Transform your life by learning to separate shame from guilt

Why separate shame and guilt, they are the same aren’t they? How will this transform my life? We all have a past. We all have something that we feel ashamed about whether it’s something that we did or didn’t do or something that someone did to us. We all carry shame from earlier in our lives, most of the time it was before we reached 12 years old. You can transform your life by learning how to separate shame from guilt.
Shame affects all areas of our life. From our physiology to how we feel. How we interact with others. How we walk and talk. It affects our confidence, our self esteem, our self belief and how we see the world.

Do you feel we live in a positive world where everyone conspires to help us, welcoming us or is it a malevolent world where people are out to do us harm? Or do you feel like a victim where bad things are happening to you that we have no control over?

It’s true that your mindset affects how you view the world you live in. This then gets fed back to you through the situations that you experience, some would even say attract through your belief system. If you believe it’s a malignant world then that’s all you’ll see.

Henry Ford showed us that you get what you believe. A belief is just a thought that you think over and over. Those that sell a positive lifestyle will say just change your mindset, think positive thoughts. While there is some value in that it won’t transform your life. The deeper the work you do the longer lasting the results you’ll get, the bigger the rewards will be. It’s like anything the more you put in the more you’ll get out of it.

I went from being a timid little thing who walked fast but with tiny steps (like a Geisha) exuding an apology for my presence. I was hunched over, shoulders down, lacking confidence, I mumbled when I talked, I didn’t trust anyone except the wrong people who showed me over and over that what I believed about the world was true. It was a malevolent place. This was because I carried a lot of shame from my childhood experiences. I had internalised that I was bad because of them. Children then to do this and some styles of parenting (especially authoritarian) seem to compound that by focusing on terms like good girl or bad girl.

So is the world a malevolent or a benevolent place? You see the world through your own lens. Like a camera you need to change the lens to let in more light. But that lens was often set by someone else when you were little. By examining the validity of my beliefs and learning who I could trust I let more light (positivity) into my life.

My beliefs were given to me at a young age and now I had to find my own. I started by learning who I could trust. I had to learn to trust myself before I could trust anyone else. If you don’t trust yourself how can you trust anyone. I did this by trusting myself to take action to look after me when bad things happened. This allowed me to then trust other people. They are still entitled to do bad things I just don’t have to accept them. I can look after me and that doesn’t make me a “bad person”. That was the start of healthy boundaries for me.

I also had to separate shame from guilt. The difference between them is that guilt means I did something wrong while shame means I am wrong. So if you have a belief in the background that you are somehow a bad person this will affect all the choices you make. You are not bad, you did something bad. Usually because you were uninformed or misdirected but once you knew better you did better.

It’s easier to transform your life once you start to like yourself. To do this you must challenge your beliefs especially about yourself. This is a process of change and will not happen overnight but by starting to see that you are not bad, you just did something bad is a huge start.

Being willing to fully immerse yourself in the process of how you see yourself and your past deeds will not only change your physiology but it will give you more confidence and that will transform your whole life. With more confidence you can get the job you want, the relationship you’d like and ultimately the life you’ve always dreamed of. Ask yourself what life would be like without shame? What could you achieve? You can transform your life.

If you want to look at how you can rid yourself of shame and elevate your life to the next level then Click here and we’ll put a plan in place.

I work on a one to one basis either face to face or online to anywhere in the world that you can get a good internet connection. I look forward to having the opportunity to help you transform your life.