Michael Breslin considers the place of guilt in a healthy personality.

The Many Faces of Guilt by Susan Auletta

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The goal of this article is to demonstrate the place of guilt in a healthy personality. First what do we mean by a ‘healthy personality’ and ‘guilt’. According to Sydney M. Jourard and Ted Landsman inHealthy Personality(1980), “the term healthy personality is used to describe those ways of being that surpass the average in actualization of self and in compassionate relationships with others.” I would add that a healthy personality requires being responsible enough to make decisions about the direction of one’s life, and having the courage to live with the consequences of one’s choices and actions. Guilt, meanwhile, is “the experience of self-loathing that arises when a person transgresses [their] own moral principles” (Ibid, p.130).

By this definition, the feeling of guilt is unique to human beings, as animals do not have moral principles that they might loath themselves for transgressing. It is an important, if not vital, emotion, and is essential in the formation of ourselves. Willard Gaylin, MD, expresses the importance of guilt in his book, Feelings: Our Vital Signs (1979): He says that guilt “is the emotion that shapes so much of our goodness and generosity. It signals us when we have transgressed from codes of behavior which we personally want to sustain. Feeling guilty informs us that we have failed our own ideals… Guilt is a form of self-disappointment. It is the sense of anguish that we did not achieve our standards of what we could be ” (p.52).

So one experiences the feeling of guilt when one fails to live up to one’s own ideal expectations. In this sense, guilt serves as an indicator of how someone can become more: it helps determine what needs to be corrected in the self so that the person might continue in the process of attaining a healthy personality.

Guilt & Shame

It is important to distinguish guilt from another emotion often confused with it: shame. The feelings are similar in that they serve as guides for acceptable and non-acceptable behavior for the individual. However, they differ in an important aspect. Whereas guilt is an internalized and personal feeling, shame occurs when one’s wrongdoing becomes publicly known. Gaylin explains the distinction between guilt and shame in this way:

“Both facilitate the socially acceptable behavior required for group living, both deal with transgression and wrongdoing against codes of conduct and are supporting pillars of the social structure. But whereas guilt is the most inner-directed of emotions, shame incorporates the community, the group, the other, directly into the feelings” (p.56).