I speak from some experience. Cultivate a healthy self-esteem. Break down those negative thoughts. They are usually irrational. Put the light of day on them, they usually break down. Keep a journal as you do so. Remind yourself of your victories. If there is anything that you can’t put right, serve someone. Express love to people with confidence. And when you see smiles on their faces, say to yourself that no matter how flawed we both are, we can reflect God’s love into the corners of human existence. Pay fast offerings, donate just a little bit to charities you believe in. And put those instances in your journal. Real, concrete actions, no matter how tiny, heal our broken inner voices. Then the Holy Spirit has material it can confirm to our minds.

No doubt a portion of all – but mostly your upbringing. People who are overwhelmed with the need for forgiveness and rescue generally suffer from an excess of shame – a condition that most often occurs as a result of having grown up with a parent who shamed them or through vicariously bearing the untreated shame a parent carried.

Thanks for a beautiful post, I share every sentiment.

Once every three or four months my work requires reading over trial transcripts where victims and perpetrators testify about things that literally make me ill. Here’s my current thinking when it comes to guilt (subject to persuasion otherwise):

(1) God is not running the show when it comes to guilt. What I see out in the world is that victims feel devastating guilt and perpetrators feel none. Surely if God were in charge of guilt, we’d see another dynamic, no?

(2) I think the capacity to feel guilt is first and foremost a matter of biology–some simply do not experience guilt, or experience only very diminished guilt.

(3) Guilt is taught and learned, by people. Guilt serves a vital purpose, but it can be manipulated to serve nearly *any* purpose. That is, different cultures use guilt to meet wildly divergent ends.

For reasons of my own I feel this statement is true for me as well (and I’m not a sociopath):

“I don’t have the inner sense that God is unhappy with me, that I’m unworthy, or that I need divine forgiveness.”

Yep. That’s about right.

“I don’t have the inner sense that God is unhappy with me, that I’m unworthy, or that I need divine forgiveness”.

There are several parts to that statement. For the first part, I don’t think God is necessarily unhappy with us all the time. We’re fallible, we struggle, He understands. For the second part, unworthiness is likewise something that I don’t think necessarily persists as a perpetual state for everyone (although perhaps King Benjamin disagrees with me). But the third part, the lack of feeling a need divine forgiveness strikes me as dangerous. I may not have done anything terrible in the last hour, there may be no horrible, grievous sins weighing on my spirit right this minute, but the need for divine forgiveness is ever-present. We rely upon it, whether we immediately recognize it or not.

I am not trying to adopt a condemnatory tone here, because I don’t believe Rosalynde has done anything wrong, per se. I simply am concerned about such an outlook in general. Perhaps it works for her, and I like to extend the benefit of the doubt. But it seems to me, generally, an awfully dangerous road to travel and not one I would recommend.

I’m going to help you out just this once. Here’s a free edit for you.

“I worry about people [who commit terrible acts against others] and claim an absence of guilt or shame.”

There you go.

The mighty change of heart is experienced differently by different people. The same Book of Mormon that discusses the mighty change of heart in Alma 5 also claims that a vast number of Lamanites were baptized with fire and the Holy Ghost and they “knew it not” (3 Ne 9:20).
I can’t relate to Rosalynde’s perspective, but I would guess that at least half the people I go to Church with every Sunday are way more like Rosalynde than me, and they serve wonderfully with very little drama. Again, I can’t relate, but that’s not an indicator of anything wrong with either them or me.