Two feelings with one name

Go back to the milk, and to the two sentences available to the adult at that table. "You spilled the milk" describes something that happened a moment ago and is already finished. "You're so clumsy" covers the past and the future, and a child can't fetch a cloth for what she is.

Psychologists who study this give the two resulting feelings different names. Guilt is the feeling that you did a bad thing. Shame is the feeling that you are a bad thing. In ordinary speech we mix them up all the time, and "I'm so ashamed of what I did" might mean either. The researcher June Tangney and her colleagues have spent decades separating them, and the separation matters because the two feelings push people in opposite directions.

Guilt is uncomfortable in a useful way. It's focused on the act, so it points at things you can do. You apologise, you fix it, you pay for the window. People who are prone to guilt tend to take responsibility and to feel for the person they hurt. That makes sense, because their attention is on the other person and the damage.

Shame is focused on the self, and that changes its whole character. Your attention swings away from the person you hurt and on to how you look and what you are. The body wants to get small. The face heats up, the eyes drop, and you'd like the floor to open. People who are prone to shame tend to hide, to deny, and quite often to get angry and blame someone else. In a review of the research, Tangney's group found shame linked again and again to those outcomes, and guilt linked to repair. A separate analysis that pooled 108 studies found shame tied to symptoms of depression more strongly than guilt was.

This cuts against the common idea that shame is what keeps people decent. On the evidence, the feeling that makes people put things right is guilt. Shame mostly makes people protect themselves.

I should be fair to shame here, because the research isn't all one way. A flash of embarrassment when you've let someone down is normal, and it passes. There's also evidence that shame can push people towards improving themselves when they believe the failure can be repaired. A 2015 analysis of 90 samples found that split. Where repair looked possible, shame went with constructive effort. Where it didn't, shame went with withdrawal. So the trouble lies with a particular kind of shame, the kind that has no way back in it.

That gives us a working definition of shaming, the act. Shaming is a message with some or all of these features.

• It's about what the person is, and the event has dropped out of view.
• It carries contempt. The tone, the eye-roll or the sigh says the person is beneath the speaker.
• It often has an audience, or threatens one.
• It offers no way back. Nothing the person could do would end the matter.

The fourth feature is the one that research points at. "You're clumsy" can't be repaired. Neither can "you've always been selfish" or "I don't know why I bother with you". The person on the receiving end has been given pain and no job to do with it. I take that to be what people mean by toxic shame. The feeling has nowhere to go, so it stays.

A short exercise, worth two minutes. Think of a time you did something wrong and felt guilty about it, and recall what you did in the following hour. Now think of a time you were made to feel ashamed, small and exposed, and recall what you did in the hour after that.

My bet is that in the first memory you moved towards someone, to apologise or explain or make up for it. In the second you moved away. You went to your room, or went quiet, or got angry, or made a joke and changed the subject. If that's right, you already know from the inside what the studies found. You also know what your own shaming does to whoever receives it.