Guilt: The Feeling About What We Do

Drawn from several Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversations with Dr. Chip Dodd, edited and arranged into a single article.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed here originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

Big D-O: Guilt Is About Doing

Guilt is one of the eight core feelings, and it is the feeling you have whenever you *do* something. Big D-O. Guilt always requires an action, or a premeditated plan, that goes against your true heart — against who God made you to be. It is the feeling we have when we do something that causes another person harm.

That is what makes guilt different from shame, and the difference matters more than almost anything else in this territory. As Dr. Chip Dodd puts it, "Shame is about my being; guilt is about my doing." We seek forgiveness for the things we do. We never, ever need to seek forgiveness for how we are made. Toxic shame is always saying, *forgive me for how I'm made* — and that is a request that can never be granted, because there is nothing there to forgive. Healthy shame says something entirely different: because I'm made like this, there's a high chance I'm going to harm you, and when I do, let me know. When I can see it and come to my senses, I'll tell you I'm sorry.

And here is the beauty of it: actions and premeditated experiences *can* be forgiven. You can say, I was wrong to do that, and I'm sorry — and mean it, right down to the part where you admit you meant to do it. Give me myself back. Please give you back to me. That is a huge thing.

Without Empathy, There Is No Guilt

Guilt doesn't come out of nowhere. It grows out of healthy shame, which is what allows a person to develop consciousness of self, and consciousness of self is what turns into conscience of another.

It works something like this. I'm a self, you're a self, you and I are the same. We go along in the world — tree, squirrel, turtle, *person.* You smell like me, I smell like you. I bet if somebody pinches you it hurts, because when somebody pinches me, it hurts. And that reminds me not to pinch you, because I don't like it either. Then one day I go ahead and pinch you anyway, and you get mad and you cry, and I say, I know what that's like, I'm sorry — instead of, *that shouldn't hurt, what are you, a baby?*

The only skin you are ever going to walk in is your own. So the work is to walk in it well: to name what's happening inside you and stay conscious of who you are and what you feel, so that you can care about yourself. You can't give what you don't have. I can hear about you not because I know what it's like to be you, but because I know what it's like to be me. The more sensitive I am to being human, the more I can care about you. That's called empathy, and without it there is no such thing as guilt — no such thing as recognizing damage I've done.

Which means healthy shame leaves us with a sensitivity to a hard fact about ourselves: I am capable of decisions and actions and thought processes that carry harm in them, or intent to harm. I'm capable of making mistakes. I'm not God. I don't have all the answers. I need you, and you need me.

The Judge With No Jury

The counterfeit of all this is toxic shame, and it deserves every bad word said about it. Picture a judge standing over you for being human. You should have done this, you should have done that, you didn't do this, you didn't do that — but I'll be merciful, I'll let you try again. So you accept the sentence of trying again, out on some kind of probation, and then you fail again, and the judge is right again, and eventually you say, just put me in. That is contempt for yourself as a human being.

The tragedy is that there's a judge and a person being judged and there is no jury. Toxic shame doesn't allow a jury. And what is a jury? A jury of your peers — a jury of empathy, mercy, conscience, consciousness. *I know what it would be like for me if I were him.* That's what allows a right sentencing instead of a verdict of worthlessness.

Scripture says there is no condemnation, and that there is no getting away from God — no height, no depth, no distance, no width. God's love is all in. So if the voice condemning you isn't Jesus, and isn't God, and isn't really you, who is it? It's the toxic shame, whoever owns it and wherever it came from: *you worthless, no-account piece of junk.*

Toxic shame holds on because it promises control. If I do better, become more, then I'll be in charge. A person hanging on to that hasn't yet admitted they're powerless over life, so they keep demanding the world fit their schema — which means becoming greater and greater and greater, or drunker and drunker and drunker, or smaller and smaller and smaller. The people at the top live with the secret that if you really knew me, I wouldn't have this place. The people at the bottom hide in holes so deep they can't be known, in order to survive. Nobody escapes neediness.

Coming to Your Senses

The lost son came to his senses. He came into need — *what am I doing?* But notice that his waking up was not yet a full confession of his true heart. It was still a plan: I've got to get out of here, here's what I'll tell him, here's how I'll act right. That's still toxic shame and shamelessness at work. And the father told him he didn't have to do that. Don't act right. The grace is sufficient; I'm just glad you're home. Then the older brother went haywire in his own version of the same thing, and he was given the same offer: come back and be loved as you are.

Real guilt is different from making a plan to look better. Real guilt sounds like this: I did something I possibly meant to do, I regret having done it, and now will I have the courage to admit my human actions in the hope that another human being will grasp my sorrow in their own sensitivity and give me mercy. I said mean things to you, and then I woke up and thought, if that were me, those words would have really hurt. So I go and admit it — I meant to say what I said, I did it because I hated you for whatever I thought you were doing, so I made you pay, and for that, I'm really sorry.

Hiding Out Instead of Crying Out

Guilt is meant to lead somewhere, and where it leads is out of your own head and into another person's world. It's one thing to dare to face it and feel it toward yourself — the man in the mirror. It's another thing altogether to walk outside the house and say it out loud to God, to yourself, and to another human being.

That is running toward the very thing that makes us want to run away. Most of us spend our lives running from what we don't want to feel or face or, as we say, *relive* — though there's no such thing as reliving, because it's gone. It's remembering. And the great paradox is that when we finally remember, the remembering remembers us. It puts us back together.

Moses told the people that what God asks of you is not up in the heavens, so that you'd have to build a ladder and climb to it, and not across the sea, so that you'd have to sail out and fetch it. It's in your mouth and in your heart. It's already in you to be spoken. Choose life. So it's a strange thing that we spend our lives hiding out in order to avoid crying out. Telling the truth about yourself to another person is a highly organized cry out: can you hear where I've been and what I've done? Can you accept me while I expose losses and regrets I've long believed there was no mercy for? Most of us go in expecting to be judged and expecting God to judge us, and instead we find kinship. We bump into somebody who knows what we're talking about, and who shows us a God who meets us where we are and relieves us of having to be God ourselves.

It helps enormously to do this with the right person — someone with humility and courage. Humility means they don't run from facts, reality, and truth; they seek justice, and because they believe God has done for them what they could never do for themselves, they love mercy. They know we're made of dust, and they believe in restoration, so they walk humbly. Courage means full-hearted participation: they'll admit their limits, but they're showing up. They can't fix it for you, but they aren't running from it. They have the qualities of a grown-up.

Repentance: The Capacity to Return

There is a word for all of this, and it has been badly abused: repentance. Along the way of trying to make myself a god, protecting myself, rejecting the love and care of others — which is exactly what toxic shame does — I have harmed people. To turn away from that and turn back toward how I was created, to go home again, is repentance. My penance, my paying the price of suffering, is over, and I turn around and face a person who can help me see that another way of living is actually available.

Put it this way: healthy shame is the inborn capacity to live fully human, and guilt is the capacity to return to being fully human again.

Repentance is not a pill. It's a gift we've been given to live daily. It looks like the daily personal inventory — a short list of my actions: where I need to say I'm sorry, where I need to say I'm hurt, and where I need to say, man, I really did well there. That kind of practice runs directly against our instinct to look for some system outside ourselves — an institution, a government, a religion, some other structure — to fix the problem for us. The alternative is one person to one person. What do I need to address in my life for me? Who do I need to address for me and for them? How do I need to live differently? If we truly turned away from our demand that something else be responsible for us, and became responsible for our interior world and the actions that come out of it, there would be a great deal of change. The world may never change. But I can be changed in it, and do what I can to affect it.

A Feeling That Sets Us Free

There isn't much room for genuine guilt in our society. In a culture where there's no higher authority than how you make me feel — and where I get to decide what you make me feel — even the church struggles to translate the difference. Because we talk about toxic shame and never learn to speak of healthy shame, healthy shame ends up sounding hopelessly uncool, and guilt right along with it. And plenty of us have sat through services where people claimed to be teaching healthy shame and were simply shaming people, calling it humility when it was nothing of the kind.

But guilt, rightly understood, is not a downer and not a punishment. It's doing unto others as I would have them do unto me, once I've come to my senses, come to my feelings, come to my heart, come to my neediness. It is the door out of hiding and back into the human race — which is a people group, not a competition. What we're sure will be curse and death when we let go of it turns out to be life and prosperity.

Guilt, then, is a feeling that sets us free.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the guilt module. Or explore all eight feelings.