How Do You Deal With Guilt Without Falling Into a Shame Spiral?
Guilt shows up on both sides of this work. Parents who grew up with emotionally immature parents feel it when they snap at their own kids. Adult children feel it when they set a boundary, skip the visit, or stop caring for a parent who hurt them — and again, differently, after that parent dies. I asked Dr. Lindsay Gibson the question directly, and Dr. Sherrie Campbell answers it from the other side. Here is what they said, with the moment in each conversation where you can hear them say it.
Dr. Lindsay Gibson: guilt points somewhere. Shame just sits on you.
The question: "How do we deal with the guilt without falling into a shame spiral?"
Gibson's distinction is practical. Guilt, over something you actually did, comes with "some positive direction and action to take" — it tells you to repair. The shame spiral is the guilt collapsing inward: "Oh my gosh, I did something hurtful. I did something wrong. They must hate me. Things will never be the same again. They'll never trust me again." She calls that the eternal now of trauma feelings — the child mind that can't see how anything resolves.
And the spiral doesn't even stay private. Stay in it, and the person you hurt ends up feeling pressure to comfort you. "So, the shame spiral is not your friend. It doesn't mean that you're a really good person because you're feeling so bad about it."
Her move: "Guilt is good. Sometimes guilt teaches us. Guilt shows us the way to that right next step." Hold on to the guilt as the motivator to fix things — and speak to the part of you that's drowning in shame the way you'd speak to your child: "You are not a bad person. You made a mistake."
▶ Watch her answer (at 2:17) Full conversation
Dr. Lindsay Gibson again: the guilt that comes after they're gone.
Asked how people handle the guilt that arrives after a parent has passed, Gibson says something plainer: "The guilt that people feel after their parents have passed — you're going to have that no matter what."
Her explanation reframes what the guilt is. After a trauma, everybody looks back for the moment they could have controlled — if only I hadn't said that, if only I had told him. "The reason that you're feeling the guilt is because you had so little control," she says. "Your subconscious mind is trying to manufacture something that you did have control over." Guilt, in other words, is the mind preferring a story where you failed over a story where you were helpless.
So don't argue yourself out of it, and don't torture yourself with it either. "We can grieve that, we can feel guilt about it. But when you start torturing yourself with it, I just beg you to remember" — you are trying to get back a sense of control that couldn't have existed under the circumstances.
▶ Watch her answer (at 25:54) Full conversation
Dr. Sherrie Campbell: most of this guilt is programming, not information.
The question: "Why do I feel guilty setting boundaries with my parents?"
Campbell's answer starts with a diagnosis: "Any guilt that you have for setting boundaries — which again are designed to keep people in your life — would be maladaptive guilt. Meaning you're feeling guilty for something that you're not doing wrong."
Setting a boundary, she says, is doing something right, by you and by them: it tells people exactly what they need to do to stay in your life. So where does the guilt come from? "We feel guilty because we've been programmed to feel guilty. We've been programmed to believe that we are not allowed to have any boundaries with our parents, and that is just not true." Her practical warning: expect discomfort, and expect a toxic parent to be offended — their reaction is the allergy to the boundary, not evidence you did something wrong.
▶ Watch her answer (at 7:40) Full conversation
Dr. Sherrie Campbell again: the guilt of not showing up at the end.
On caring for an aging parent who hurt you, Campbell applies the same test. Protecting yourself from a parent's behaviour — including at the end of their life — "is not a crime... and that's not something that you should feel guilty about. That would be maladaptive guilt. You protecting you should never be looked at as you're doing something wrong."
She speaks from her own ledger: she did not see her father before he died and did not go to his funeral, after his last words to her were violent and threatening and he had many years to mend it. Other people's opinions, she says, shouldn't carry weight here: "They didn't walk a moment in your shoes in that relationship."
▶ Watch her answer (at 22:08) Full conversation
Where the two of them land
Between them, Gibson and Campbell hand you one test: did you actually do something wrong?
If you did, guilt is a compass, not a verdict — Gibson's version. Feel it, take the next repair step, and talk to the shamed part of you like a child who made a mistake, because that's what it is.
If you didn't — you set a boundary, you protected yourself, you declined to be hurt again — Campbell's version applies: the guilt is programming installed by the very people it protects, and it is not information about you.
And if the guilt arrives after they're gone, Gibson's third answer holds: it isn't evidence at all. It's your mind buying back a feeling of control at your own expense.
Not sure whether your parent is emotionally immature? Take the free assessment: https://www.theacademyofselfhelp.com/assessment
Dealing with a parent like this day to day? The Emotionally Immature Parent Survival Guide: https://www.theacademyofselfhelp.com/survival-guide
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