NT Experience

“I have hurt the group; I am at risk of exclusion; I feel the group’s pain.”

In NT people guilt is a reflection of how others view them: specifically that others feel they have harmed a relationship or violated a social norm. Guilt is the emotion that they feel and the mechanism that triggers their signaling and social repair.

My Experience

“I have violated a rule, broke something, or caused a failure. Logic dictates a taking steps to restore the original state, if possible.”

Although I might say “I feel guilty about X” where X is something that I did, I am not feeling the same emotion at all. In reality I feel Regret that X happened and that I caused it. I can apologize for it and attempt to make it right. If I performed X and knew it was wrong, I would “feel” bad about myself: I violated my own Ethics. Except that is not Shame, again, it is a form of regret that I committed this violation.

If I can rectify the problem, e.g. I broke something and replaced it with something as good as or better, my feeling goes away. The ledger is cleared.

Guilt is more a type of regret where I feel I have some culpability. It is a label on the regret rather than an emotion.

Comparison

In this case the trigger is something that both the NT person and I have done, but the type of action is likely different. I won’t know (or care) about social gaffes due to my lack of Social Salience – I will only recognize violations of my ethics (including damage to equipment). NT people typically feel guilty about how they made other people feel. If they break a tool they do not feel bad about the damage, they feel bad about how they made the owner of the tool feel and how the owner perceives them.

That overlap in trigger is pretty thin and the rest of the experience is totally different.

In both cases the “guilt” feeling does trigger reparative work, though even the nature of that differs. I risk confusing NT people by using the word “guilt” when I don’t mean what they mean.

Much like Shame, I can’t really feel guilt.

Semantic Divergence: yes.

Survivor Guilt

Survivor Guilt is an affective response where an individual feels responsible for a negative outcome they did not cause, simply because they did not share the fate of the victims.

In NT people there are two basic mechanisms at play:

• Shared Fate - because of Social Salience the brain sees self as a subset of tribe. If the tribe suffers and the self does not there is a symmetry violation.
• Social Debt - the brain interprets survival as taking a resource or failing to protect the group, which leads to Shame.

Although I haven’t been in a situation where I think survivor guilt would apply, I don’t think I can experience it – neither of those triggers will affect me. Self is an independent system. My own survival (lack of negative outcome) is a positive value and the death of others is a negative value. These are logically independent, assuming I was not at fault for the incident.