When you see an action that you’ve done has caused harm, you should feel shame and loathing — not shame and loathing for yourself, shame and loathing for the action. That’s an important distinction.

 "We have this inbred difficulty of looking at our own actions, but that’s precisely what the meditation is: looking at your own actions. It’s not so much self-purification as action-purification. It requires that you see your intentions and the actions and their results. Often these are things we don’t like to look at. Sometimes it’s just simple dishonesty. Other times we don’t like to look at these things because we don’t know how to handle what we see. How can you look at your mistakes without getting all tangled up in self-hatred, self-frustration?

This is where the right attitudes come in. Look at those instructions the Buddha gave to Rahula. He said that when you see an action that you’ve done has caused harm, you should feel shame and loathing — not shame and loathing for yourself, shame and loathing for the action. That’s an important distinction. Shame around the action means that you realize you’re a better person than that. You shouldn’t have done it. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. If you don’t feel shame for actions like that, there’s a problem.

But he also says you shouldn’t get tied up in remorse. Notice a mistake, realize it was a mistake, and then resolve not repeat it. That’s all you can do as a human being immersed in time. You can’t go back and change the action. And you can’t compensate for the action by beating yourself up in the present moment.

This is where a lot of us have problems. We may have picked up this attitude from our families or our surroundings. It’s hard to say nowadays what kind of culture American culture is, but when many of us grew up, it was a guilt culture. Somehow we feel that feelings of guilt are who we really are. It’s where we sense ourselves most intently. There’s a rightness about feeling guilty, about feeling miserable. When we feel well, it doesn’t feel true. It doesn’t feel real. That’s an attitude you’ve got to unlearn.

In the beginning, it doesn’t mean that you wipe the attitude out, just that you notice when it comes and you try not to identify with it. Tell yourself, “This is a feeling, this is an attitude that’s come up. Exactly how useful is it?” Well, watch it. See it as a process of cause and effect, in and of itself. Especially the long string of comments that comes along with an attitude: “I’m a horrible person. I’m a miserable person. I’m a no-good person” — whatever comes up. Learn how to listen to those voices without siding with them, without believing them. Just notice, this is what happens when you cultivate this attitude. This is all the self-destructive stuff that comes along with it. And it’s not necessarily true. Certainly not helpful.

And you don’t have to identify with these things. You don’t have to believe the remarks of self-hatred any more than you have to believe any overestimation of yourself. In fact, it’s best if you get the ideas of “self” out of the picture entirely, leaving just the question of action purification: training your actions, developing your actions in the right direction right now."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Self-Hatred"