Riddled with Regrets

“You need to stop focusing on the darkness behind you. The past is the past. Nothing can change what we’ve done.” – Walter White, Breaking Bad, S05E09: Blood Money.

Regret is a universal human emotion that has both positive and negative effects. Knowing when and how to move past and learn from them is key to our overall well-being. Excessive regret however, accompanied by self-criticism and self-judgement, can do us tremendous harm.

“We are not meant to spend our lives carrying around past issues and hurts. Unhealed issues weigh us down, keep us asleep and prevent us from consciously creating. It is only our personal issues that stop us from experiencing our greatest potential.” – Nanice Ellis

Learning to forgive, love and be gentle with ourselves is the hardest thing we will have to learn, and that’s understandable. Because it means reversing years and years of habitually telling ourselves we’re not worth it. We are. And we can change the way we have become accustomed to perceiving and talking about what we have done or experienced in the past. It’s not easy and I often find myself actively replacing negative core beliefs with more positive beliefs. Changing the narrative and the way I speak to myself, especially when it comes to behaviour or choices I regret, is an ongoing practice of awareness, acknowledgment and adjustment.

Kendra Cherry writes, “Regret can be an incredibly painful emotion. While rooted in feelings of contrition, disappointment, guilt, or remorse for things that have happened in the past, such feelings can have a powerful influence over your life in the here and now. Regret is defined as an aversive emotion focused on the belief that some event from the past could have been changed in order to produce a more desirable outcome.”

Excessive regret keeps us fixated on the past and often involves self-blame and guilt. This is painful because, by its nature, it implies that there is something we could have done, a choice we could have made, or an action we might have taken that would have avoided something terrible or made something good happen.

But we have to accept that it’s the choice we made at that time, with the information, personal history, wounds, conditioning, relationships, and everything else we possessed and were at the time. While it may seem like we could have chosen something other than what we chose, this is a false belief that only creates suffering. The only choice we could have made was the one we made, precisely because it’s the one we did make. Had we been able to make a different choice, we would have made it.

Acknowledging and being accountable for our choices, even if they turned out to be mistakes, can feel intimidating and crushing, but it can also help us to improve if given and received with kindness. It’s not possible to avoid regret entirely. But managing regret in a healthy, positive way can help us learn from the experience.

I try to understand (without criticism) the motivations behind my past choices. I look for the human who made those choices, accept that I am imperfect just like everyone else, and endeavour to forgive myself for the choices I made. I embrace today’s good intentions instead of berating myself for choices that turned out to be mistakes. I remind myself that those mistakes belong in the past and it’s what I do now that defines me.

“We can’t concern ourselves with what was. We must act on what is.” Monk Gyatso, ATLA

Putting an effort into healing helps us to move on and get ready for our next adventures. It’s part of being human to make more mistakes and to have rough days. But we’re also going to grow. We’re also going to change and transform into a stronger version of ourselves over time.

Allowing ourselves to grow has a lot to do with learning how to be accountable for our actions, accepting ourselves as we are and believing that we are worth investing in. While I’ve come to terms with a lot of my mistakes and I’ve learned how to own them, self-forgiveness is something that I still find challenging from time to time. It is one thing to know that I deserve to forgive myself and it is another thing to actually do it.

I have come a long way since Feb 2014, and even though I get frustrated with myself sometimes for not “growing fast enough”, I also know that life’s lessons take their time and are given to us when it is time for us to learn them. I remind myself often, to be gentle with my thoughts and self-judgments, to treat myself with care, and that I do deserve to be happy.

Further reading: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/deal-with-regret/https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-cope-with-regret-5218665https://psychcentral.com/blog/a-powerful-exercise-for-moving-past-regret#negative-effectshttps://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/comparatively-speaking/202106/managing-regret-and-guilt-when-you-really-hurt-someonehttps://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201708/why-regret-is-waste-time

Love and Light to you, Phoenix.

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Prompted by this year’s AtoZ Challenge theme ‘Resilience’, here’s nine years sober, and counting… with some things to say, inspired by quotes from brilliant television series that resonate with me.