The first thing to do here is to realize that your thoughts are creating this reality for you, not what actually happened. The evidence for this is here: Are there moments when you are not thinking about this, you’re distracted from you’re thinking, e.g. watching a movie, listening to a song etc., and you feel fine? If so then you can see that it’s not what happened that’s creating these feelings, you’re actually feeling the effects of your thinking in the moment. To give you another example, could somebody else feel differently about this? Yes, there are people that kill animals all the time and they don’t feel bad. Therefore killing an animal doesn’t actually make you feel bad for years – it’s your thinking in the present moment that creates the feelings. If killing animals made people feel bad for years, then everybody would feel bad after killing animals, and also you would feel bad all the time after having done so. Are those things the case? No. Therefore can you accept it isn’t what’s happened that creates your feelings, that it is actually instead the effects of your thinking in the present moment?

Once you can realize that it is your thinking creating the feelings, i.e. you are feeling the effects of your thinking, the solution is to see the thoughts for what they really are: mental projections, not reality. For example, a thought you might have from time to time could be, “I am a bad person because of what I did”. To dispute this, you could ask yourself, do bad people feel bad for 4 years after killing an animal? Does thinking I’m bad make me bad? On this last point, if you like a song, is that song actually objectively better than other songs, or do you just think it is? If you think a painting is bad, is that painting actually objectively bad, or do you just think it is? Similarly, if you think you’re bad, does that objectively mean you’re bad, or is it just a thought you have about yourself in the moment? Can you actually “be” “bad” when “bad” is a humanly generated concept? A conceptual construct in your mind? In reality things just “are”, there’s no good or bad.

To get even deeper, how do you know what you did is “bad”? It was a perfect lung shot. What if you saved that animal from a worse fate? Maybe if you hadn’t done that, it would have suffered a really brutal, savage death the next day that was extremely painful and prolonged. Maybe you actually rescued it from suffering. Now this can’t be proven but the point is: it disputes the thought you have that what you did is definitely “bad”. How can you know it was bad? I’ve already given you one example of how that could be the case. Another example is, maybe if you hadn’t have done it and felt bad for all these years you never would have reflected upon your experience of life so much. Maybe this experience will lead you to becoming much more conscious of how your thoughts create your feelings which could enable you to be happier in the future. So that is also an example of how maybe what happened wasn’t actually definitely “bad”. I’m not saying any of this is “true” in reality, it’s just perspectives to help you dispute the thought that you have done a bad thing.

It’s worth noting here that my response here is heavily, HEAVILY influenced (if not borrowed) from Noah Elkrief. Check out his YouTube videos. Check out Eckhart Tolle – his book “The Power of now” is a good one. Check out Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Also, “You can be happy no matter what” by Richard Carlson will be great for you. MINDFULNESS MEDITATION will likely be a huge help for you. And if you do get somebody to help you through this, get somebody really good and solution focused. A lot of therapists just go over the past and problems and don’t actually like solving problems and creating solutions! So make sure you get somebody good.

If it helps oskarpe, I have no negative judgements about you in this moment and you are 100% ok to me. You are feeling the effects of, and believing in, the judgements you are making about yourself in the moments you feel bad.

Of course it is lovely not to want to kill animals, but the natural feelings of the grief would have passed pretty quickly, that gut sensation of “this is horrible” which you can experience on a purely feeling level. These feelings you’re having now are ok but are unrelated to that immediate primal gut feeling. They are thinking-induced. Nothing to do with what happened. It’s time to move on my friend!