, not the action. It involves self-reproof, and is what prompts us to be contrite. I guess people can have no regrets – but I find it unlikely, unless they are a master planner and have every move throughout their whole lives mapped.

Brené Brown once said, “Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, eating disorders, suicide, violence, and bullying.” With that in view, shame and guilt are by far the most corrosive of the negative emotions defined here. Though often used interchangeably with guilt, shame differs in that it seems to be self-referential entirely. Shame is all about the emo, and is confined solely to that arena: feelings. Guilt, by contrast, arises in response to responsibility for our actions or thoughts or feelings toward others. This being the case, people who are entirely self-absorbed are capable of feeling great amounts of shame… Guilt, however, requires empathy, which isn’t of interest to the self-absorbed. They tend to be crippled instead by shame at their imperfections, then idealize the lives of others, imagining them living a perfect existence. This in turn allows self-absorbed people to envy others, indulge in hating them, possibly behaving hatefully and spitefully toward them, all because of a perceived “better than” lifestyle which gives an uneven comparison between others and themselves. Interesting, the concept of “fat shaming” and that type of thing stems not from concern about the shamee who is carrying extra weight but from a perception of the shamer that the weight that person carries is somehow a personal affront… to them, as a less heavy person. Obviously, shame perceptions and attitudes impede personal growth. Neither guilt nor shame seems to give most people a particularly positive outcome… and yet, people feel – and attempt to wield as tools or weapons – these emotions every day. There has to be something more to it.

It’s hard for many of us to take personal responsibility for things. When we’re pointed to our faults, we get defensive. That’s a gift that a healthy application of guilt gives us. We see our crap, we get upset about it, we fix it. End of story. As far as I can see it, especially in a religious context, shame gives us …nothing. A lot of people are even confused by the concept, because it is so closely tied with the idea of “you did something wrong.” And yet, a lot of people in American Christian circles, anyway, seem to feel it’s part of the gig. Humanity, in the cold mathematics of logic, failed all the tests way back in Eden, and by rights, deserved to be voted off the island. This is a Big story, a humanity story. When it comes to a personal story, many faith practices expect individuals to experience the shame of these failures as an individual, not as part of the human collective. Then the shame becomes personal – unmoored from specific persons and events in history – and individuals are burdened with the belief that we have much for which to atone.

And then, the pretending begins in earnest. Because, seriously: who can pick that up?

More thoughts as I think them.