113. Forgiving yourself for past mistakes

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is great to have you here. Back for another episode. Today, we're going to talk about the incredible power of self forgiveness and how to embrace our past mistakes. I think we have a really difficult time accepting the fact that each of us is innately flawed. We are in innately flawed species, and we often ruminate on all the things that we've gotten wrong, sometimes for months or even years after the fact. I am very much the same, but I've come to realize recently that not accepting our failures, not accepting our mistakes, kind of means not accepting the fact that we are human and putting our behavior on a pedestal that we would never place someone else on. This is particularly relevant for our twenties in our early years as adults, because it is a time of exploration, of learning and growth. But I think also this weird decade or limbo between childhood and adolescent feelings and that adulthood maturity where so many of the things we are experiencing we are experiencing for the first time, and as frustrating as it is, we don't really have a guidebook. A lot of it comes down to trial and error, from impulsive relationship choices to career plans that don't really work out as expected, and unfortunately, sometimes mistakes that end up hurting other people even if we didn't mean to. So how can we embrace this unfortunate but kind of unavoidable side of ourselves. I think that's a huge question, because living with regret and guilt truly gets us nowhere. Unfortunately, I think you cannot undo the past, but you also can't live with that remorse forever. The beauty of psychology lies in its ability to really shed light on our human experience, but also our capacity to grow despite all the things that we think have ruined our lives or we think make us bad people. I promise that those mistakes do not mean those things we're going to explore in today's episode, the very neurology and underpinning psychological theories that show why our twenties are important for making mistakes. Were also going to at the distinction between feeling regret and feeling guilty, especially when we do come to acknowledge that we've hurt others. There's a reason we hold on to those experiences, and it has a lot to do with social harmony and social contract theory, but also this conflict between our actual selves and our idea selves. Beyond that, we're also going to discuss why it is that some people experience regret more profoundly than others, particularly due to factors like rumination, but also on a controversial note, maybe the role of social media in weaponizing public shame. That is all very valuable information to understand. But what we're really here for is to get into a place where we can practice self forgiveness and learn how to forgive yourself for the times that you didn't know any better than you do now. It's part of our shared humanity to mess up, and I do truly believe that we can learn just as much, if not more, from our mistakes as we can from our successes. So I also want to dive into the four hours of self forgiveness and how accountability. Although initially unpleasant, can really free you from a lot of lifelong guilt and negativity. It really comes down to self compassion, and by releasing ourselves from that kind of chains and those chains of self blame through genuine, actual introspection and self awareness, we really do unlock the potential to use the things in our past for growth rather than letting us all letting ourselves really be weighed down by that. So a lot of the advice and the evidence we're going to explore is probably information that I needed to take on myself. If you're listening to this, I'm guessing you're most likely in your twenties and as well. So we are all learning together and sometimes we're not going to be perfect, but at least we can be in the same boat. So I'm excited to get into it. Without further ado, let's explore the psychology behind self forgiveness and moving on from our past mistakes. Okay, it goes without saying that you are going to make a lot of mistakes in your twenties and probably in every decade thereafter. Unfortunately for us, humans are highly fallible and flawed creatures. We cannot do everything perfectly, and that includes life. I think an important reminder is that none of us have done this before. This is your first time being alive, experiencing these events and complex emotions and just the ways of human error and misunderstanding and learning. And so despite our best intentions, we are going to mess up, and we might hurt other people and experience regret. I think despite the unavoidability of mistakes, we do have a choice to let this a completely paralyze us and perpetually hate ourselves, or be embrace the opportunity this provides and embrace our mistakes for exactly what they are, which is a space for self awareness and for growth. I think it's important to remember, as we're discussing forgiving ourselves for past mistakes, that you were not the same person you were two years ago or even six months ago. People can grow and change and realize the error of their ways. There is not a single person out there who hasn't done something they wish they could take back. But it's about how you move forward from that, whether you take on the responsibility of what you've done of some of the errors of your ways. Additionally, when applying self compassion in these situations, I think it's important to recognize that our twenties in particular are a time when we are going to mess up, probably more than any other decade for a number of reasons. This era of our lives involves a very unique blend of still feeling very much like a child but being expected to behave like an adult. It's like, as soon as the clock kind of strikes twelve on your eighteenth birthday, suddenly we're expected to mature into this whole new version of ourselves who can pay taxes and own a home, and it's expected to understand exactly what they want and how to treat others. But that's not really how maturity works from a psychological, emotional, social perspective, and so our twenties are this unique in between time, I would say, where we're grappling with two different sides of ourselves, the immaturity but also the expectation of responsibility. We have no idea what's going on. A lot of the time, we do not have the hindsight to understand the future consequences of our current actions. Speaking from a very neurological perspective as well, our brains also don't completely finish developing and maturing until like the late to mid twenties, and the last part of our brain to mature is called the prefrontal cortex. We speak about this a lot because it is so such a crucial part of everything that makes us very human, our personality, our identity. But it's also the area responsible for things like decision making and impulse control. It's why when we look back at things that we did at seventeen, when our prefrontal cortex was not developed, we kind of internally cringe. I was talking to someone about this the other day who I think like knew me or met me when I was maybe nineteen or twenty, and she was telling me about her first impression of me and how she thought I was super loud and didn't really think before I spoke, and I was like, yeah, that's probably right. I made a lot of mistakes back then and did things I really regret that I look back at now with that prefrontal maturity and just cannot fathom. There's so much in there and so much in our history that I think we realize we would have done differently. We're also trying out different versions of ourselves, some of which may not fit or versions that don't actually reflect our values. This is also in part because we're trying to separate from the identity we have cultivated under the guidance of our family, particularly our parents, and we're trying to branch out to be our own independent people. Suddenly the protective kind of shield of parental supervision is taken down, and you've got to learn all the things they learned in their twenties, and that is a lot of trial and error and ultimately a few regrets. Also, when we combine that with things like the drinking age, you know that a lot of us start consuming alcohol during this period. We know that leads to poorer decisions. We also have a bit more financial freedom, and also the complexity that develops in our relationships. It's kind of no wonder that we're going to misstep at times. We are going to do dumb things. We pass up amazing opportunities, we fail at things we wish we'd succeeded, We spend too much money, We embarrass ourselves. However, amongst all of these mistakes, I think the biggest ones I see people ruminating on have to do with how they acted in their personal relationships, how they treated their friends or a former partner, maybe even their parents. I think without a doubt these other regrets that sting the most, that leave kind of the greatest emotional scars. There's a reason why interpersonal regret sticks with us, perhaps more so than the decisions that could only hurt us individually. We have evolved as creatures, as a species who seek the need and the approval of the group for survival, and part of that is the need to create social harmony and behave according to the social agreement that really implicitly dictates how we treat others. In psychology and also in philosophy, there's this idea known as social contract theory, and what it says is that we have been conditioned to live together in society in accordance with an inherent moral agreement to not hurt others or to not do unto others as we would want done onto ourselves. So causing someone else's pain, either due to things like oversight or selfishness, or even outright cruelty, it goes against that contract. Those feelings of regret, of guilt or shame. They are an internal psychological signal that we have gone against this deeper moral code and that we need to rectify our behavior to restore a general sense of cohesion. In that way, things like guilt, as they relate to past mistakes, are somewhat of a pro social emotion. It's trying to make us a good person to be around. It's trying to show us how we can be agreeable and stick within that social contract. There's an important distinction here between guilt and regret, because I think although sometimes we use them interchangeably, as I literally just did, there is a bit of a difference. In a study they conducted back in twenty and twelve maybe twenty eleven, they got people to describe typical situations in which they felt guilt and situations where they felt regret. What they found is that guilt specifically occurs for choices in a social context where we have believed that we have caused harm, whereas regret is strongly associated with personal mistakes, with missed opportunities, self sabotage, that kind of broader category of behaviors, or when we wrong someone else. This is where we typically experience guilt and we regret the actions that cause this pain, the actions that we were responsible for. Regret self pity, that is, for the self, whereas guilt and remorse is for others. I want to pause and actually break down the psychology behind regret for a second here, because I think that is the primary emotion we're discussing when we examine the long term impact of past mistakes. Regret, at its core, is a complex emotion that arises when we feel dissatisfied or disappointed with past choices, and it often stems from a desire to have done things differently based on our current perspective. And this kind of occurs in two directions. So we can regret the things that we didn't do, which is what we would call in action, all the things that we did do, which is called actionable or action regret. And importantly, you're more likely to experience long term regret for the times when you didn't act compared to the decisions that you did make. Research suggests that this action related regrets, although they're painful, they actually spur people to learn more from their mistakes and move on because they've given us an experience that we otherwise wouldn't have had, and we wouldn't have had that teachable moment. But regret related to an action the things that we cannot do with the opportunities that we did lose. It's much harder to fix, and this kind of regret is more associated with things like long term anxiety, depression, a feeling of stuckness. So if you want to avoid future regret, I think it kind of goes without saying that it's more about making a decision than making the wrong decision, because even if it's the wrong decision, then it's better than doing nothing at all, because it will at least give you a teachable moment compared to just the regret surrounding the what if, the expectant thinking, the kind of hypothetical future telling, and what if it had turned out differently? What if I had actually done this? You can't really take that back. However, further to this idea of the mistakes that we make that hurt others, there's this idea known as discrepancy theory that explains why these mistakes linger the most. Each of us has an actual self, which is who we actually are, and then I deal self the person we would like to be, and when the actions conducted by our actual self don't align with our ideal self, that is when we experience things like regret or negative emotions. Because we are not acting in accordance with who we feel we ought to be. When we don't act, we regret our wasted potential. When we do, we regret the outcome of those actions, and we experience regret for a few other reasons we already spoke of the kind of evolutionary explanation, especially from a social perspective where we don't want to disrupt social harmony, but regret also serves to prevent us making the same mistake twice. Past experiences in that way, they kind of linger in our brains as a cautionary tale. They want us to make better choices, better decisions, by using the emotional salience of that memory and the pain of that memory to dissuade us. Interestingly, psychological research indicates that while people often you regret to be distressing, it nevertheless is rated as a positive experience because when we listen to that remorse or that unpleasant sensation, we only need to experience the negative outcome once. When we don't listen, we keep making the same mistake over and over again until that feeling finally sets in, and by then there is a lot more to process and a lot more to reflect on. So we're going to talk about that a little bit later. How kind of going further into the belly of regret and acknowledging when you've made a mistake might actually help you not make future mistakes. But I also want to speak about why there are some people in our lives, maybe you are one of them, who really finds it additionally and extra difficult to move on, to let these things go. Some people are more prone to lingering on things of the past. This is a tendency that we call rumination. So rumination is a thought processing disorder where we obsess over negative feelings and our distress, and we repetitively think about all of the consequences, how awful we are, all the things we could have avoided, what we've missed out on. Our tendency to ruminate often comes from our coping style, particularly an individual tendency to overthink, but also things like emotional intelligence. So emotional intelligence really exacerbates our mental distress sometimes because we are unable to shut our brain off. Our brain, especially the brain of someone with high EQ, is constantly mulling over all of the emotional impacts and kind of roots and paths and branches of their actions. People who also constantly ruminate, they may do so because they're unhappy with the lack of closure from an experience, and they use overthinking to kind of soothe that distress. But it actually does the opposite. It gets us stuck in the negative cycle and unable to move past our past actions, dwelling upon mistakes. It has been shown time and time again that although it might feel like you're doing something about it, what is actually happening is that you're going to diminish your self confidence. You're going to diminish your creativity, you're going to diminish your performance and your productivity, and it's just going to make you feel absolutely miserable. And they did a series of studies in the early two thousands, and what they found was that when you dwell on past behavior, this can really trigger things like procrastination and perfectionism because you're so concerned that you might do it again. This is what makes regret so all consuming. We cannot under the past, no matter how hard we try. We are thinking as if we can, that all of that mental energy is going to change the outcome. I think that sometimes this stems from our need for self punishment. If we can't undo our mistakes, then we better make sure we repent for them or feel the full force of our guilt once again. Some of that is evolutionary, and most of it is highly unproductive, and it stems from our deep sense of shame. So self punishment involves things like forcing yourself to continually think about your mistakes, avoiding things that make you happy because you feel like you no longer deserve them, negative self talk, excessive exercise, or even abusing things like alcohol. The use of self punishment acts to relieve our guilt, but also in some ways makes us feel like we're redeeming ourselves. And when we face regret, perhaps due to action, we often feel like we lack a certain agency over our lives, particularly if we've acted out of character, and so self punishment acts as an outlet, almost like a productive way to pay for our mistakes. We feel like it's doing something to counterbalance the negative experience of regret. Some of that is also imposed on us by society. For sure. There's a reason why we may feel the pain of past mistakes more harshly nowadays, especially if they were things that were perhaps offensive or really hurt someone. Our society is really good at weaponizing shame for good and for bad, especially things like online shaming and even cancel culture. I have a lot of opinions on this a lot. You know, we see celebrities being canceled all the time, sometimes for very very valid reasons. But when we see this play out so frequently, sometimes we feel that point that media outrage or even that personal outrage could be turned at us for minor things. We spend so much about lives online and so what people think of us in that context is important, and we've become a lot more aware of how past actions, which maybe at the time didn't seem so bad, could now be deemed as really offensive or really hurtful. I think that role of public humiliation, especially in the modern day, has a lot of complicated psychological and social origins that we don't really have time to get into. But what is definitely being seen, I think, is that it's really forcing us to reflect more on our actions and make us ask questions and question the distinction between maybe I've done a bad thing and I regret it, and I'm a bad person. I can never be forgiven. Previously, our mistakes were not up for discussion by you know literally everyone on the internet in the world now, like you could do something stupid and it's everywhere someone could film you, And so we're much better at self policing our behavior on a micro kind of personal scale away from social media and the Internet. I find our tendency to not forgive ourselves for past mistakes really fascinating and also at times quite ironic, because we are so so willing to forgive other people when they do us harm. We are so willing to overlook hurtful behaviors to realize that people make mistakes and maybe they've changed, maybe they've grown, But we hold ourselves to such a high standard we don't give ourselves the same grace that we give others. I'm definitely someone who is highly forgiving, perhaps as some of my friends would say, to a fault sometimes, And I think that's because I would want to have the same forgiveness that I'm giving to others, because of that sense that we are a bad person and we're going to need others to forgive us, so we'd better be very, very forgiving of them without thinking of how we can forgive ourselves. But it's a lot deeper than that. We see others as very complex beings. We are very aware that they are flawed and they are nuanced, But we see ourselves as needing to be perfect and needing to have all the answers, And that's what makes it so hard to move forward, especially since we're kind of the only ones who can personally and deeply feel all of the negative outcomes of our past, you know, especially that guilt, and we don't really see the private lives of others and how much they may themselves be self punishing self forgiveness is really tricky, but it's also truly the only way to move forward in such a positive character attribute. You've got to remind yourself that you truly did the best you could with the information you had. No one wants to make their lives worse. Most people don't want to hurt others or do we experience regret. We don't want to be in this position. So if we knew the outcome of our decisions, we probably wouldn't have done it. We would have chosen differently, But we didn't. We didn't know what the consequences were going to be. We had to do what we thought was best or at the very least, or very worst, what was convenient, and now you know, as the saying goes, the bet has been made. You can't change it, but you can replace that bitterness and regret with compassion and with love for yourself. So I want to explain how how can we move on from past mistakes, but also how can we actually learn from them rather than just sweeping it under the rug. All of that and more after this short break, I think the first step towards self forgiveness is realizing, like we said before, that you are not the same person you were a few years ago. You are not perpetually stuck at the age and the time you were when you made that mistake, especially if you're under the age of thirty, like I'm sure many of you are. Your brain, like we said, wasn't even fully developed yet you were in some ways still a child in an adult's body. Not only are you allowed to grow from that version of you and the version of you that may have been misguided, but psychology basically demands that you do. One way to show this is by examining personality. Our personalities were often thought to be quite fixed and quite stagnant. Who you were at eighteen is who you would be when you were eighty, but we've now seen that that's totally false. Researchers have continuously proven over the last few decades that we are not the same person our whole life. In particular, we become as we get older alone more conscientious, a lot, more altruistic and agreeable, even more empathetic. Part of that change is also brought on by our past mistakes, whatever the nature of those may be. One of the biggest parts of forgiving yourself is choosing to accept the lesson from your decisions, rather than only accepting the guilt. You can learn equally as much from the things you did wrong as you can from the things that you did right, and what that involves is an acknowledgment of what went wrong and the ways you may have acted in a manner that was not aligned to that ideal self. So think about it in terms of making a mistake at a new job. You send that email to the wrong person, Well, you know from now on you're going to triple check those email addresses. You said something really hurtful to a friend, Well you're now going to check yourself every time you're in a heated discussion because that regret is a very salient emotional reminder of what you don't want to feel, which is that terrible, dull ache of remorse. That's why we say regret is an important signal because it shows us when we've stepped out of line or acted in a way that we don't really agree with. So you need to listen to that feeling because it's telling you something important. And further to that, examine where the root of your behavior or that tendency has come from. Maybe it's emerged from how you were raised, how you were taught to treat others past trauma, especially in romantic relationships. I hear about this all the time, people who lash out and push others away because of that fear of being hurt, only to realize that that person may have been really special. Maybe it's more pathological, like a compulsive tendency to lie or to oversell your case abilities. There are so many possibilities, but really examining the origins of your mistake before you commit to fixing it is important because otherwise, how can you kind of identify a repeat pattern? How can you learn from that? Part of that involves taking accountability and responsibility for your actions. That's really hard because the first step is to admit your mistake, and that is difficult because we are very good at finding ways to protect our ego and maintain a positive self image. So we unconsciously search for excuses as to why we've acted in a certain way, both exogenous and endogenous, or you know, we say things like they started it, I just lost my call, I didn't think things through, I was drunk. Yes, those are all valuable explanations, but at the end of the day, you still made a choice, and that's okay. You just have to own up to it. Everyone struggles with admitting that they've done something perhaps bad. It's only natural because if we truly thought that we were a terrible person or a failure, it would be very difficult to move on because of that all or nothing thinking. And that's where we get into trouble because you can mess up and still have a lot of redeeming qualities, but one of those qualities cannot be ignorance, because denial is kind of how you get yourself into deeper trouble. I think a big part of maturing is realizing that you can embrace accountability rather than being scared of it, and it will probably leave you better off. I was having this discussion with a friend the other day who was telling me how she made a mistake at work and her boss kind of called her out for it, and her first reaction was to be like, oh my god, he's such an asshole. He's so cranky, so uptight. But we had this discussion of being like deciding that here's the problem. Isn't going to make your life easier. It's not going to change the outcome. You kind of have to take it on the nose, absorb the feedback, and choose to be better. The saying goes for more serious things like cheating. As an example, if you cheat on someone and obviously not speaking from personal experience, but if you do, you can either choose to put that guilt and that shame back onto your partner, or you can choose to be better. You can say to yourself, Okay, I messed up here, I feel guilty. What is that telling me about my actions and make the conscious choice to not be that person, to not be that version of yourself in the future, Or you know, you can avoid the regret, you can move on to the next person, do it again, break someone else's heart be the villain. It doesn't eradicate the original mistake. And the thing is nothing will. The only thing that matters at that point is the future. So you want to make sure the future version of yourself is one that takes accountability and does better. And part of that is this really simple equation for self forgiveness that I think we should all be following because it really allows us to humanize our mistakes and show self compassion and move forward. It's called the four hours of self forgiveness. So they are responsibility, remorse, restoration, and renewal. We've already spoken about responsibility, which I think is very much synonymous with accountability, but basically, you have to be honest with yourself or with others that you made a mistake and you are responsible for your own actions. Secondly, there's remorse. This is particularly important if the decisions that you made have impacted someone else. Express what you're feeling, say that you feel bad that you know you made the wrong choice, that you don't like how the outcome has turned out, but you take responsibility that you are the one who's caused it. Or if it's a mistake that's impacting you and you alone, that you know you made a mistake and you feel sorry. Allow yourself to feel those negative feelings associated with responsibility, whether it's kind of letting go of guilt or shame. Both of those things need to be channeled into remorse. You cannot forgive yourself or move on if you suppress those negative feelings because you haven't fully accepted what's happened and your role in the outcome. This is when we get to restoration, which is kind of like the beginning of the healing phase. An important part of forgiving yourself is making amends for your mistakes if it's needed, make a genuine apology to those people or that person that you've heard. This takes away the feeling of wishing that you could have done more in the field future. The worst feeling is knowing that you've messed up and burying your head in the sand, being like, I don't want to feel like a bad person, so I'm going to forget this ever happened. And then six months a year goes by, that feeling still there. You haven't actually taken accountability. And I think it also is really important because at this stage, like we said, you can't change the outcome, but you can change how you conclude the story, how you make someone else feel, and leaving things better than before also allows you to close that chapter knowing that you've done the right thing and that you do deserve to move on from it. Or if it's a mistake that's impacting you, you can apologize to yourself, acknowledge the context in which the decision was made, and that you did what felt right and now you know better it's time to move forward. So finally we have renewal. What are you going to change about yourself, your motivations, and your actions to do better next time. An important part of that, I've found is to really articulate what you want your ideal self to be. Who does this person look like? Knowing what you know now, write down how they act, how they make others feel, how people respond to them. Are they honest? Are they more empathetic? Are they more cautious? Do they ask for help when they need it? I really want you to visualize this person and question how you can align your current behavior with what your best self, your ideal self, would be doing. It's even better if you can make those thoughts tangible by writing them down or even typing them into your notes app someplace that you can revisit and return to, kind of when you want to receive your own wisdom or guidance, because typically we trust our opinion the most. There's no point punishing yourself forever at this stage. It's not going to fix the situation. In fact, it's just going to keep you stuck in those memories in that moment. It goes without saying that it's not up to you to decide whether someone else forgives you as well. Your emotional reaction and theirs do not have to be aligned for you to acknowledge that pain and move forward. Let them say their peace, let them have their response, and actually listen. It's uncomfortable, I know, but you owe it to them, and also you owe it to yourself. No feeling can be passed, No feeling can be processed without being felt. Finally, it's valuable to think about how you treat others when they make mistakes, and well, treat them how you would want to be treated, and then treat yourself accordingly. It's this idea known as shared humanity, acknowledging that some parts of the human experience are very much universal. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone experiences setbacks. You are not the only one going through this, probably at this very moment, and imagining how you would treat a good friend in this situation or a younger sibling, you would probably do so with a lot of compassion. So it kind of goes without saying, why don't you deserve the same? I think that's a beautiful reminder to end on. As someone who also struggles with feeling a lot of guilt and regret over the past, I really do understand how mentally exhausting it is to feel like your identity is no more than your past mistakes. But it is more. It is so much more, especially when we choose to learn and grow and be better rather than overwhelm ourselves with self pity and the what ifs. No one has had a go at being human before. There is no guidebook and human emotion. A lot of things in life are tricky, So just do the best you can with what you have, have an open mind about accepting failure and accountability, Recognize that you will grow. You are a different person now. I just really think you can't do more than that. You really can't. You just kind of have to live with it and know that in time it will pass, you will have a greater perspective on why maybe this mistake needed to happen, why you needed to mess up, the lesson that you needed to learn. It all comes together in the future. So thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you took something valuable from this, and if there is someone else who you think would take something from this, please feel free to share it with them. I think radical self compassion, self forgiveness are really important. We cannot punish ourselves forever. Like I keep saying, I think that is a huge part of my daily philosophy these days. So hopefully that resonated with you as well as always. If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever this episode is coming to you from. It really helps the show to grow and reach a new audience. I've spoken about my Patreon before as well, but like I say, it does take a lot of work to make this show. It is just me writing these episodes, researching them, recording them, editing them. It's a lot of work and I really do appreciate the additional support and you also get bonus content from me all the time. I do sometimes span people there with bonus episodes and newsletters and transcripts. So check it out if you would like, and if you have an episode suggestion, send me a DM at that Psychology podcast. I love hearing what you guys are going through and how that relates to some of the universal psychology and experiences of our twenties. So thank you for listening, and we will be back next week with another episode.