Episode Highlights:
- Tina clarifies the distinction between guilt and shame: "guilt is I did something bad and shame is I'm a bad person because I did something bad," noting that guilt relates to behavior while shame attacks identity
- The hosts share Tina's experience with an unprofessional healthcare provider who made inappropriate comments about her appearance, exploring her conflicted feelings about standing up for herself and requesting a refund
- Michelle identifies guilt as particularly common in the female experience, noting how women are socialized to "don't make a fuss, don't make noise" and be accommodating, leading to guilt when they advocate for themselves
- The conversation explores "overly responsible syndrome" as a generational issue for Gen X women who hold themselves to impossibly high internal standards that others don't expect from them
- Tina shares her strategy for managing guilt through reframing, choosing to focus on how she "probably provided that office a service" rather than dwelling on guilty feelings, and training herself to redirect from guilt to gratitude when her mind returns to self-criticism
Podcast theme music by Dubush Miaw from Pixabay
This episode of the #FeelingsMatter Podcast was recorded and produced at MSR Studios in Saint Paul, MN. No reproduction, excerpting, or other use without written permission.
This episode is sponsored by
FeelWise - bridging the gap between reflection and resilience, offering practical tools to help people overcome obstacles, embrace change, and grow stronger emotionally. https://www.feel-wise.com/
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Episode Transcript
Do you have trouble talking about your feelings. You're not alone.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's a topic that can make even the most powerful
people somewhat squeamish. You're listening to Feelings Matter, where our
mission is to demystify everything about emotions so that we
can all get more comfortable in talking about them. Joining Heather, Tina,
(00:29):
and Michelle as we unpack a new angle on emotions and.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
The psychology of human nature. Feelings Matter. Welcome back to
Feelings Matter. I'm Michelle Stinson Ross and I'm Tina Schweiger,
and I'm having ampton.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Guilty.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Do I feel guilty about that I made a mistake? I?
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Yeah. My spouse wanted to use the car and.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
I said, nope, I'm going to be needing it in
a half an hour, and he was like, oh, okay,
never mind. And then I realized I read the clock
wrong and I actually didn't need it for an hour,
and so I misspoke. It's if there's a feeling of
guilty there, it's a very small feeling, because I don't
feel like there's much anything bad that came out of that,
(01:25):
just as simple honest mistake. You feel guilty about honest mistakes? Yeah,
you can, But guilty in itself is feeling responsible for
run wrongdoing, whether or not the harm has been inflicted
upon another. Feeling guilty is more about me and my
feelings outside of the harms or lack of harm. So
(01:49):
there's a world in which I could feel super guilty
about that oversight.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
I just don't.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
I do think about like when is the last time
I felt guilty if I'd done something that I believe
has caused harm to someone else, or feel like I've
been constantly thinking about past actions, or if I'm remorseful
about them.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
And I think guilty is different than shame.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Shame is more heavy, It's like a lack of I
don't know. I don't have the definition of shame right
in front of me right now, but I know it's
different for me.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
The distinction is guilty is I did something bad, and
shame is I am a bad person because I did
something bad.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, that right there. It has to do with the
difference between behavior and identity.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Yeah, something happened to me this week where I was
put in a position that I had to stand up
for myself and be very direct. I went into a
healthcare provider's office and I was talking to them about
a previous I had a jaw surgery when I was
(02:55):
I don't know, twenty seven years old, a long time ago,
and the provider looked at me and said I must
have had a horse face before this surgery, and continued
to assess my looks. And this was not a cosmetic surgery,
it was an orthodonic surgery. And I was immediately triggered
(03:17):
because it's so unprofessional to say something like that, and
I felt traumatized because I had.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
A family member that would make fun of my bite.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
So it was so bad that I just decided that
I was not going to continue seeing.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
That provider at all.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
And then I had to.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Stand up for myself.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
So what that meant for me in that situation was
telling the office what had happened, letting them know I
wasn't happy, telling the referra who referred me there what
happened so that I could get a different referral and
that they knew what happened. And then third, it was
when I got the survey request for the next day,
sharing my tree feelings with the survey request, and when
(04:02):
I did that, the link didn't work, so I just
replied to the text message, and I basically said, the
only thing that you could do to make this right
is to refund me my consult fee. And then I
said I could go on Google and review this in detail,
but I'd rather not. And I felt so conflicted about
(04:23):
all of that. On one hand, I felt really proud
of myself for being decisive and standing up for myself
and hopefully bringing light to a situation that might have
happened before so that provider could maybe learn something from
it and maybe take that word off of his okay
to say in front of patient's list. And on the
other hand, I felt a little bit guilty because I
(04:47):
was I did get the reimbursement, and I got it
right away, I can tell you that. And I also
felt a little guilty because I did it. Was it
co work, It was I coercive with them. If you
don't refund me the money, I'm going to go put
it all over social media me personally, like I was, like,
(05:10):
that feels a little icky, even though it was probably
quite justified.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
I think that's the guiltiness.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
That's a great example of guilt where somebody from the
outside might look at the situation and be like, oh,
you did the right thing, and you should have told
them that you could put it on Google and they
should be afraid of that. And like, you could line
that whole thing up and say it played out quite well.
But there's a part of me that's concerned that I
was coercive in that I feel a little guilty over
(05:38):
that I'm allowing myself to let that go.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
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(06:04):
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(06:26):
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Speaker 5 (06:35):
Yes, I think bub Michelle and I would absolutely one
hundred percent back you up on saying let that go.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
I think that this is so.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
Indicative of the female experience in general, having conflict and
feeling bad about standing up for ourselves, and it horrifyingly
happens so much in the medical profession.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
And we are constantly.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
Gasline and disbelieved and undermined, et cetera. And so you
are in the most vulnerable position you could possibly be
with a healthcare provider and being they'de feel less is
absolutely unacceptable in any situation. And then you're in a
(07:20):
terrible situation. And so it just goes back to how
we are as women in our society. Just constantly don't
make a fuss, don't make a noise, don't be just
be accommodating, make everything okay for everyone. I would wager
that if this had happened to a man, they wouldn't
have even offered the opportunity. It's give me my money
(07:42):
bag and I'm going to backward to Vidova. There's no like,
you have to do both, there's no option. So we're
just constantly reminded of guilt is a very common ethnic
experience for women in our systets were recovering people pleaser.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah, you nailed it. Something that stood.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Out to me in particular was the definition of guilt
in that you included the word responsible responsibility. Not only
is it something that has to do with us presenting
as female in this particular culture, particularly in the US,
(08:26):
but I think some of this might possibly be generational
because Tina and I are We were both born in
the same year, and we have talked fairly often of
our shared experience of overly responsible syndrome, this elevated level
of responsibility that we feel for the things in our lives,
(08:49):
the way we conduct ourselves, the way we again, the
way we work. I'm a service provider. I deal with
doing things for other people, and I do have an
elevated level. I feel highly responsible around that, and it's
interesting that this sense of responsibility gets engaged along with guilt.
(09:15):
If I feel it, it tends to be around that
did I actually live up to the level of responsibility
I hold for myself? Which is really funny. It's so
elevated that nobody else around me holds me to that
safe standard. This is absolutely my own internal standard that
I'm holding myself to, and therefore I wind up beating
(09:35):
myself up about engaging to the level of responsibility. I
I'm being my own worst enemy in those moments, totally.
So what do we do in those moments of guilt?
You personally said, Tina that I finally made a decision
that I can just let that go.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
I reframed my thinking about the situa because a lot
of emotional issues that come up are as a result
of deciding to dwell on something from a certain perspective.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
I had a choice to continue.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
Dwelling on that whole situation and only focus on that
little bit of guilt that I felt. I could also
choose to review that situation again and say I probably
provided that office as service in the way that they
treat people in the future and feel good about that.
(10:35):
So my choice right now is anytime my mind, like ego,
pops up and tries to niggle at me that there's
a little thing I should feel guilty about, because your
internal family systems and your mother in there just saying
you should feel guilty about this, this is wrong, I
just go, oh, that's I see that, And now I'm
(10:57):
gonna remember the fact that I probably did a service
for somebody and helping shape better and more professional behavior.
So I'm going to be grateful for that instead of
feeling guilty. And every time my mind goes back to
the guilty, I'm like, that's nice, but we're going to
go back over here to grateful. And you would be
surprised at how much you can train yourself to reframe
(11:19):
how you're thinking about memories or things that have been
bothering you, or things that you're worried about in the future.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
That's wonderful.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
And I think also a great question to ask yourself
is if you're guilty, are you needing to make amends
to someone? So in your situation, who would you be
apologizing to and when? If you're like, there's no one
that I need to apologize to you because the doctor
was a jerk and was inappropriate, So I don't need
to apologize to him, what I'm going to apologize to
(11:50):
the staff at the office. What I didn't accuse them
of anything. I didn't do anything bad to them.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
What.
Speaker 5 (11:56):
There's no atoning, there's no amends making that needs da
in this So there are no guilts, there's I let
it go, there's nothing, there's nothing to be done.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Yeah, it wasn't It was a short lived guilt. It
was just a past behavior in past perspective that Michelle
eloquently described.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
There's an opportunity to talk about the mother inside our head.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I would unpack that, Tita.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I know a little bit about your mom, and you
know a little bit about mine. It's it's so funny
because the mother inside my head talks very differently to
me than the mother inside your head.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Oh yeah, I bet.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Oh so sometimes guys a guilt and shame. If that's
being driven by the mom inside your head, maybe you
need to sit down and have a conversation with mom
inside your head and go, you know what, will you treating.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Me right now? Mom?
Speaker 1 (12:55):
That's not cool.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Get in the back of the bus, don't drive it.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
That's a mixtape that is outdated, and you can stop, yeah,
pushing play on it.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It doesn't serve you anymore.
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