Thoughts on Guilt vs. Shame

(This is a comment I threw together in response to a video from Cwic Media:)

The Church's Emotional Resilience class has a wonderful diagram on page 32 - illustrating the difference between "Worth" and "Worthiness". Our worth to God never changes, but our worthiness fluctuates.

I believe guilt and shame both point at the two different things.  As mentioned by the quote from Elder Bednar, guilt has to do with when we feel our worthiness has been set back or we have been distanced from the Lord.

But, as C.S. Lewis and Elder Bednar wonderfully taught, we are dual natured creatures - both spirits with a seed of divinity but also inhabiting the bodies of creatures made of fallen material.  These creatures have instincts that help it survive and spread it's offspring, through things like being aware of the social hierarchy and therefore being able to have a sense of if actions help us be higher or lower in the social order, but also a failsafe that will encourage an individual near the bottom of the social ladder (or is in very poor health) to isolate or even self-sacrifice for the good of the species or the "tribe".

Although our eternal worth is fixed, our biology evaluates our "worth" in terms of social hierarchy, which fluctuates based on comparison to other creatures in the "tribe" / culture.  And anytime we experience that intuition of feeling that our biological worth is threatened or lowered compared to the proximal creatures our biology is exposed to around us, we experience the sensation of "shame".

Now, in religious cultures, the two can often overlap - things that could impact our spiritual worthiness also could threaten our social status, so we could experience both guilt and shame.

Shame can be a tool of the adversary or our vain ambitions to get us to run and hide or avoid confessing our sins because we don't want word to get out, (or how we want to feel about ourselves - i.e. the cancer of pride).

Statistically, women experience a high degree of baseline negative emotion, (i.e. "trait neuroticism" in the "Big 5 Model").  There is a high correlation between those who are high in trait neuroticism and those who have a much greater predisposition to shame, (usually because their biology has a survival strategy much more dependent on relying on others and thus hypersensitive to where their position is in the social hierarchy or anything that might threaten it).  Unfortunately, I believe that many are so hypersensitive and predisposed to shame that they throw the "baby out with the bathwater" and try to attack any standard of worthiness that might trigger feelings of guilt that slip into shame.  (Often, these people also identify themselves as "empathetic", "allies", or "woke" and seek after a type of Jesus that is all love and no standards, i.e. "Teddy Bear Jesus").

I believe this is kind of what Elder Bendar talked about learning to be agents instead of objects, and Elder Oaks talks about how the atonement is there to help free us from all forms of emotional bondage and how our "strengths can be our downfalls").