This part is hard, I’m not going to lie.
You violated your old concepts of what was true in the world. You have violated all the stories your mind created to justify and explain your actions and the actions of others.
This phase is where the underlying principles are tested and destroyed in turn. It is often called ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’, or the ‘Dukkha Nanas’; knowledge of suffering.
The Buddhists split them into fear, misery and disgust, but that level of segmentation is not necessary.
Basically you may have acted through greed and now you have moved yourself to a non-greed modality. Your world has improved and you have settled from the prior oscillation. But the destabilisation has propagated to lower levels - ideas, motivators and morality.
Your mind is now pulsing with phasic dopamine to destabilise and violate the unsuitable pathways that were identified during doubt. ‘Why did I behave like this?’ ‘Why did I do that?’ ‘The world is founded on self-interest.’
This is tough. All the justifications you gave yourself for past behaviour are not only being stress-tested; they are being demolished. It is jagged and it is painful and it is not fun.
But this is the purification process. Once these underlying priors - for example self-interest and greed - are gone, you will be free. The spiky-but-low dopamine can result in that horrible feeling of wired-but-tired, eating yourself from the inside, both depressed and unable to sleep.
It is of utmost importance that you continue to be the change you want to see. Recognise that the reason you feel so bad is because you are healing. The things you are disgusted by in this phase are being permanently removed from your neural architecture.
If you can ride the storm without reinforcing the old behaviour, it will fall away like ash in the wind.
This can, unfortunately, go both ways. This is why some people wind up with no goodness left in them. If they are pulling their scaffold in the direction of greed, then the same process works in reverse, and ideas of generosity and kindness begin to disgust them. Remember that this is reflected back at them in their real world, so it is only they who suffer.
However, the network is always plastic. You can reverse the process. Someone who has lost all of their goodness and faith in humanity can recover it through cultivation and metacognition. It just takes time.
The only way out is through.
You cannot stop this part of the process. The networks to be pruned have already been identified and this is where they are being destroyed through repeated volatile activation. Grit your teeth and weather the storm.
Keep regulating. Step up to a higher level of regulation - exercise, for example. Do not feel like you need to sit there meditating like a Buddha or praying like Jesus. Get your dopaminergic tone up through exercise or rocking first.
This is not regression.
This is healing.
It will pass.