I know there are a lot of other heroin addicts who like me have caused tremendous harm to our loved ones. How do you ever find a way to cope with it though when you don't feel you deserve it. As much as ive hurt myself, as much as I hate myself, I don't feel like I've hurt nearly enough to make up for my crimes. I don't feel like I can do this, I don't feel like I'm gonna survive this. I don't think I want too. I'm not suicidal, I just want it over. I feel like I've gone too far to come back now. All that awaits me now is death, or jail then death. I'm too damaged to survive. Thats how I feel. And if I do survive, all that awaits then is the pain and guilt of what I've done. Among countless other emotional problems I had before my addiction.
I'm sorry to hear you have been struggling Jess. You're a really valuable person, with so much to offer the world, it's a shame (pun not intended) that you are devoting so much of your time and energy to feeling guilty and beating yourself up about it (I'm not saying this is "bad," just that it isn't exactly super productive if you're interested in engaging in healthier, more fulfilling, skillful or wise ways of living). Anyways, on to my $0.02...
Cultivating a more aware, mindful relationship inclusive to as much as possible in the diversity of my experiences has been the most helpful way I have addressed deep, pervasive feelings of existential guilt and shame related to things I've done.
Ultimately I have the pretty firm belief that all action and intention flows from a place of need and desire to experience peace, love and connection. You might feel or think you don't deserve to experience such things, but this doesn't mean you are any less deserving than anyone else. In fact, it's is in our nature as humans to seek out connection and love - we are social animals after all. Without one another we'd each die.
I have trained myself to accomplish this through cultivating awareness of the dynamics of perception: how I experience individual sensations, emotions and thoughts, as well as an awareness of the interrelated connections shared between the perception of sensation, emotion and thought (thought as in mental auditory and visual images/representations; an "idea" would be more auditory whereas "playing back a memory" would be more visual).
It's really a practice of exploring some very charged desires and revulsions (such as states of craving, aversion, and fantasy), with a clearer understanding of their operation learning how to come out of autopilot and "let go" of the pleasant and unpleasant sensations that seduce us. Basically I'm conditioning myself to surf urges and impulsive, not to simply fly on autopilot through my life according to labels like good or bad, right or wrong. It's a process characterized most perhaps by learning to get good at letting go.
Something I've noticed rather recently has been the impact of gaining an awareness of how others hear me. The experience of feeling heard is so incredibly profound, particularly when is dealing with profound shame and existential guilt. The experience of being heard of course requires interaction with folks who are capable of hearing you, tapping into what is meaningful to you - what you are really interested in and all about. It requires mindful listening, tolerance, understanding, compassion and patience (these qualities come naturally more to some than others, but more people have to work to cultivate them for them to be meaningful).
Once you find people who are capable of hearing you, the results are profound. Feeling heard and acknowledged in this kind of way is a huge catalyst when it comes to the motivation that can be required to address unwholesome or unhealthy habits, such as overwhelming feelings of guilt or shame. In my experience it is THE catalyst for developing more personal agency and freedom.
The more we attach to feelings the more they significant part of how we think of ourselves, the kind of person we see ourselves as (even though the ultimate reality of who we are couldn't be further from that kind of malaise and self-loathing). I'm not suggesting anyone would be better off ignore their feelings or emotions, whether they are easy or difficult to experience, and especially not emotions like like guilt or shame. A deep exploration of our relationship to difficult emotions can enhance how we see and act on the world, and provides the kind of richness not so obvious when it comes to exploring more pleasant experiences like joy.
Developing a robust self-compassion practice has also done a hell of a lot for me. While it is important to understand the dynamics involve in our present moment experience through exercises designed to increase concentration, it is just as important to devote time to cultivating particular healthy, more wholesome mind states (after all, certainly for the majority, self-hatred does not seem to be a particular practical or healthy mind state). These would be mind states where you can see yourself in more of the totality of who you are, as opposed to cultivating a kind of tunnel vision that narrows and limits conscious perception of experience to only those experiences that are pleasurable or difficult (which limits our decision making ability). Seeing myself as the multidimensional individual that I am, with areas both to improve and become healthier and of strength and capacity, is what I mean.
Practicing to cultivate deeper ways of seeing and interacting with the world has actually made it very difficult for me to engage difficult feelings like shame and guilt that continue to arise in the same kinds of unskillful ways getting stuck in them has caused in the past. By engaging in the kinds of practice required to see myself and my world more clearly, it has become very difficult for me to identify too strongly with shame and guilt. As I engage more in ethical, virtuous behaviors and a more wholesome, compassionate relationship with my sense of self, I have less inclination to believe the afflictive voices in my head telling me I am less than, not good enough, a failure of a human being, etc. etc.
Yes, I'm done things that cause me to feel ashamed and guilty sometimes, but these things do not define the totally of who I am or the totality of my experience. Through gaining an awareness of how my actions have caused me as well as other to suffer, instead of feeling driven to ruminate on guilt, shame or the past I find that really what happens is that it become much more distasteful to continue to engage in immoral or unethical behavior. After all, the very behavior that leads to the experience of shame and feelings of guilt.
So with awareness of how I have unskillfully in the past, how I have harmed myself and others, makes engaging in such behavior moving forward is both more distasteful and less productive. Once one begins to gain a deep awareness of something in the particular way I've been describing, not engaging in the kinds of personal change and transformation that make such behaviors that lead to more guilt and shame so unappealing that we simply stop engaging in them in favor of engaging in more skillful, healthier and more wholesome choices and activities.
We're so much more than what we do - both the good and the bad. What we want to do, however, is entirely up to us.
