Turning Shame into guilt

Thanks to the incredible book Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, I have found a much clearer understanding of how a direct discussion of Shame is the missing ingredient to all the concepts that I have written about up to this point. Shame is the glue that has held all of our Default, Unconscious and Unhealthy patterns in place. It is incredible the correlation between Shame, Codependent Traits and being run by the Overly Critical voice. If it is not clear, I highly recommend you read Daring Greatly, as well as Codependent No More. Both books are applicable to everyone because we all carry shame, and we all have some codependent traits.

The goal that I am proposing is to turn our Shame into Guilt.

As Brené Brown explains so clearly, the difference between Guilt and Shame is:
Guilt = my ACTION
Shame = my Character Flaw

Guilt: What I do.
“I messed up.” “What I did was really bad.”

Shame: Who I am.
“I am a mess up.” “I am bad.” “I’m not good enough” (Aka “Imposter syndrome.”). “I’m a failure.” “Something is wrong with me.” “I’m broken and cannot be fixed.” “I’m a loser.” “I don’t belong.” “I’m unlovable.”

Mistakes:
Guilt operates under the belief, “Everybody makes mistakes. Mistakes are how we learn. Am I learning though??”
Guilt leads to recognizing our Mistake in Action, and correcting it when we are Accountable.
Accountability = learning from my mistake and accepting the consequences for my mistake.

People “hard-wired towards Shame” do not understand that the error was in their Action. When they make a mistake, they are immediately triggered to their original Shame self-talk (“I am bad.” / “I am not good enough.”/ “I am a failure.”).  As  Brené Brown explains, a person hard-wired towards shame is not going to authentically admit they made a mistake due to the fact that they do not understand that this is even an option. They have been trained since the beginning of their lives to (mis)interpret a mistake as a character flaw. So instead of facing their deepest wounds when an error occurs (“I’m a mistake!”), they minimize it, blame someone or something else, give an INauthentic apology, avoid addressing it by ignoring/ hiding, or “Gaslight” you: Lie that it happened and attack you (“I didn’t do that! Are you losing your mind?!”)

Let me be very clear: I am not condoning the above behaviors of a person who is hard-wired towards shame and refusing to be accountable and learn from their mistake.
Everybody can rewire themselves from Shame. They may need to seek professional help, but they are capable of learning how to learn from their mistakes. (Sound familiar from Caretaking and Emotional Caretaking?)

When we can recognize that our Action was bad (not we are bad), we can break our Default thinking, face our deepest fears and free ourselves from the shame spiral we consistently fall into.

We must first Catch ourselves in our Shame-Thinking to break ourselves from our Unconscious patterns.
Then we need to remind ourselves this is not who we are, but what we DID.
Correcting one's actions warrants forgiveness. If I am learning from my mistakes, "I am allowed to forgive me/ I am allowed to be forgiven."