Shame and guilt

[saraemerald]

I have been experiencing aweful feelings of shame and guilt off and on that causes knots in my stomach. When I feel this way, it then turns into anger and frustration and feeling I cannot blame my problems on anyone else but myself. This has started ever since I began to obnoxiously sabotage my life. I used to be a nice person, with a positive and idealistic attitude, I loved helping people and volunteering in the religion I used to be a part of (Jehovah's Witness) and then I suddenly stopped being positive and stopped relying on God and starting ruining any positive feeling I had and started making myself feel miserable and even making myself feel guilty almost intentionally as if to ruin all the progress in my life I had made over the past decade.

 

[F_uckYourselves]

I'm not a religious person so forgive me if this sounds clueless, but let's say for the sake of argument that what you're saying is true and you are indeed the cause of all your own problems. Do you think the God that loves you would want you to go on shaming and blaming yourself for it? Or would he (it?) want to see you forgive yourself and begin to heal?

 

[Lola Nocheprieta]

Hi, @saraemerald. I struggle with shame and guilt, too, terribly, and I suspect that many of us on the forum do as well. Do you have a T? Are you talking about what you are ashamed of?

My T says that the antidote to shame is to do the opposite action, that is, to tell someone whom you know will be supportive exactly what it is that you are ashamed of. We are our harshest critics, but there are many people here who will not judge you, who will accept you and not reject you. That is a healing experience to tell your darkest, most shameful secret to even one other person, someone who then hugs you (if you accept hugs), tells you you are not alone, and that they don't care, they don't think any less of you, in fact, they are proud of you for sharing!

Have you talked about this with your T?

Good luck, saraemerald! You are not alone!

 

[saraemerald]

I am a very stubborn person and it's very hard for to accept things. My mom was an insane woman and had post partum depression that was untreated and was recently diagnosed with physcosis. When I was younger and moved out from home, I wanted nothing to do with my crazy family and I was terrified that if I didn't do something to fix myself and be the best person I could be and be a good person with faith in God according to my psychotic strict religion, that I might become crazy like my family. I never acted insane, I was very self aware, I kept myself busy, educated myself about PTSD and family dysfunction, etc. I learned how to manage my PTSD symptoms and anxiety and to function at work, school and church. (Jehovah's witnesses have extremely intensive scheduled that takes a lot of time and effort and studying and preparation for all required meetings and volunteering) I knew how to care about people and be there for people that needed help, etc. I knew how to distance myself from crazy people and toxic people, knew how to take care of my and take care of all my responsibilities in my life. I forced myself to work as hard as I could and go to school so that I wouldn't have to rely on welfare or food stamps. I was proud of myself for doing all that with full-blown PTSD symptoms. I remained positive even when people in my life were not supportive and caring to me when I when on a holistic healing spree. I healed most of my symptoms and I was so excited and happy.
Then after volunteering in a foreign language for the religion for awhile, I was tired because I was taking care of a sweet elderly person and my cousin was suicidal and so I was trying to be there for her when possible.
So I came back to my congregation I grew up in.

 

[saraemerald]

When I came back to my home congregation, I was hoping my friends in my congregation would notice that I no longer had PTSD symptoms and that I was in a better place in my life and was happy. One of my friends noticed and was not happy for me.
So I'm not exactly sure why but, around this time, I was recognising I was feeling so good but I was unhappy that I was still single and so I was naively just trying to remain positive and have faith in God. There was this guy I liked a lot And had for a couple years And so I was trying to stop thinking about him and move on. And then this is when I suddenly wanted to feel my actual feelings but could not, so I thought maybe I was so positive because I was always relying on my faith in God. And I was kind of upset that it seemed because of my strong faith in God, that no matter what happens in my life, I'm always so positive about it and I never screw up my life and make bad decisions in my life because I always pray to Him for direction in my life and strength. So I suddenly found myself trying to push away 'God's holy spirit', because I wanted to be on my own with my own feelings, not some positive faith in a God. So instead of the normal positive thoughts that helped me push through my PTSD and hard times in the past, I suddenly thought the exact opposite. Instead of thinking positively that I will be a good mom one day and rise above the abuse in my childhood, I told God, I will not be a good mom and I will be abusive to kids just like priests are to kids.

 

[saraemerald]

The last couple sentences in this last post is my big ugly f#=king secret.
After that happened, I forced myself to feel guilty and to focus on that thought and then to make myself feel like I am the worst and sickest person ever. After that, I wanted to die. I could not live with myself and then I became angry with God, because I had done EVERYTHING required by the religion on a regular basis, and had tons of love in my heart and then this happens. I was tired of people seeing me as the sweet, naive, good girl, and I wished more people had more compassion and less snottiness and less judgement. I wished so bad people knew how hard I had worked to get to where I did before this ugly thought. I wish people didn't think I was just a sweet naive girl, but that I had endured some pretty tough st#t and becaue of all the st#t I had endured, that's why I was a "good girl", became I was scared of making mistakes. And plus, I wanted to be nothing like my parents.

 

[saraemerald]

Right after I thought that, I asked God for forgiveness. But I felt like I could not go back and then I thought the thought again and then I just felt like God was gone. I was confused about what I had just done in a matter of a few minutes and felt that I could never feel chaste or innocent again. Then I became angry with God, and I was thinking that, no matter how hard you try to be a good person, because we are sinners, we will f#%k up and always need God's forgiveness and that seems unfair to me because I guess we should all just humble ourselves and admit we will always need a God to help us live our lives. Like aren't we good people on our own and don't we doo good things wi5h our own strength without having to pray to a God everyday to do it properly?!
And I am such an imperfect person that I would think the most horrible thought on purpose, so that I can push God away so that I can feel my own feelings without being "positive" and "have faith in God all the time"!?

Does any of this make sense?

 

[saraemerald]

I feel like nothing will ever make me feel any better about what I did and no matter how much I try to analyse it, I will never figure out why I did it. This is what leaves me with horrible anxiety on a regular basis and I can't seem to forgive myself or ever be OK with it and continue living my life.
And yes, I am seeing a therapist. She is about the 10th therapist I have been to since this happened.
I wish someone on here was able to understand what I did and understand it somehow.

 

[saraemerald]

To clarify this more so I don't sound like a complete psychopath:
I don't remember if this happened any earlier that this but I do remember in my late teens, around the same time my PTSD symptoms flared up for the first time, I started suffering from intrusive thoughts and fears. They caused me so much distress, they made me feel like I was dirty and messed up. I figured I must have these thoughts because of all the abuse I had suffered. So from then on, I did all I could to get rid of them. I would try to think of something nice instead, keep myself very busy and preoccupied all the time or pray to God or read a scripture or try to focus on the fruitages of the holy spirit. What gave me hope was knowing that I didn't want these thoughts in my head so they did not represent me, they must be as a result of abuse I endured.
So I never told anyone about these intrusive thoughts and I figured I would just do everything I can to forget them. Because I became a very religious Jehovah's Witness and that ended up occupying much of my time, the thoughts were under control and eventually no longer bother me and instead of me feeling like something is terribly wrong with me, the more "spiritual" I became, the better I felt about myself.
But that one day, that I reacted weird to trying to stop obsessing about this guy I liked and move on, I sabotaged myself by thinking a sick thought on purpose to push God's holy spirit away from me and I have not been OK ever since.
I even made my situation even worse and unbearable by confessing this thought to two elders in my congregation. Doing that didn't make me feel any better though and from then on, I started making dumb obnoxious decisions with my life that only made me feel worse and from then on, I felt there was nothing that could ever make me feel better so I got to the point where I felt I could not live with myself and just wanted to die.

 

[saraemerald]

Since then, I've tried therapy, meds, eating healthy, self help books, etc and nothing seems to help. Although, I am noticing EMDR seems to be giving me some hope.

 

[saraemerald]

I wish someone could read my post that can relate to it. I feel so alone and feel like no one else has ever experienced this. I feel like my story is weird and pretty messed up.

 

[saraemerald]

And to me, what makes this worse and different from other OCD sufferers, is I thought this particular thought intentionally, so that it would make God withdraw his holy spirit from me, so that I could feel my actual feelings on my own, without him. Because (if this makes any sense), whenever I go through something that others would cry about, I never did because I always relied on God and his holy spirit to get me through, so I was always positive, :/ , which after awhile can get really annoying because then I'm not really in tune with how I really feel about something.