Replacing Regret With Resolve

How many times have you thought or uttered the words “I woulda, shoulda, coulda?”  If we lived perfect lives, we’d get everything right the first time, be free from mistakes, and never have to clean up messes, personal or otherwise.   I hate to dash anyone’s hopes, but the last time I looked, I was unable to find anyone whose existence was exemplary.  Nobody I know is error-proof, least of all me. To be honest, it is a rare day when I make less than a dozen mistakes, most of them small, but sometimes a doozy.  Like many people, I was brought up with unreasonably high standards, expected to do everything correctly and reprimanded every time I fell short.  I carried much of this perfectionism with me into adulthood, and was often very hard on myself.  This overly critical behavior made my life miserable. Nothing I ever did or had was good enough.  My existence was a long winding trail of regrets.

This painful pattern led me to a series of addictive behaviors and caused me to seek personal therapy and recovery groups.  After years of self-examination, I’ve learned that I’ve needed to shed many of the high expectations I inherited from parents, teachers, religious instruction, and society in general.  I’ve seen that I need to work on being more patient, more understanding, and more forgiving.  Because I’ve made my share of poor decisions that caused me to slip and fall, I’ve had to learn to get back on my feet and keep going, something that is often not easy to do.  

My dozen-a-day goofs have sometimes been small problems like spilling a beverage on the floor or saying something embarrassing to a friend or partner.  At other times they have been larger gaffes like losing a lot of money on an errant opportunity or uttering some harsh words that led to damaging or even breaking up a relationship, In either case I’ve needed to try to become more compassionate with myself.  

My old pattern after any mishap was to castigate myself and spend a long time focusing on my disappointment and wounds.  As I’ve accumulated a bit of wisdom, I’ve learned to stop holding on to my failings.  Instead of surrounding myself with gloom and doom, I try to focus instead on what lessons I can learn from my situation.  When I am able to replace a regret with a resolve to do better, I can transform a negative experience into a more positive one.   As I’ve become more patient with my shortcomings, there has been an unexpected side-benefit.  I find that I’m much less critical and more accepting of other people’s foibles, be they small or great.  This is truly a win-win situation that helps me to sleep better at night and wake up on the right side of the bed much more often than before.

Try practicing looking at your mistakes in life as part of your learning curve. By being more forgiving of yourself you will rest easier too. Being more accepting of our shortcomings allows us the ability to be more accepting of others’ bad behavior. What a better world this would be if we all took this valuable lesson to heart.

C 2023 [David] Cat Cohen