BLOG
The key difference between guilt and shame is one of identity.
If shame is "I am a bad person", guilt is "I have done a bad thing."
Rather than collapsing your entire identity into a mistake you've made, you can recognize that there is a difference between your behavior and your person.
You can do a bad thing without being a bad person. You can make a mistake without it meaning anything about who you are.
If you've been thinking that a conflict is just a fancier way to frame a fight, I think you're right that a lot of people are using it that way right now. Like, I'm pretty sure Gwenyth Paltrow would only have conflict and never a fight.
But they're actually two very different things with two different purposes and personally, I think BOTH of them are useful in relationships.
Being with someone in grief is not intuitive and it’s not a skill that most of us have anymore. It's been lost as we become more and more isolated into our nuclear families. Grief is uncomfortable in its intensity. Being around grief reminds us of our own pain and thank you, but we’d really rather not. It’s much more comfortable to dismiss it, sugarcoat it, or fix it than it is to let it be.