Guilt and Shame in Recovery
You just made a mistake. How do you respond?
Someone feeling guilt may say: “Oh, that was not what I wanted to do. I feel bad about that choice. I need to make it right.”
Someone feeling shame may say, “This is just another example of me not being enough. I’ll never be perfect; I’m never going to make it through this. I must be a bad person.”
Shame shows up a lot in recovery, more than most people may acknowledge or even admit. It doesn’t arrive with a big announcement. Shame can just slip in. Chances are, it happens when you’re doing something 
mundane and then, boom, you’re thinking about something you said or did all those years ago and how bad of a person you are because of that action. It can be incredibly uncomfortable, and you might even feel like others are still judging you for it. It can be easy to equate shame as a sign that change hasn’t occurred at all. But that’s not how it works. Shame tends to hang around you for a long time, even when your life looks very different from how it used to. Metaphorically, shame is like a shark looking for an easy meal. Shame is generally just a choice or a few away, lurking, and waiting. Waiting for those moments where you are tired, bored, complacent, feeling down, or lacking direction. Shame is that voice that whispers, “What’s the harm in it?” or “Nobody will know,” or “No one will be affected by your choice” or “Just this once,” because as soon as you make that choice and after the dopamine (i.e., high, pleasure, escape, etc.) has passed, shame is there. Shame focuses on the worst moments and acts like that’s the whole picture.
Most people don’t behave perfectly when they’re struggling. That’s not news. However, shame has a way of ignoring everything that led up to those moments. This complicated feeling doesn’t care what you were going through or what kind of pressure you were under. It doesn’t care if you were scared, overwhelmed, stressed, or exhausted. Instead, it only pulls out the parts that hurt to remember. And because shame doesn’t give you the full story, it’s easy to let it define who you think you are. You are not that single incident or multiple of incidents. You are you, not your choices. While those choices may be moments that you’re not proud of, shame doesn’t have to define your story in recovery. But the truth is simple: one period of your life can’t explain everything about you, and it doesn’t define your recovery either, even if you’re in the early stages of sobriety.
People try to push shame down because they’re afraid that acknowledging it will make everything worse. It usually does the opposite. Talking about your personal struggles with someone you trust often makes those feelings of shame feel smaller, more manageable. Often, people may also reciprocate your vulnerability and share their own challenges or rough chapters, too. Shame tells you your situation is unusual, that you’re alone. But it’s not unusual, and you’re not alone. Everybody makes mistakes, and it’s not all your fault. But some things are. Being honest about what happened isn’t the same as excusing it. Honesty is just honesty. It’s nothing more.
Shame and guilt in recovery
One thing people struggle with is believing they’re allowed to rebuild their identity. Shame likes to argue against that. It tells you that change doesn’t count because your past is still there. And in early sobriety, this gets even louder, because you’re trying to figure out who you are without all the old habits, and it feels like you don’t get to change anything yet. But identities shift all the time. It’s not unusual. It is not dramatic. It’s just what happens when you learn new ways of dealing with life. This is also where inner resilience becomes important. It might make sense to focus on creating strength within yourself because it helps you see the progress you’re making, even on days when things feel slow. These tiny improvements in how you respond to stress or handle conflict matter more than people realize. They’re proof that things are changing, even if you’re taking baby steps. This further shows shame doesn’t have to define your story in recovery, because, as you grow and develop from your past self, you take control of your story, your choices, and your life.
There’s this idea in the world that being kind to yourself means you’re not taking your recovery seriously. When you think about it, on the other hand, does being harsh help anyone stay consistent? No. It usually makes people want to quit. Of course, self-compassion and self-love aren’t about pretending everything was always fine. Most of the time, it’s about saying, “I’m working on it,” instead of, “I’m terrible.” In the end, recovery needs stability to succeed. If there’s one thing it doesn’t need, it’s punishment. You’ll always make better decisions when you’re not constantly pulling yourself down.
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Where does the shame come from? Believing you are bad because you made a mistake is often something you learned when you were a child, likely between birth and eight years old. You may have learned it later, in your teenage years. Shame may have once been a protector for you–protecting you from the feelings of embarrassment or vulnerability required to admit making a mistake. Perhaps you didn’t have parents who tolerated mistakes or expressed their love to you. In these cases, shame often comes from the lessons you learn from others, including your parents, about your worth and value. In these situations, you may have experienced trauma, or childhood trauma. Here is hope, in a therapeutic method called EMDR. In this intervention, we target those distressing memories from childhood to both desensitize their impact and then to create new beliefs about yourself. In these circumstances, people will often turn to substances, smoking, video gaming, gambling, pornography, stealing, shopping, and other distracting coping strategies to “numb out” from their situation–to avoid feeling the associated emotions (i.e., I am worthless; I don’t deserve love; Love is conditional). Desires to numb out become choices. Choices can become habits and habits can become unhealthy or ineffective habits Unhealthy or ineffective habits can then become addictions.
When you begin on the path to recovery, you will likely experience situations that activate feelings from the past, shame, or feelings in the present. Where you once turned to your choice substance, you must now choose a different way to maintain your journey. Unfortunately, recovery isn’t predictable. Some days you feel steady. Other days, everything feels harder than it should. That doesn’t mean you’re back at the beginning. It just means you’re human. Shame tends to exaggerate setbacks and relapses. It takes one bad day and turns it into a story about failure. But noticing a slip is actually part of getting better at catching yourself. It’s not a sign that nothing has improved. You have improved, and you are still improving. Every day. Even if it doesn’t always feel like it, every day that you go, that you continue your battle, is another day won.
Ever feel tied to your old self? If so, it’s important to know that letting go doesn’t mean ignoring the consequences. Similarly, moving forward doesn’t mean pretending nothing ever happened. It just means you’re not repeating it. That you refuse to repeat it. And, in reality, there’s nothing irresponsible about that. You’re allowed to change how you think about yourself. Believe it or not, you’re allowed to build a life that isn’t shaped entirely by the hardest moments. You’re allowed to keep improving without constantly proving you feel guilty. And you don’t need to feel guilty to be worthy. You only need to be yourself, whatever version you choose.
Shame will always have something to say. It’s persistent. It doesn’t get tiring. But it also doesn’t know everything about you. Shame doesn’t have to define your story in recovery because it only focuses on the worst parts. Recovery pays attention to the whole picture. The long-term effort. The willingness to try again. The quiet, steady progress that’s easy to overlook because it doesn’t make a big scene. You’re still building your story. That’s what matters. You can write it and rewrite it as many times as you want. Shame is just one opinion, not a conclusion. You are the one holding the pen.
