Quote:
Originally Posted by Skeezyks
I wish I had some suggestions for you. Well... I guess I do have one. It's the Buddhist practice called "compassionate abiding". And it's my go-to practice for intrusive thoughts, compulsions, & other troublesome things in my life. It's not a cure. But it is a way of dealing with thoughts, urges, etc. that bother me.
Basically what I do is to simply allow the thought to be there (because it already is.) I breathe into it & perhaps smile to it. I may even place a hand over my heart as a sign of acceptance & compassion for whatever it is that is troubling me. And then I just allow the thought to fade at it's own pace (which doesn't generally take long because my mind is always leaping from one thing to another.) Here's a link to a mental-health-oriented description of the practice:
Relieve Distress By Allowing It: Compassionate Abiding 101 | Mindset: Perspective Is Everything
Let me just add however that if the things you listed in your post are the worst you've done, from my perspective as a truly bad person, you haven't even gotten off to a good start yet. But I don't mean to belittle how you feel about the things you mentioned. My personal non-professional opinion would be though that how you feel about the things you did has more to do with depression & perhaps low self-esteem than it does true badness. Here are links to 2 articles, from PC's archives, that (hopefully) may be of some help:
Breaking Free from the Bonds of Badness
How to Stop Punishing Yourself
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Wow, the 'breaking free from the bonds of badness' is exactly what I needed to read, thank you. I think I'll need to read it about a thousand times, lol, but just realizing it's a common enough thing for someone to write an article about exactly the way I'm feeling is somehow comforting.
I don't actually feel bad about any of the stuff on that list. Well. I do feel really conflicted about the disability stuff. I wouldn't hire me, bc I have memory problems, which causes flakiness and inconsistent abilities (one day I can bake a gourmet cheesecake, next day I can't boil an egg w/out burning it) plus the pain - so realistically, I would make a poor employee, but I am just certain that if I really wanted to, I could make it work and that the fact that I gave up and filed for disability (and was granted) means I don't really want to work = I'm lazy =
Generally though I just feel bad about myself. Pretty much like it says in the article. my sense of self is that I'm a bad person. No real evidence (I did get a speeding ticket once, and was actually speeding, so I totally deserved it.) for my conviction that I'm a bad person, just that conviction. Anyway - thank you very very much for this comment, that article is a big help.
Compassionate abiding looks really hard, and a little intimidating, but I'm going to keep that tab open, and re-read it for a few days to make it a little more familiar feeling, until I figure out a way to ease into it gently.
Thanks so much for this very helpful response.