Seeing Guilt for What It Is: Motivation to Change

Floating on a cloud of alcohol-infused revelry, British student Chris Moore and three university friends made a fateful decision: They stole a car and drove it home, drunk. Instead of making it back, they crashed into a group of cyclists, killing one, wounding others, and leaving Moore seriously injured. The totality of the experience changed the trajectory of Moore’s life. “I felt this incredible shock, that mass combination of emotions, obviously the horror of what had happened,” he told The Guardian. “The massive regret of what we’d done.”

“There isn’t a simple story in terms of what the emotions were,” Moore says. “It was just a roiling mass of different negative emotions. That’s why I think of guilt as being complex, because all of these other emotions were tied into it.” Because some of those feelings propel us to the work of repair, healing, and transformation, guilt – unlike shame – can be a good thing, Moore says. Informed by the work of US social psychologist Roy Baumeister, Moore views guilt as less of a moral question and more about felt damage to relationships, along with empathy for those harmed.

“So there’s anxiety, which is the fear that our relationships, or something we care about, has been harmed in some way. There’s compassion, sadness or empathy that we feel for the person we might have hurt, and there’s anger at ourselves for what we may have done,” he explains.  When there’s too much self-directed anger, it becomes shame, “which is the idea that you’re a bad person, not just that you did a bad thing,” he says. Shame makes us hide from relationships rather than fix them. But when healthy guilt forms, “you realize you have responsibility, and that you need to make amends in some way. You feel that anxiety, but that motivates you to try to heal the relationship rather than to run away from it,” Moore says.

Moore is now a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and has worked more than 40 years as a psychology researcher. He was able to heal because he was buoyed by forgiveness from those he harmed, including the other injured cyclists and the family of the man killed, along with uncharacteristically vocal reassurance and love from his parents. 

“I didn’t come out of it with shame,” he said. “I didn’t think I was a bad person. I thought I was, at the time, a stupid person. I’d done a stupid thing, drunk too much, agreed to get in a car that wasn’t ours, with somebody who was not capable of driving. But it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.” 

But not all stories are like Moore’s, and sometimes self-forgiveness “is really the route to healing,” he says, especially if amends can’t be made. Moore was able to complete his studies following one year of suspension, and later complete his PhD.Plus, he didn’t have to pass a criminal background check, which isn’t always the case now. 

Criminal records have a disproportionate impact on low-income people, Black people and other people of color in the US – even small crimes can shut out opportunities for life. Moore’s vision of guilt as social, about relationships, means that he believes restorative justice should be further prioritized, “because it puts relationships at the heart, and says that crime is an offence against individuals, but also the community, and we need to think how we restore those relationships in society.” 

This value also extends to his ideas about collective guilt and collective responsibility to repair past transgressions. Specifically on the question of reparations for the UK’s role in slavery, Moore is skeptical of individual attempts to avoid responsibility: “You’re saying, for the purposes of this issue: ‘I’m not part of the group, I’m an individual, and I had no responsibility for it.’ The question is: did your group have responsibility for it? Did the UK as an entity, as a collective, a nation, have responsibility for it? And if they did, then there is a reasonable debate to have about reparations.” That said, Moore acknowledges it’s tough to settle upon a solution. 

In a world where leaders impetuously inflict war and pain upon others with impunity, Moore returns to guilt’s truth and utility. “I think there should be more attempts to keep our relationships strong, whether those relationships are at the individual level, or whether they’re larger scale in terms of societies,” he said. “A functioning life, and a functioning world, is all about strong relationships, and the point of guilt is to strengthen and manage relationships.”