Notes from our conversation
Definitions
Academics don’t always use words in the same way as the rest of us and sometimes define things differently than the dictionary. This can cause confusion! So we began by talking about what we understand guilt, shame and related emotions to mean, and introduced how psychologists and philosophers use them in some of their writing about eco-guilt and shame.
Guilt is the bad feeling we get when we’ve done something wrong.
Shame is often interchangeable with guilt in everyday speech and that’s how most of us understood it. Shame is also associated with judgement and other people’s standards.
Eco-guilt and eco-shame are the bad feelings we get when something they’ve done, or not done, has harmed the environment.
Remorse or regret comes from feeling responsibility and sorrow about something. It can linger.
Inadequacy is feeling bad that we aren’t doing enough about the situation. It can be a feeling of hopelessness and powerless. It’s hard to avoid given the state of the situation we’re in with climate change. It might not be something we can change.
Ambivalence is commonly understood to mean not caring one way or another. However, ambivalence means being undecided, feeling more than one way about something or seeing both the pros and cons of a situation.
Are guilt and shame the same thing?
In common use, guilt and shame can mean the same thing – feeling bad about something you’ve done. For the academics whose work I read while preparing this topic, guilt and shame are related but different. Guilt comes from our judgement of our actions. Guilt also requires an ability to put ourselves in someone else’s position in order for us to understand that we have done harm to them. For psychologists and philosophers, shame is different to guilt because guilt is about something you have done and shame is feeling bad about who we are, our identity our self-image. This makes shame very threatening. Shame happens because of something someone else, or society generally, says is wrong or shameful.
Can guilt and shame be constructive?
Some of the researchers and writers I read in preparation say yes, but it’s complicated. Eco-guilt can motivate people to change their actions in the future or to make amends. Eco-shame may lead people to reflect on their view of their world and their relationship to nature. But both emotions are distressing to experience. And both can lead to defensiveness or eco-paralysis.
How do we respond when we feel guilty?
Answers from our conversation:
- withdraw
- apologise
- offload the reasons for guilt
- feel resentment
- suppress it or block it out
- feel anxious and sad
- ruminate on what happened
- feel heavy inside, a knot in my stomach
- doing something to atone, but it’s reactive not particularly thoughtful or helpful
- tears and distress
- horror, thining “how could I?” “why did I do that?”
- justifying what I did and making excuses
Inadequacy
In the second conversation, we talked more about inadequacy and how that made us feel.
- “There’s nothing I feel I can do”, it’s so overwhelming it freezes me. Then I feel more inadequate.
- The scale and speed of the crisis is too much.
- I can’t meet the standards I have for myself.
- Do the people who do loads for the climate still feel like this?
- Does everybody feel like this? Surely everyone who understands what’s happening does?
- Hopeless
- Not able to think of any solutions
- Powerless
- I feel so ill-equipped
UR3OK
In the second conversation on eco-guilt we looked at an idea from Dr Thomas Doherty for coping with feelings of ambivalence around lifestyle decisions, for example taking a flight, and considered whether it was a strategy that could help us when we felt stuck.
Dr Doherty is a psychologist and this is a model he uses to help patients. He talks about it on his podcast with Dr Pinu Pihkala.
U is for understanding, the impact of the activity and the social context you are living in.
Rs are for reduce, reuse and recycle, but also refuse and resist if you like!
O is for offsets
K is for kindness for yourself and others
Offsets are controversial as not all schemes are genuinely useful. Dr Doherty has produced a webpage with his approach for navigating situations where you have mixed feelings about doing something, or feel stuck with doing something for now, that you know is bad for the planet. You can read more, including advice on using offsets here.
Our conclusions
These are the comments we made at the end of the first session.
- I need more time to think about it.
- Thinking about our collective identity and collective shame is something we’ve lost. Can we keep the benefit of having shared morals without harming individuals?
- Public discussion of the rights and wrongs of climate change seems to be lacking.
- We found it hard to define.
- It’s complicated there are lots of different ways of thinking about it.
- We can all relate to all these climate emotions: eco-guilt, eco-shame, ambivalence, remorse and inadequacy.
- We all have a physical response as part of feeling guilt and shame.
- We’d like to revisit this topic in the future and talk more about the different potential reactions to guilt and shame.
Sources
These are the items I looked at while preparing for the session.
🎓 Aaltola, Elisa. “Defensive over Climate Change? Climate Shame as a Method of Moral Cultivation.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 34, no. 1 (February 27, 2021): 6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-021-09844-5.
🎙️ Climate Change and Happiness. “Season 2, Episode 25: Flight Guilt and Other Emotions about Travel.” Accessed August 9, 2023. https://climatechangeandhappiness.com/episodes/season-2-episode-25-flight-guilt-and-other-emotions-about-travel.
🕸️ Doherty, Thomas. “UR3OK.” Accessed August 9, 2023. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/616e2e995b4bbe6b41d9fb45/t/64cac4feecb9bc5188b833c1/1691010303036/Dr-Thomas-Doherty-sustainbale-self-How-to-Use-Carbon-Offsets.pdf.
🕸️“Guilt,” August 2, 2023. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/guilt.
🎓 Pihkala, Panu. “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions.” Frontiers in Climate 3 (2022). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154.
🎓= academic work
🎙️= podcast
🕸️= website