 We're gonna go ahead and take a question from our viewing audience right now. So exciting We'd like to each have you answer Teresa who's asking Do you have any suggestions for? overcoming feelings of unworthiness of someone trying to start down a spiritual path but feeling unworthy in doing so due to perhaps childhood trauma and How do you forgive yourself if from sins in your past that you've already confessed you Move beyond the confessional, but you still have trouble Letting those go and feeling like you're unworthy to even begin this monumental task of building your interior life Father Miller would you begin? Yes, so this is a very common problem that I would say I deal with on a weekly basis with prisoners or Catholics just visiting St. Dorothy's and need some advice and direction The first things first in regards to forgiven one's cells for past sins. I always remind The person you know or I asked the person have you gone to confession? You know if they've gone to confession Then I I tell them did did the Lord forgive you and they always say oh, yes You know father gave me absolution the Lord forgave me and I said so it's quite arrogant of you To assume that God who's perfect and just in all things has deemed it you know able to forgive you and somehow you're for refusing to forgive yourself You know, so do you think you're a better judge than God? You know, do you think you're better at judging your own soul than the Lord is he's already forgiven you What are you worried about? So if that kind of a temptation is actually rooted in our pride that we don't trust the Lord's judgment even when he's merciful Right, we think we can judge ourselves better than he can and so it's it's something that the individual has to repent of and You know and then learn to focus more upon his mercy his forgiveness as opposed to You know their own thoughts or feelings or judgments which are secondary In regards to the healing of past traumas and wounds So one of my backgrounds is psychology and I've done a lot of work in this area And what I've discovered is the reason these memories still plague us is because More often than not we prevent our Lord and our lady from entering into those memories Usually with past trauma. There's a lot of shame associated with it and guilt and When they're shame and guilt we can imagine like a little child when you catch them doing something bad They'll cover their face and say don't look at me Right. It's their shame that wants them to hide. Well, even as adults That shame can lead us to hide from Christ to hide from the Blessed Mother And the only way for our Lord to heal those memories is if we allow him in So I usually leave people through a three stage Three stages of meditation to help them to allow the Lord in and I'll just go over real quick So all of our viewers can hear it. So the first thing is you have to be able to Remember what happened to you if you're not there yet. You need some counseling and you're able to at least Remember what happened once you do that. I always recommend this in the presence of the priest or your counselor or in front of the Blessed sacrament that's ideal You have to allow Jesus to visibly be present in your memory as you're reliving it even though it's painful and difficult He doesn't say anything and he doesn't do anything But he just stands there in a corner He's outside the window looking in when he sees what happens what you did what happened to you doesn't matter what it is Once you find some semblance of peace with our Lord's presence because he was there. He's everywhere Then you allow him to speak if Jesus was there. What would he have said? To you or to the person that hurt you, right? What would he have said what truth would he have spoken you already know this for the most part? And you just have to allow him to say it in the memory and it can take days and sometimes weeks of quiet meditation Until you can get comfortable with our Lord's presence and when then with our Lord speaking Once our Lord can speak and you're comfortable with that and reliving the memory then what you do is you actually Allow him to act allow him to change your memory I had a beautiful soul who had a very traumatic experience where someone threatened her life when she was a little girl and In the final stages of the healing Jesus ran up grabbed her out of the hands of the person who was going to threaten her and said don't touch my daughter and he carried her off to safety and She said once she saw that in her memory all of the pain went away And it had no hold over her anymore And it's just this beautiful. I've seen that many times with with my parishioners and with others Wow Wow exceptionally powerful my goodness. Thank you for sharing that father Father Robert would you like to add to that on feelings of unmovingness and yeah? Look what what father Miller had has spoken about about the efficacy of sacramental confession That people often, you know Feel unworthy they feel impaired by sins which have actually been sacramentally forgiven by God through the ministry of the church and that really frees a person from sin and Feelings of of unworthiness and so forth in a sense every human being is infinitely unworthy of The graces of God even the very greatest saint but in another sense every human being is made with the image and likeness of God and has this Dignity of being a divine son or daughter what I would say is feelings of unworthiness Come from looking too closely at yourself if you can imagine if you looked at yourself very very closely in a mirror You got to see all kinds of you know imperfections faults so forth The answer is don't look too closely at yourself Look look instead at the glories of heaven look instead at You know one book I would recommend is the crowd of the Virgin and this book is Is a meditation upon the splendor the beauty the glory of the Queen of Heaven? This is what we should be looking at not ourselves if we look at ourselves if we look at our own lives often We'll find you know a disaster or at least a bit of a disaster We look at stead at the Kingdom of Heaven. We look at Jesus We look at Mary and we find it's all beauty peace tranquility power and so forth This is what we're aspiring like a person driving a car looks at what's coming ahead They're not looking at what they've passed by and all of that stuff sins traumas of the past You know let go it's only our looking at them our thinking about them our fixation on which makes us hang on to it So allow ourselves to forgive allow ourselves to be forgiven and just to let go beautiful Father Luke you must see this so frequently That was speaking of people who have trauma or deal with people in situations. So your thoughts on this. Oh, yeah Well, a couple of things first of all just to note that in some cases when we use like a term like childhood trauma or whatever There is no shame in getting professional psychological help and it is amazing how In the science of psychology so many things have been learned about The brain and the way it processes memories and a lot of people focusing in on trauma in particular and even Sculpting velocity sometimes could be more psychological than anything else and there's no shame particularly if you can find somebody who's really solidly Catholic and Christian Blending the you know staying authentic to the faith, but also insights from modern psychology There's no shame in that at all and then to two spiritual things I would advise one of which would be the devotion and writings of the divine mercy from St Faustina We have a funny joke in our friaries if you see a brother bringing her diary to the holy hour You'd be like oh bro You haven't a bad day, you know But it's just that promise of mercy and grace that Jesus gives to that devotion has been so healing and encouraging to people who struggle and then the other thing is praying with Gospel passages where Jesus encounters sinners and whether it be the woman at the well whether it be the Famous parable the prodigal son and Luke 15 or there's so many of these stories where Jesus has encounters with people Who were sinful and then the way he treats them with such great love and mercy to do like Lexio divina or healing prayer with some of these stories from the Gospels I have a hunch that that might be part of the reason why the early church wanted to write them down and preserve them Because in praying with those stories we can receive a lot of grace Wonderful answers very good. Thank you for that question Teresa