“I feel guilty, how do I break the cycle of guilt?”
Being imprisoned in pornography can lead us to feel guilty, we are torn between the immediate artificial pleasure brought by looking at pictures, and the awkwardness of a broken chord somewhere, feeling that something is being damaged within us. We would like to give ourselves to another, in fullness and in truth, but our sensual preferences make us close in on ourselves, like Adam hiding from God, after sinning. In facing all this, we can take one of several different paths.
1) Despair
Every time we end up falling again, it’s so easy to say it’s all useless, we’ll never manage to be successful. We let ourselves give up, to despair, to experience depression, perhaps worse…
2) Pride
Yes, I fell, but I’ll get up again, for sure, because I’m strong, I can control myself… vanity of vanities, all is vanity…
3) Humility
The third solution, and the only one to help us break the infernal cycle of guilt, lies in recognising that we can’t succeed alone. It creates an opening to God, for those who believe in him, acknowledging before him that we’re weak, and imploring his mercy: this is the sense of confession.
This opening can also be made through a third-party, someone who has our trust: a friend, a priest, a psychologist… Lots of options exist, competent individuals ready to provide help. I’ll mention a couple here:
- Talk to us about it via the chat!
- Novena to Carlo Acutis. The possibility of reciting the same prayer for nine days, asking the intercession of a young Italian who died in holiness and who was passionate about new technologies.
So we should never give up, we need to use the ways given to us to make progress, getting to know ourselves and our limits, and always staying hopeful.
If you’re asking yourself, ‘how do I break the cycle of guilt?’ Don’t hesitate to talk to us about it via the chat (free and anonymous):
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