Have you ever heard the theory that shame and guilt are good things because they support community cohesiveness and personal accountability (eg – that shame and guilt exist, evolutionarily speaking, to help individuals know when they’ve broken a norm which helps defend the collective welfare)?

Regardless of the origins of guilt and shame, we do know that:

We live in an increasingly isolated world where our humanity is reduced to utility, where we internalize capitalism’s notion that our mattering is conditional on how much we produce.

And we also live in a world with rapidly dwindling resources, where being alive means compromising the lives of others (carbon footprint, the level of nourishment we consume, global trade and resource use) etc.

In this context it is critical to understand the evolutionary mismatch between the world we expect, as social mammals, and the world we actually inhabit… and to re-look at how guilt, shame, conscience, loyalty and innocence function in our bodies as a result of our longing for harmony with those around us.

In our cultural crisis of mattering and belonging, the dysfunctional consequences of shame often lead to depression, generalized anxiety disorder and low self-esteem, and the maladaptive aspects of guilt include obsessive rumination, self-punishment and self-criticism, obsessive-compulsive disorders and more.

I explore the fullness of this topic in my online webinar recording ($20 in the online store) called Loyalty, Status, Innocence and Belonging. Check out the recording to learn how guilt, shame, innocence, and conscience operate in the brain and body, including the connection between internalized oppression and shame, and where forgiveness fits in.

Here’s a sneak peek:

• Did you know that guilt and shame look the same in fMRIs (pictures of brain activity), but they feel drastically different in our bodies?
• And that guilt often has a protective and connective function, and has been found to lead to repair action tendencies (apologizing, amending, and undoing harm) where as shame often leads to withdrawal and escape behaviors, as well as hostile and self-defensive reactions?
• Have you considered that, while we traditionally believe that our “conscience” tells us what is right and what is wrong, conscience, in practice, actually is a functional strive for harmony with those around us?
• Because assuring our belonging is a matter of survival, we often feel good simply to be in accordance with the norms of our group. This means we can do horrible things (like take children away from their parents) with a clean conscience, and never feel any guilt.