How to deal with shame
We’ve worked with thousands of people who have committed sexual offences and have experienced guilt and shame. These feelings are normal and feeling guilty can help make sure you don’t engage in harmful behaviour in the future. However, shame can be incredibly difficult to cope with and can lead to feeling overwhelmed and hopeless, which can prevent you from moving to an offence free life.
Here are some techniques you can use to manage your feelings of shame.
Accept responsibility for your mistake
Facing what you have done is the first step toward forgiving yourself. Don’t make excuses or try to justify your actions.
See this as an opportunity to learn and grow as a person. Identify where you could have done better and make a plan for how to handle similar situations in the future. This can help give you the confidence that you won’t repeat your mistakes.
Talk about your feelings
It can be really helpful to talk to someone else about how you feel. Other people are often good at challenging you or pointing out things that you do well. They will see the whole person and not just the behaviour. By sharing how you feel, the emotions can become easier to manage. If you need help with talking about your thoughts and feelings, visit our opening up to others module.
Find an emotional outlet
Making changes in your life can cut down on negative emotions, but it won’t eliminate them. As you make changes in your life to reduce negative emotions such as shame, you will also need to find healthy outlets for dealing with these emotions, for example:
- regular exercise provides an emotional lift and an outlet for negative emotions
- meditation can help stop you from feeling overwhelmed
- finding opportunities for having fun and getting more laughter in your life can also change your perspective and relieve stress.
Find a few of these outlets, and you’ll feel less overwhelmed when having negative emotions.
Work on your self-talk
What you say to yourself in your mind is called self-talk. It can have a really great impact on your self-esteem and confidence.
When we feel shame, it can be difficult to see the good things about ourselves and our lives. The shame spiral can make us only focus on the negatives. We might, for example, expect others to only think badly about us. It is important to get yourself out of the spiral.
One way of doing this is to recognise your negative thoughts and balance them with a more realistic view. To do this, remind yourself of the positives about yourself and your life. Make a list of things you like about yourself, things you are good at, things you have achieved, and things other people like about you. It can be useful to carry the list around with you and look at it when you feel shame. Keep adding to the list and keep reminding yourself of the positives.
