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I don’t know what has caused this, but I feel a tremendous sense of guilt about the way I treated some people when I was in my 20’s — over 30 years ago. A couple women, in particular, who loved me, and whose love I took for granted. Eventually I broke up with them and really hurt them. I suppose I still love at least one of them down inside somewhere, so it hurts even more to know that I broke her heart to the point she said she almost resented me. I know the atonement is supposed to cover these kinds of infractions if we repent. And I think the state of my heart is one of repentence. If given the chance to do it over again, I wouldn’t have been so harsh and cavalier about the love they showed me. It’s truly a gift when someone loves you, and if it’s unrequited, it should be communicated in a kind way. I can’t very well contact them to apologize as they are apparently happily married now, and a call from an old boyfriend wouldn’t be perceived as welcome by their spouses, I am sure. Further, it was so long ago that they have probably moved past it.
But back to the area for which I need support.
For me, the atonement has never left me with that feeling of guilt lifted like Enos in the Book of Mormon. I never feel at peace about the mistakes I make unless I somehow process the mistake myself, coming to terms with it. I never feel any external support from God when I pray for forgiveness.
So, that part of the gospel message never worked for me.
How about you? Do you feel the atonement brings you peace after you feel guilt about mistakes you have made? Is it an involuntary feeling that comes after heartfelt repentence? What triggers it? Or do you continue to feel guilt about things until you put the effort into cognitively refuting the need for guilt given your repentence, independent of God?Guilt and peace are felt differently by different people. For me, I prefer to frame it in terms of hope. I think people can continue to feel bad / guilty / remorseful / etc. and still accept the Atonement, as long as they at least hope for the best for themselves and others.
I think that different people have different life experiences and that affects their religious viewpoints. There was one church father that was always obedient and felt that to make the choice to be obedient was always within his power.
There was another church father that lived fairly rebelliously as a youth until he felt God calling him to church service later in life. This church father popularized the idea of inescapable grace and that humans are powerless to please God until God chooses to empower them through His grace.
Both of these church father were hugely influential.
I share this because I have my experience but I also recognize that others can have a very different experience.
In my experience, I have never felt my sins lifted from me. I feel quite similar than I do with any bad choice that I am resolved to never do again or a bad habit that I want to change. It involves work and self-improvement.
OTOH, I have had an experience where I felt completely loved and accepted by God.
If I were to build a religion based on this latter experience, It would probably be one that downplays sin and God’s wrath etc and rather that God encourages us to do right because of his love for us AND his love for everyone else. More gentle encouragement and never giving up – less hellfire and brimstone.
Something that has helped quite a bit for guilt/regret for me is the thought that, at the time of whatever it was, I did the best I could with what I knew or who my character was at the time. If I were to go back as the person I am now and relive something, of course I would do things differently, but that’s because I am current me and not past me. Future me will probably look back on current me and would do things that I’m doing now differently as well. With that thought, I find it a little easier to be self-forgiving. Bringing in the atonement, the thought that everything will be made right in the end helps for those moments were I wasn’t up to being the person I should’ve/could’ve been.
Thanks for those thoughts. It helps just to have a place to talk about it. I think that in order to overcome this sense of guilt, I am going to have to do self-administered EMDR therapy on it. As I said previously, I feel nothing when I pray, no sense of forgiveness, no guilt lifted. I think the only time I’ll really feel the effects of the atonement in this regard is when I stand before God and get judged. At that time, I’ll know whether the atonement actually worked in my life.
I posted about EMDR therapy at another time here on StayLDS. I reiterated it below the line of asterisks below.
Anyway, I believe that if I’m going to overcome this, I’m going to have to put the work into it with EMDR.
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It stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Basically, you wear a set of headphones that creates a beep in each ear, one at a time, while you hold vibrating “buzzers” in each hand that match the lateral stimulation of the beeps in your ears. The name is presumably from the fact that originally, patients would move their eyes from left to right in response to a light flickering left to right. But it has evolved into alternating buzzes and vibrations with the advent of specialized equipment.
Here is all the different equipment therapists use for it:
https://neurotekcorp.com/https://neurotekcorp.com/” class=”bbcode_url”> Here is a YouTube video that provides bilateral stimulation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k2HMSIxK0khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k2HMSIxK0k” class=”bbcode_url”> For some reason, unknown to mankind, while in this state of lateral stimulation, the brain reprocesses disturbing memories in a positive, healthy way. That is the mystery of it. You can do it with a therapist, or you can do self-administered EMDR. I started with a therapist and then my benefits stopped funding the therapy, so I got a book on self-administered EMDR. Over the period of a couple months, I processed a lot of past “disturbances”, using my journal as the place for reporting/reflection/reprocessing. It was highly effective to the point that many of the church experiences that caused me angst are now considered “dealt with”. I don’t feel that I need to go through them again with people like I did before the experiences were reprocessed. I reprocessed both church and non-church experiences that caused me unhappiness. That is one reason you never hear me talk about them here any more — I have dealt with them. It doesn’t mean that I am back on TBM terms with the church — not at all — but it means the experiences are no longer suspended in “disturbance space” but are resolved and put to bed. Here are a few of them, although I did about 10 different experiences:
1. The two YW leaders who had me punished by priesthood leaders.
2. The Stake Presidency that ignored me for months after I asked to be released as HPGL.
3. The Stake President who kicked me out of his office when I came up with a funding solution so I could get on a mission.
etc….
I have been unwilling to do more EMDR until recently for a few reasons. One, it sounds easy, but it’s actually quite a bit of work. It involves journal writing if self-administered. It’s emotionally draining to be neck-deep in experiences that were emotionally traumatic. But it works.
I think these reasons are why I have shied away from applying it to this guilt-inducing situation. I also think I have some residual love for one of the women given challenges in my marriage over the last 30 years.
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PazamaManX wrote:
Something that has helped quite a bit for guilt/regret for me is the thought that, at the time of whatever it was, I did the best I could with what I knew or who my character was at the time.If I were to go back as the person I am now and relive something, of course I would do things differently, but that’s because I am current me and not past me. Future me will probably look back on current me and would do things that I’m doing now differently as well. With that thought, I find it a little easier to be self-forgiving.Bringing in the atonement, the thought that everything will be made right in the end helps for those moments were I wasn’t up to being the person I should’ve/could’ve been.
This part in bold makes a lot of sense, and I suspect it would be part of the cognitive reprocessing I will do in EMDR therapy. I can think these things as I feel the guilt, but the emotional sensations don’t seem to disappear until the processing happens during EMDR therapy.
PazamaManX wrote:
Something that has helped quite a bit for guilt/regret for me is the thought that, at the time of whatever it was, I did the best I could with what I knew or who my character was at the time. If I were to go back as the person I am now and relive something, of course I would do things differently, but that’s because I am current me and not past me. Future me will probably look back on current me and would do things that I’m doing now differently as well. With that thought, I find it a little easier to be self-forgiving.Bringing in the atonement, the thought that everything will be made right in the end helps for those moments were I wasn’t up to being the person I should’ve/could’ve been.
Yes, I imagine that compared to God we are all as toddlers running around telling the other toddlers how to do things the “right” way. for me, this context brings added meaning to the phrase, “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
When I answer questions like this I don’t always get a lot of love. In a nutshell, I put my church related guilt in the trash where it belongs. (IOW, I let it go and now the song is stuck in my head.) A part of rebuilding my faith has been related to my relationship with God. As others have noted I have not ever had a “your sins are forgiven you” moment but also like others I have had the “I love you” assurance. I should note that I have not sought forgiveness from God in a long time either because I don’t believe that’s what God expects. As I have testified in other threads, I believe the price has been paid and forgiveness is absolutely free for me (and everyone else). More recently my understanding of what sin is – and isn’t – has become much clearer. I will credit Terryl and Fiona Givens for this (especially in All Things New) but they really only confirmed what I had already come to believe (I appreciate the confirmation though). Generally I will say that in rebuilding my faith I came to recognize that the church uses fear, guilt, and shame as tools to keep people in line doing their will when indeed those things have no part in God’s gospel. If they don’t exist in the gospel then I have no use for them and they are not a part of me.
What an interesting topic. I’ve tried at least 4 different responses & deleted them all. My takeaway is that Guilt must be learned beginning as a child.
My conclusion is that dealing with & overcoming guilt must also be learned.
For me, I deal with guilt in different ways. By guilt I mean anything that interferes with interpersonal relationships.
Here are ways that I deal with guilt, forgiveness and the attempt to heal relationships.
1. Face to Face. This is the best way because I receive immediate feedback.
2. Write a letter, email or text message. The feedback is not as immediate.
3. If I think a response would do more harm than good, I do nothing. I then try not to repeat the same mistake.
When I was a teenager, I got into a lot of trouble. As a result, I inflicted pain on my parents, my brother & sister.
I graduated high school & college. I joined the church, got married, had children. Life moved on.
We never really had a conversation about my teenage years & I carried the guilt around with me.
My wife & I were Stake Missionaries & taught the principles of the gospel including repentance & forgiveness before baptism.
I thought I understood what these principles meant but I continued to carry around my guilt.
A couple years before my mother died, she came to stay with us on vacation. During her visit, she reminisced about her life &
raising her children. She made the comment that she never had any trouble raising us growing up. I then tried to
remind her about the trouble I got into when I was a teenager. She looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language.
Then she slowly remembered what happened and she said, “oh Michael, that was nothing”. In that moment I knew that she
not only forgave me but, completely forgot about it many years ago. In the meantime, I carried the guilt around with me.
You can tell so much from looking another person in the eyes when you talk to them. I wish it were possible to do that when you
took the sacrament. There has to be so much you could learn by just looking into the eyes of the Savior.
Minyan Man wrote:
She looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language.Then she slowly remembered what happened and she said, “oh Michael, that was nothing”. In that moment I knew that she
not only forgave me but, completely forgot about it many years ago.
What a gift she gave in those 5 simple words!
Who among us would take pictures of our children at their worst and frame them in the living room as a constant reminder. We take pictures of our children at their best and remind ourselves of how far they have come. I like to believe that this is how God sees us.
Isaiah 43:25 (NIV),
Quote:“I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”
This verse seems to suggest that God “blots out our transgressions” at least partially because He wants to (for [His] own sake). He wants to remember the good!
Minyan Man wrote:
You can tell so much from looking another person in the eyes when you talk to them. I wish it were possible to do that when youtook the sacrament. There has to be so much you could learn by just looking into the eyes of the Savior.
That is such a wonderful thought. Thank you for sharing it.
I wonder sometimes, why some of us feel guilt & others don’t seem to have a problem with the things they’ve done? Take for example: Bernie Madoff or Ted Bundy. Maybe come times it’s due to the number of times they do the offense &
other times it’s due to the rewards received.
It would be interesting to take a psychology class on the topic of guilt.
Minyan Man wrote:
I wonder sometimes, why some of us feel guilt & others don’t seem to have a problem with the things they’ve done?Take for example: Bernie Madoff or Ted Bundy. Maybe come times it’s due to the number of times they do the offense &
other times it’s due to the rewards received.
It would be interesting to take a psychology class on the topic of guilt.
I think it has its roots in empathy. If you can’t feel what the other person is likely feeling, there is no real trigger for guilt. Lack of empathy and therefore remorse seems to be a common thread in the psychological analysis of narcissists and psychopaths.
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