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• ‘You know, there’s no shame these days,’ said one old woman wistfully to her friend as I stood behind them in the post office queue. I confess to eavesdropping to gain some clue as to what might have given rise to the comment. I never did find out, but it set me pondering the role that shame and guilt play in our lives.
  
  Although close neighbours, these two concepts seem far from one and the same. Guilt arises from something bad we have done or some good we failed to do; whereas shame has less to do with behaviour than with who we are, or more accurately, who we believe ourselves to be. Consequently, I suspect guilt is the easier to overcome: apologies can be offered, reparation made, until we, and those around us, feel justice has been done and forgiveness can be bestowed and embraced. But the burden of shame feels a more indelible stain. Like lettering through a stick of rock, you can nibble away at it all you wish, but it remains stubbornly present to the very last inch. And the experience of shame leaves a sour taste that makes us shrink and hide away inside.
  
  Shame and guilt both have their uses in terms of social control and conditioning. I grew up at a time when it was generally regarded as shameful to be gay, out of work, a divorcee, or conceived/born ‘illegitimate’. The consequent whispering, finger pointing, and worse, played its part in inhibiting individuals’ behaviour or at least pushing it underground. An early supervisor of mine liked to argue that guilt is simply the price we charge ourselves for doing what we want. She may have been right, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stop feeling guilty.
  
  As a spiritually minded non-Christian, having lapsed as a Catholic by the age of five, I am fascinated by the ritual popularly known as ‘confession’. Cheaper and quicker than psychotherapy, the rite of confession offers potential for similar relief via the honest coming to terms with one’s self, and by creating the ability and opportunity to move on anew (depending, of course, on whether the penitent can accept and embrace the premise on which the entire ritual is founded). Of course, blame, shame, guilt and forgiveness are also fascinating themes in therapy. I sometimes tell clients, ‘You weren’t born that way’ (ie labouring under a yoke of shame). But neither were they born bearing positive self-esteem. I suggest we were simply ‘born’, with needs and an instinctive urge to satisfy them; but also with an inner propensity towards making relationships. And as the months and years pass, we gain a growing sense that those relationships can reward as well as punish and frustrate us. Working out why that is, and untangling who does what to whom, forms the basis of much in psychotherapy.
  
  The second creation story in Genesis sheds some light on the subject of shame. Adam and Eve, playing spontaneously in their Eden garden, (predictably) do the one thing that they were expressly forbidden. Discovering them later hiding in the bushes, their creator confronts them. ‘We were hiding because we are naked!’ they grudgingly admit.
  
  ‘Who told you, you were naked?’ God asks, and they confess to having eaten of the tree of knowledge, then set off on the merry-go-round of the blame game, each pointing the finger at the other, at the serpent and at God himself.
  The story teaches that shame is intrinsically tied up with our knowledge/sense of self, and it makes us shrink away from the light rather than blossom and open up. I would argue our sense of self is derived in large part by how others treat us, and in turn helps form our prevailing expectations of self. No, we weren’t born that way.
  
  I was on a train and sitting across the carriage were two belligerent young men, swilling cans of lager and making disparaging remarks about a woman who had just moved away down the carriage, presumably to escape their attentions. Horror of horrors one of them also had his Doc Marten booted feet on the seat opposite. At one point I made the mistake of glancing across disapprovingly and one of them caught my stare. ‘What’re you f***ing looking at?’ he snapped, clearly spoiling for a fight. I made no reply, just buried my head, shamefully, in my newspaper. I was relieved when they got off at the next station. Those two old ladies were wrong, shame is still alive and well in our society; it’s just felt in different places these days.

• Kevin Chandler is a therapist, supervisor and author of Listening In: A Novel of Therapy and Real Life.