Regret can be a painful emotion. It can lead one to feel bad about oneself, especially if the regret involves a decision or action that one took. Regrets can play in our minds over and over again. This can lead to reliving painful emotions, causing us more pain.
But there are healthy ways to deal with regret. Most everyone has regrets at some point or another. It is a part of being human. We all make mistakes and face challenging situations that can lead us to feeling regret. So read on for healthy ways to help you navigate through those feelings of regret.
The first thing to do when faced with a feeling of regret is to remind yourself that you are not alone in this. Regret is part of the human condition. Perfection largely does not exist in the real world. All the imperfection around us is fertile ground for feelings of regret to grow. We all feel regret at times. Reminding yourself of this fact can help you get through your regret by feeling less alone in it.
Trying to fully understand the past is a challenging endeavor. If you are grappling with trying to understand why you made a particular decision or took a certain action, realize that recreating the past situation you faced is impossible. There will be factors that have been forgotten, and intangible factors that flew under the radar but affected your actions. When you try to recreate a past situation in your mind to fully understand it, you are only recreating part of the picture. Some of the factors that affected your thinking at the time cannot be recreated in your mind.
That is why it is wise to trust that you did the best you could at the time, and leave it at that. We cannot go back in time, and trying to go back in time in one's mind in order to analyze past events is at best an imperfect analysis, with missing information.
It is important to realize that so much that happens in life is beyond one's control. We do not have control of everything, far from. Occurrences beyond our control are continually affecting our decisions and actions. Remember this the next time you start to blame yourself for a past regret. Stop yourself and remind yourself that factors beyond your control influenced your actions. We do the best we can with the circumstances and challenges that we face. Things do not always go according to plan. The factors beyond our control continually affect how our plans manifest. So do not kick yourself when you have a regret. Realize that no one is in total control of what transpires in their life. Making the best of our life circumstances should be the goal.
Regret can be painful. Sometimes the only way to ease pain is to go through it and out the other side. When faced with the pain of a regret, remind yourself that everyone goes through this at times. Analyze the situation that led to the regret if you must, being cautious not to overanalyze. Increasing our understanding of a regret can help to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. Thinking about the regret can be painful, but it can provide us with much needed closure. Once we have analyzed the situation that led to the regret as best we can, it is time for healing. We are then ready to focus on moving on, getting past this regret, and getting past the pain.
The reality is that we cannot change the past. Everybody makes mistakes, and so everybody would like to be able to go back in time and change a decision they made or an action they took. As they say, hindsight is 20-20 vision. But we cannot go back and change things. It is fruitless to frustrate ourselves by going over in our minds the things we would do differently. There is no point to this type of thinking, except to make ourselves feel bad. Everyone faces regret at some point, but it is how one handles their feelings of regret that will decide how one ultimately feels in the face of a regret.
Just reminding ourselves that we are not alone in having regrets is comforting. Acknowledging that regret is part of the human condition can help lead the way to acceptance. Ultimately, accepting our reality is the healthy approach to dealing with regret.
It is crucial that instead of wallowing in regret, we choose to focus on finding solutions to our problems. We cannot always find a perfect solution that will turn around and ease our regret. But an imperfect solution will help to do just that as well. If something has been lost, think about how you can fill the place of it with something else, even if something different. The focus should be on what you can do now to better the situation that has caused your feeling of regret.
Practicing forgiveness is important when faced with a regret. Being angry at someone else or at oneself will cause the regretful feelings to fester. This is not a healthy way to deal with regret. Forgiving ourselves and others for whatever perceived missteps that occurred is a first step to letting the pain of the past go and moving on from the regret. Harboring anger is toxic for your system. It is a negative emotion, and it will bring you down emotionally. Remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes. That cannot be avoided. There is no sense in harboring anger when a mistake occurs. Understanding that making mistakes is a part of being human, and then practicing forgiveness, is a healthy way to deal with a regret.
Conclusion:
Regrets will occur in everybody's life at one time or another. Things do not always go according to plan. Even if they do, sometimes, with hindsight, we see that we would have changed our plan. Making mistakes is a part of being human. There are unhealthy and healthy ways to deal with regret. It is important to develop healthy manners of dealing with our regrets, to avoid feeling bad about ourselves, our lives, and others. Healthy practices in dealing with regret will prevent us from becoming consumed by the regret and enable us to learn, grow and move on from past regrets.
