How I Overcame Deep Regret By Healing It's Root
The Interplay of Traumatic Shame, Regret & Rumination
In the past, regret would wrap its arms around me and cripple me.
I lived by the things I hadn’t said, the things I’d done, and the people I’d lost or hurt.
Rumination was my best friend; I spent hours walking the halls of my past, but the mind wandering always led to the same conclusion: That I was bad, undeserving of love, and would never find better than what had come before.
These thoughts haunted me and kept me spiritually stunted, emotionally fixated on my perceived problems, and holding on to relationships that had long ended.
Regret, and its accompanying rumination, felt like pouring salt into my emotional wounds, only the salt was poison and it rotted my sense of self.
It’s difficult to move forward with life when you’re constantly attacking yourself for the way you’ve thought, the things you’ve done, and the people/opportunities you may have lost.
Whereas past-me would daze off into a regret-filled rumination whilst having dinner with friends, my growth journey has thankfully severed the steel chain link that connected me and my regret.
The Journey So Far: A Path to Shame
Over the years I’ve made peace with the fact that I am not perfect, despite what my perfectionistic mind might like me to think. Regret serves a useful function in healthy doses, it tells us where we could have done better so that next time we know better.
Some of the regret I felt was valid, but most of it was not. I was sensitive to regret, which is to say, I was sensitive to self-criticism. It was easy for me to berate, and at times, torture myself for my past actions. Regret would clasp its arms around me so long as I let it.
This was because regret itself wasn’t the core issue or emotion I was struggling with.
Regret, with its thoughts of “I did something bad” was only a precursor to a much worse and debilitating emotion: Shame, or in my case, toxic shame.
“I did something bad” always seemed to go to, “I am bad”.
The Interplay Between Toxic Shame, Regret and Rumination
When we learn that we are, in some way, inherently bad and unworthy, it is only natural that we become hypersensitive to the mistakes we make and the feelings of regret that follow. Even the smallest of errors can weigh on our minds like lead
I was so sensitive to shame-filled regret that I developed full-blown OCD where I criticised myself for even thinking certain things. “Why did you think that Joe?”, “You must be an awful person if you thought that”. My compulsion was thinking. Maybe if I ruminated enough I’d find reasons to believe I wasn’t so bad. The relief never came.
Now I see that my mistakes, and the sense of regret that came thereafter, was the key that opened the door to trauma locked in the depths of my psyche, where the core belief “I am bad” sat.
Regret can be an empowering emotion. If we can recognise that things happen for us and not against us, “Yes, I did bad” can lead to “I will do better next time; stronger and wiser than before.” When toxic shame lies beneath our mistakes, there is no hope, only doom.
I was hyper-sensitive to regret because I was terrified of making mistakes that might remind me of the fact I felt I was a bad person. I was perfectionistic because I thought if I controlled everything around me I could save myself from reinforcing this core belief.
Except, we can’t control others and we can’t ensure we won’t make mistakes. In a sense, then, we can’t be in complete control over what we think, say, or do. We will act impulsively sometimes, we will do some things we regret, that is human: YOU ARE NOT A BAD PERSON BECAUSE OF IT.
Managing and healing my tendency to experience regret did not come in over-analysing whether I did right or wrong, it came in realising that regardless of what happened, I am still a good person.
So long as I believed myself to be fundamentally flawed, I would always judge my actions as reflections of me being bad. Through therapy, research, self-care, meditation, pursuing healthier connections, developing my present-moment awareness, and more, this wound has begun to heal.
I find myself experiencing regret less often now and when I do — as we all should from time to time — I can keep faith and learn my lessons, ready for what the Universe throws at me next.
Thank you for reading this article! To keep up to date with my articles, YouTube videos and my daily ramblings, subscribe here.