6 Ways to Forgive Yourself for Not Knowing What to Do | Handling Regret

Foreign. Hey there. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on six ways to forgive yourself for not knowing what to do. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. When something happens, we often reflect on not knowing what to do in the moment as either making the wrong choice or just freezing up. Think about times that you may regret. You may still be holding on to regrets about you wanted to be the best parent or the best spouse or the best friend and you didn't know what to do to make that happen. And you looked back and you're like, well, I shoulda, coulda, woulda done all these things. And then you start beating yourself up because you didn't respond the way you now know you could have. Now remember, hindsight is 2020 when we're looking back over something we've grown, we've learned since then. We may not have had that knowledge back then. We may not have had some of the abilities we needed back then. So we. And. And we may. Even if you did have those not that knowledge and those abilities in the moment, it's not as easy to see all of your options as it is when you're standing out and armchair quarterbacking. So maybe you reflect on times where you didn't know what to do to effectively manage your emotions and you lashed out or you acted in a way that was not helpful. Okay, it happened. You may not have known what to do in order to healthfully maintain your boundaries. So you were either aggressive and pushed people away or passive and started getting resentful at others. You may not have known what to do to help somebody in distress. They were just really struggling. And you're like, I don't know how to help you. And I feel bad about that. I regret not taking these steps I now know I could have. Or responding to something during a traumatic event. Maybe you were in the middle of a trauma and you look back and again, hindsight's 2020 when you're in trauma, when you're experiencing a trauma, that fight orf flight reaction is on. That means we're not in our wise mind. We're not thinking with our executive control network. We are in fight or flee. I want to stay safe. So responding to. During a traumatic event, you may look back and go, well, I should have. And I know a lot of people in certain news stories that are going on right now are armchair quarterbacking what somebody should have done in a particular situation. And it's important that we step back and say, you know, if I was in that situation, Would I have known what to do? What might have I, what might I have done differently? And recognizing that when that fight, flee or freeze situation occurs, you don't necessarily have control over it. So if you freeze, then it's important to recognize that that's a, a natural part of the stress reaction. Anger is a response to a threat. So if you're resentful or regretful or angry about what you didn't do, or not knowing how to respond, okay, so anger is our overriding emotion, depending on what you want to call it. Guilt is anger at yourself. So think about that situation. How were your actions or are your actions a threat to yourself or self esteem? If you're angry at yourself for not responding in a particular way, how does that memory that you have reflect on potentially not who you want to be now? Grief and, and regret is often kind of a combination of guilt and grief. In my experience. Grief is anger plus depression. You're angry about what happened and how you apparently responded incorrectly or didn't respond. And you're reflecting. You're starting to begin to explore how this memory might represent a threat to your self esteem. And depression is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. So how does this situation that you didn't know how to respond in, how does this situation represent a loss that you blame yourself for? And it could be a loss of self esteem, it could be, you know, a loss of a friend. So if you are feeling depression over it and you look back and you say, you know, I didn't know how to manage my emotions effectively and I lashed out and I was really not pleasant to be around during this time in my life and I pushed a lot of people away and I regret that. Okay, so there's a lot of losses there to grieve and to deal with. And recognizing that is going to be important because it's going to be part of the healing process. It's also important to recognize that when things happen, we often have to make decisions. And those decisions are not always right. Even if you have time to sit down and think about them in your wise mind, they may not be right in retrospect. But that's that hindsight thing. Again, did you have the ability to make a different choice or take a different action at that point in time? And when I say the ability, I don't mean, you know, stepping back and thinking, well, could I have done this? If you were in fight, flight or freeze and you were frozen, you didn't have the ability to do something else at that point? Your body had done taken over. So did you have the ability to make a different choice or take a different action? If so, okay, let's look at why you might not have. In what way was the choice you made the least unpleasant of your options? And you may have made a choice based on what had worked for you in the past to help you stay safe. You may have made a choice. And. And a lot of our choices aren't even necessarily conscious choices. They're reactions. But you may have reacted based on your past experiences and those things that were more prominent in your memory versus those things that you would like to do. Forgiveness means using your energy to learn from the experience so it doesn't happen again. Instead of continuing to use that energy to beat yourself up, what's a more effective way of moving towards your rich and meaningful life? One of the things that you can use your energy for is accepting powerlessness over the things that were out of your control. In that situation, you didn't know what to do. Or maybe you look at the situation and you think, I made the wrong choice. Well, could you have predicted the future? Could you have predicted what was going to happen? If you could have, you may have made a very different choice. But sometimes we can't. And. Or did it have to do with someone else? And accepting powerlessness over the things out of your control means accept accepting that you can't change other people. Even if somebody that you love dearly is struggling with addiction or depression or something, and you truly want to help them, but you don't know what to do to help them, or you're doing everything you know how to do and it's not working. All right, well, you know what? You're not able to change somebody else. So accepting the fact that sometimes there are no answers really sucks. But it's one tool in the toolbox. So what parts of this situation that you're having trouble forgiving yourself for, what parts were out of your control and what parts were in your control. Forgiveness also means using your energy to learn to identify the motivations of your actions. I did not know how to do it, so I. I didn't know how to cope with this feeling. I didn't know how to accomplish this goal, so I just didn't do it. Even though people were telling me I didn't know how to actually do it, so I just didn't. Or I was overwhelmed by having to try to figure it out. You know, it's easy to look back and go, okay, in this situation, you should have done X, Y and Z. But that is just looking at that person in a vacuum. You're not considering all the other stuff you had going on, all the other stuff that you were trying to contend with at that point in time. You can look back at it and say, I wish I would have done X, but I didn't. And we can't change the past. And I will take this knowledge, I will take this experience, and in the future I will try to respond this way. And I emphasize try to respond because remember, sometimes that default mode network kicks in and you are in your responding mind, you're in your emotional mind and you are going to fight, flee, freeze, fawn, or just forget about it. Before you can get into your wise mind. Explore how many people would have encountered difficulty in the same situation. How many people have been through something similar and may have looked back 10, 15 days or weeks or years later and said, gosh, I wish I would have made a different choice. Explore the reality of the losses and the damage from not knowing what to do and what aspects are able to be fixed. Sometimes things happen and you don't know how to respond and you feel guilty for making some of the choices that may have led up to that. And it's important to reflect on what actually were the consequences. Sometimes we can start attributing negative things or negative outcomes to, to this particular event and it really doesn't have that much to do with that event or we had no control over that event. But if there are things that can be fixed, maybe you had difficulty, you didn't understand what emotional disregulation was, and you've been disregulating for a long time. However, there are relationships that still exist to some extent that you want to repair. Okay, you know, so can those relationships be fixed? You can beat yourself up until the cows come home over how you acted and interacted in the past, but that's not going to change anything. It's not going to help them feel better, and it's going to make you feel worse. Or you can use that energy to say, okay, let me try to show you this new way that I am acting and reacting. Reflect on how holding on to regret is negatively impacting your life. Holding on to this anger at yourself for not knowing what to do, how is that benefiting you? And how is it keeping you from moving toward your rich and meaningful life? Explore why it's scary to tell yourself, you know what, it's okay, you did the best you could with the tools you had at the time. And I've said this three or four times already in this presentation, but hindsight is 20 20, and we mustn't minimize the impact that everything had on that led up to that decision. You know, you didn't just suddenly get plopped into a situation and have to make a decision. There were things that led up to it, there were things that were going on at the same time, and then there were consequences. So we need to reflect on how was the choice I made, how did I, how was I doing the best that I could explore? Who beside yourself, is still judging you for what you didn't know or didn't know how to do? Likely nobody or, or very few people. And for those people who are still judging you, is likely, if they understood what you now understand, they may be able to work toward forgiveness as well. In summary, I guess stop holding yourself to a higher standard than everyone else. Most of us, if a friend or a loved one or even a stranger on the street is faced with a situation and they don't know what to do, we don't hold it against them. Even if bad things happen as a result, we don't hold it against them, at least not for a long time. And so it's important not to hold ourselves to that higher standard and continue to beat ourselves up instead of learning from it and using that energy in a positive direction. Stop being angry at yourself for not knowing what you didn't know. One of the regrets that I struggle with is I really didn't know my family, my grandmother, I learned more about her at her wake than I learned from her in the 22 years that she was in my life. And I really regret that. But I didn't know what questions to ask. I had no, no idea to ask questions about, you know, anything, you know. And I was a child at that point, you know, most of those 22 years, I was a young child and saying, hey grandma, tell me about what it was like growing up. Being you isn't something that's going to pop into the mind of an 8 year old, or at least not most 8 year olds. So stop being angry for, at yourself for not knowing what you should have done. Start using the lessons that you are learning now from that hindsight to improve your future and start recognizing that you know what. Nobody knows the right thing to do in every situation. It may appear some people do, but in my opinion, I think some people get lucky a lot. But nobody knows everything and nobody knows all the right answers all the time.