Hey,
It a great idea to journal everything you feel in these moments so that the way you process the sin you’ve caused others has been documented before and throughout—so you can go back to it, expand on it, refine it and even categorize information regarding your personal blocks (physical addictions, emotional addiction, etc.), Male/female addictions/triggers, potential causal emotions identified, causal, etc. I like to think of it as doing research, where my soul is what I’m investigating, and God along with Jesus, Mary and our divine guides are our scholarly sources.
It might be best to get other opinions on the matter, but what’s really gonna help is getting a better grasp on your soul and its condition so you can connect with God—less intellect and more soul experience. Pray and pray and pray. Here goes:
Sandina wrote:2. Then emotionally experience & feel ALL of the damage we did to others or ourselves while in our
addictions and façade
Here are some things that come to mind that I use that you might find helpful to consider—and attempt to feel as you go:
You basically chose to hurt others rather than work out the reasons your pain was driving you to do so. You wanted to hurt them. You didn’t want to take responsibility before or during those moments you caused harm to that person. You knew that you were harming them but chose to do it anyways. You used substances, people, created events, etc. to help you avoid addressing the injuries in yourself that caused you to harm people that God loves just like you. Up until this point, you haven’t really wanted to take responsibility for the choices you made that caused them harm—which they’ll eventually have to forgive you for. The harm that you caused them may have motivated them to sin further and harm others. You are contributing to spreading sin and the degradation of the souls of others. If you didn’t harm them it’s possible they wouldn’t have caused as much suffering in others. They will suffer the results of your sin against them until they connect with their hurt self and make the effort to forgive you. By not releasing sin, you cannot love yourself. You haven’t loved yourself while you have a desire to harm others. If you truly loved yourself you would work on releasing sin every chance you get. The greater the desire to release sin, the greater love for oneself. All of the pain you have in your soul is a measurement for how much you love yourself. When you’re harming others you don’t care about the condition of your soul. Etc.
Investigating these further, developing your own, and keeping a record for future use may help to get the repentance process rolling with future desire.
Sandina wrote:3. Then emotionally experience & feel ALL the emotions associated with the reasons why we made the
choice to hurt others or ourselves rather than feel our own original hurt
Here are some questions that hopefully strike a chord within regarding our reasoning:
First and foremost, is my heart open? How open? What do I want from this person that I’ve harmed? Should they have to give me what I want? What did it feel like when I wanted to hurt them because I wasn’t getting what I wanted? Did it feel good to hurt them? Did it feel good after? What if everyone felt good about hurting me after? Am I punishing myself, or making a real effort to work through this issue? Am I angry about the actions they took? Am I afraid of what would have happen if I didn’t violate them? Am I afraid of the actions they took and may take in the future? Am I totally over people taking these sorts of actions? How badly do I want to control certain people? Am I ashamed of them and the actions they took? Embarrassed? Am I judging them? Am I judging myself for having these feelings that must be felt? What judgments do I have of them? Am I aware that I still project these judgments at them? Am I aware that I will continue to project these judgments at them until I sort out this issue? Am I okay with them feeling this pain I’d like to have towards them? Do they have any idea that the way I feel about them effects the way they currently feel about me? Do they have any idea that the way I feel about them may be causing them to feel the same way about themselves? Am I being selfish here? Was I afraid with what may have happened had I not stepped in and took action? Do I still feel my actions were justified? Do I feel like I need to be angry still? What’s this anger about? How do I feel about anger in myself? How do I feel about anger in others? Am I okay with releasing anger? How am I using this anger? Do I want to protect myself with this anger? Do I want to keep people at a distance with this anger? How do I start again? Am I making any progress wanting to hold on to this anger? Do I want to feel the actual emotion driving my desire to remain angry? Can God help? Should God help? Is there a demand coming out of me towards God to help? Am I desperate for God? Am I angry God isn’t making it clear? Why is this process so difficult? Is it really worth going through all of this just to repent this one sin I’ve committed? Do I feel helpless, or am I being arrogant? Lazy? Untrusting? Would I rather have someone else do the work for me? Am I judging myself for feeling this way? Can I just feel these feelings without judging myself? Is this the facade? Do I prefer the facade? What is the actual feeling I want to avoid? Do I feel ashamed about something? How badly do I care about the judgments of others towards me as I practice finding an effective form of humility? etc.
Sandina wrote:4. Then recognize & emotionally experience & feel all of the feelings of hurt which we created in others
& ourselves due to our choices to avoid our own original hurt
This phase should serve us in getting us closer to the actual feelings of repentance:
What emotions hit me at my core in part 3? There are very uncomfortable emotions that came up in part 3 of this experiment, am I open to feeling every single one of these emotion that came up? Which ones do I not want to feel, and what thought, memory, person, event, etc. triggered these horrible feelings. What emotions were most difficult for me to feel regarding what I created in the person I harmed? What emotions were most difficult for me to feel regarding what I created in myself? Careful not to judge these emotions—which is facade.
Part 3 was a process where we were able to recognize all of the emotions associated with our preference to sin over taking responsibility over what we’re creating, and part 4 is the process where we’ve discovered the emotions we don’t want to feel and experiment with feeling those. In other words, we’ve developed a pretty good idea at this point what our blocks are—the emotions we prefer over others—and we’re now aware of the feelings we want to avoid. As we go into the feelings we want to avoid, our blocks will most likely interfere. Dealing with the blocks is recognizing the addictions, not giving them to ourselves, and feeling how badly it feels to not give ourselves these things (thanks Jesus). Even in repentance and forgiveness we will be dealing with addictions.
In my experience, to get to the cause of why you want to harm others, you’re gonna have to make some attempts to forgive the people who’ve harmed you—the childhood causal emotions you want to avoid. Repentance is a great way of identifying these emotions and identifying the people who chose to degrade your condition in the past—also a segue to causal (childhood) damage.
Hope this helps, it is quite a web. God is always available when we’re truthful about the damage we’ve caused.
Writing this helped me a lot by the way!
Matt