Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to
join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever
problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get
started. Hi,
beautiful soul. My name is Amanda Durocher. And if you're new here, this is New
View Advice. This is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer
guidance for the healing journey. I don't believe I have all the answers you seek.
I believe you have all the answers. You just may need a New View and
a little help along the way. Thank you for joining me for today's episode. In
this episode, we are talking about how to forgive ourselves when we feel regret.
I think everyone here can relate to feeling regret over decision or action
in their life. All of us have made mistakes in which we could take an
action back or handle a conversation differently or change something that has
happened in the past. Sometimes we're able to move on quickly. We're able to say,
oops, that was a mistake. Oops, I woulda handled that differently. But other times,
these regrets won't go away, and they can end up feeling like heavy
burdens that we live with. In this episode, I am answering a question from a
listener who is living with many regrets, and they've felt this way for many
months now, and they're having trouble moving on. And one of these regrets
includes feeling regret for telling the truth. I think this is a great
question because I've actually had a few conversations this week about
truth, when to tell the truth, and feeling regret after telling the truth. So
we're gonna talk all about that today. My intention for this episode is to assist
you in forgiving yourself and letting go of regret, learning how to process
the difficult feelings that often go with regret, such as guilt, shame, and
more, and to help you to be kinder to yourself as you navigate these
regrets. Before we jump into today's listener question, I wanted to
mention that if you haven't checked out my website yet, I invite you to check
it out after this episode for more free resources for the healing journey, including
journal prompts, meditations, and more. You can find all
things newbie advice at newviewadvice.com/107.
So with that, let's jump on into talking about regret.
I went to another state for a work trip this summer and downloaded a dating
app there to meet new people. I matched with a guy who I had an
instant connection with and we fell in love. We were so obsessed with each other
and I practically lived with him for the 2 months I was there. But because
I wasn't looking for anything long term, I was meeting other people on the side.
We told each other that we would be physically exclusive, but I didn't keep that
promise from my end, and I lied to him. At the end of my work
trip, we decided that we were going to try long distance, but he had his
suspicions of what I was up to during our time together. I felt so guilty
for what I had done behind his back and for lying to him that I
came clean about everything. He told me that I was a horrible person and that
he didn't love me anymore and had no desire for a future with me after
learning the truth. It's been a few months since then, and I'm still devastated.
And I've seen that he's moved on, has new friends, and is living a fulfilling
life. I'm happy for him, but I'm shattered knowing I could've been a part of
that had I not messed up so horribly. Because this caused such a special
bond in my life to break, I'm regretting telling him the truth even though I
knew it was the right thing to do. How do I understand that telling the
truth was ultimately the right decision? And how do I get past my
guilt, shame, self hatred, and the grief of losing someone so special because
of my actions? How do I remind myself that I am worthy of love and
will have a special connection again? Thank you so much for this question. I think
this is a great question that I know so many people can relate to. As
I mentioned in the intro, I think everybody can relate to feeling regret
throughout their life. So I just wanna honor that for you and for anyone else
feeling regret right now and feeling burdened by those regrets. And I just
wanna take a minute to honor you. I think that to me, it sounds like
you're incredibly hard on yourself. You were called a horrible person and then throughout the
question you called yourself a horrible person. You are not a horrible
person. You made a mistake. We all make mistakes.
And mistakes can be especially hard when we hurt someone
else. And it sounds like you hurt somebody who you had very strong
feelings for. And that is not easy, but it
does not make you a horrible person. You are not defined by one moment
in time, and we'll talk more about that. But you are not
defined by that moment. And I think that it says a lot about
you that you're looking to grow from this experience, that you're being self reflective about
this experience, that you're learning more about yourself from this experience.
That's really all we can ask of ourselves when tough
things happen is how can we grow from this. So much of life
is a perspective shift. You know, we either feel like life is happening to us
or we're cocreating with life and we're like, okay. I'm here. I'm showing up.
Show me how I can grow from this. Show me how I can change. Show
me what I can learn. Show me how I can show up better next time.
And that's all okay. I think that especially
when we're young, we want to just be perfect,
and we expect ourselves to act really well. And if we don't, then we punish
ourselves. And when you get older, you just learn that life is
full of mistakes. Nobody's perfect, and you're able to
offer yourself more grace. So here, I just want to invite you
to offer yourself more grace because you do not deserve to be burdened
by this mistake for your entire life. So you've described
here feeling some really hard feelings such as guilt,
shame, self hatred, and grief. It's a lot of
heaviness that you're feeling. Take a moment to honor
how hard all those feelings are. Guilt, shame,
self hatred, and grief. I have felt all those
feelings throughout my life and those are really heavy
feelings to have. And to have all of those at once bubbling to the
surface, oof, be kind to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Most people
who feel those feelings shove them down. They shove them deep into their soul,
into their body, and they refuse to look at them. You are here looking
to be intentional. So part of being intentional about looking at
difficult feelings like that is being kind to yourself and understanding
that the work you're doing, the inner work is work and that it takes
time but that it's also you're doing something. Right? So many of us who do
inner work feel like, oh my god, I'm not doing anything because it's all internal.
It's not external. At least that's how I've felt throughout my life. And I want
you to take a moment to slow down and honor that and make sure you're
taking care of yourself throughout this period. Are you getting enough sleep? Are
you eating well? Are you exercising? Those sound like such basic things,
but when we're doing inner work, it's so important to take care of ourselves
because it will help you to be kind to yourself and to
remember you are not a horrible person when you go back to basics and you
take care of yourself. And so I also wanna mention here
that in your question you mentioned that he is all happy now and
he's living this fulfilling life. One thing that I think is another way to
take care of yourself and to help your mental health here because it sounds like
your mental health might be impacted because our mental health is always impacted by
heavy emotions such as self hatred that leads to a lot of negative self talk.
And one thing that may help you is to set some social media boundaries. I
mentioned this in a lot of episodes, but social media is not real
life. I had a hell of a past couple years.
I talk about it all the time on the podcast. I'm only mentioning that because
I could get on social media, and I could make my life look so good.
I've traveled all over the world. I've gone to places that people dream
about going over the past couple years. I could make it look like my life
has been so good. It hasn't been. It's been really, really hard. And
I say that because social media is not real and people choose and curate
their feed to look the way they want it to look, which is
totally fine. There's no judgment. We just have to remember when we're looking at it
that we're not seeing the full picture of somebody's life. And
so he may look happy. He may be happy. He may not be
happy. But it sounds like the regrets for you are building
by seeing these pictures of him and creating stories because
that's what it is. When we see somebody's social media feed and we make judgments
about their life based on that feed, we're actually writing a story
that may or may not be true. When I read that in
your question, the mentioning of how his life looks really happy
now, I was reminded of that song breaking up was easy in the nineties
by Sam Hunt. I don't know if you've heard it. It's a country song. But
the song's all about how it must have been easier
before we went on these rabbit holes of seeing what people are up to, before
social media, before the Internet, before you could just see pictures of how happy
somebody looks. Must have been easier to go through breakups. And I agree with that.
I bet it was. And I invite you to set boundaries with
yourself. It sounds like you and this person are no longer in contact.
So I think it's okay for you to block them, to unfollow them. I know
that that can be really hard, but I really think that
it's important for us to disengage
from those type of triggers that are just gonna make you feel worse as you're
healing. Imagine you had a broken bone. You wouldn't constantly
irritate that bone and hit that bone. You would allow it to heal.
You would give it space and time in order to heal. And so I think
it's the same way when we're healing from breakups is it's okay to
disengage from the person you used to be with. It doesn't mean you have to
disengage forever either. Maybe you just need a social media break and
you need to disengage your accounts for a little bit. I rarely go on social
media at this point. I found it incredibly unhelpful for my mental
health. I was constantly comparing myself to everyone else. And
now that I'm not on it, never been happier. So I'm personally
a fan of setting boundaries with social media. So I just wanted to mention
that up front here because I think having these pictures front of
mind and seeing what this person's up to
is contributing to your feelings of regret. So now I
wanna talk about your question. How do you begin to understand that telling the truth
was ultimately the right decision? And I think in your case,
telling the truth was the right decision because you know that it was for you.
You said that in your question. You know that it was the right decision for
you, and I think it's telling that you felt guilty before because it meant
that your heart and your body were feeling guilty. You would've
continued to feel guilty if you had never told the truth. So say you were
in that life right now, you were in those photos, you would be living with
this regret still. Right? You would regret what you had done and not telling
the truth. So to me, it sounds like the situation where damned if you
do, damned if you don't, where you were going to feel guilty
and likely feel these feelings of regret either way. And I
wanted to honor you here because you chose to do a difficult thing. You
chose to tell the truth, and that is often very
difficult in a situation like this. Not everybody would choose to tell
the truth. And you knew that your heart was telling you to tell the
truth. I want you to honor that. I want you to not punish your heart
for asking you to do something difficult. Because oftentimes our
hearts do encourage us to do difficult things because that's where we
grow. That's where we learn. That's where we become the people we
desire to be. You know? When I think about who I desire to
be, it's not an external thing. I don't desire to be a millionaire or I
don't desire to be famous or I don't desire these external things.
I desire to be a good person. I desire to go to bed at
night and know that I did my best. I desire to feel
creative. And for me to feel creative, I have to feel like I'm enough. I
have to feel like I'm worthy. I have to love myself. My
creativity comes from a love of self. And I love myself when I
am aligned with who I desire to be, not with the
mistakes of my past. Not by making decisions from a wounded
fearful place, but making decisions from a loving place. It's taken me a
long time to get here and I've gotten here by 1 by 1
making difficult choices, having difficult conversations, and
again and again forgiving myself for the mistakes I have
made. And I think here, something that happened, that happens a
lot of times when we tell the truth, is that you told the truth and
then by being honest you were left feeling like the bad guy. You felt like
you were punished for doing the right thing. And I want you to know
you're not alone in this. This is something I've talked about with many people,
and this is something that's also true for trauma survivors. I know
there's a lot of trauma survivors here who listen to the podcast. And I wanna
honor this because I watched a bunch of documentaries this summer about
sexual assault and sexual violence and what I was
struck by was how many people said, I
told the truth and then I was punished. And that is
so often what happens when people tell the truth because
they're telling somebody what they don't wanna hear or they're disrupting
a norm. And in your situation, you told the truth because
you knew that in order to build a better relationship with
this person, you wanted to have it built on trust.
You wanted it to be built on honesty. And you knew that there
was a crack in the foundation and in order to repair that crack you had
to tell the truth. And then it kind of blows up in your face when
he doesn't forgive you. And, unfortunately, that sometimes happens
when we choose to tell the truth. Sometimes it doesn't go the way we
want because the other person does not like our truth or they have
free will to choose a different way. And, this makes me think of the sentiment
that people say the truth will set you free. And the truth is that the
truth will not always set you free. It does not always feel that way that
the truth will set you free. At least it's not immediate. But
I do think the truth sets us free. What that statement really
means is that when we feel called to tell our truth, it may lead
us down another windy path, but in the
end, we will have that self respect and that self love
from being truthful and aligned with who we are. But it's not always
easy to tell the truth. As I mentioned, it's often a difficult choice. So again,
I just really ask you to honor yourself here and the decision you made
instead of punishing yourself. You are who is punishing you
now. You're beating yourself up for it with
the replaying in your head of the regrets rather than accepting
that this person is no longer in your life. And I don't mean that
harshly. I just mean that you made a mistake and you
owned up to that mistake, which is honorable. But that does not always
go the way we want it to, which is why so many people would choose
a different choice. But again, you are aligning with who you want to
be. And in your next relationship, which spoiler alert, yes, you are
worthy of love. Yes, you will find love. And in your next relationship, you will
be able to show up in that relationship in a new way and in a
more mature way. Because that's really what's happening here is you're growing and you're becoming
more mature. You know, your question reminded me of a friendship I had to end
this summer. I had to be honest with somebody that the friendship was not serving
me, and it came out of left field for them. They were very surprised. They
were very hurt. And I felt really guilty before I told
them. I felt really guilty after. I I thought the truth was gonna set me
free and I was gonna feel a burden lifted the minute I told this
person I couldn't be friends with them anymore. That was not the case. I felt
really bad. I felt like a horrible person. I felt like I did
this horrible thing and that I broke this person's heart and it was all my
fault. And I had to over and over again remind
myself that I ended the friendship even though it was really hard
because it was the right thing to do. That in order for
me to show up each day and love myself, I had to be truthful about
this relationship. And, yes, my heart asked me to do something hard, and it would've
been easier to ghost this person or it would've been easier to continue a wishy
washy friendship where
I wasn't honest with this person. That probably would've been easier. But in the long
run, it wouldn't have been easier. It would've been harder and more burdensome
on me. And that guilt and those feelings of
being in a friendship that wasn't serving me, that would've kept building
on me. I share that because it was a hard situation. I had
to move through all the feelings that went with it. But it was the right
choice, and how I forgave myself for that
situation was seeing the whole situation clearly.
So that's what I want to talk about next is how can we forgive
ourselves. And oftentimes, self forgiveness comes in layers.
I've found that true forgiveness isn't like a switch we can turn on and
off. It comes when we are truly ready to let go of the
past and the mistakes that we've made. And forgiveness is
much easier and it comes easier when we understand why
we did what we did and why we feel the way we feel. So, I
invite you to really become aware of why this situation played out the way
it did. Why did you say you would be physically exclusive and then
continue being physical with other people? I know you likely feel really bad
about this. It sounds like you've had some shame around the situation, but I
invite you to be curious with yourself. Be honest with yourself. If you
wanna be an honest person, it often starts with being honest
with you first. So many of us lie to ourselves about why we do
the things we do. We live in denial of how our actions impact others and
the consequences because we are often denying a truth within us.
And this truth could be a fear of getting hurt. It could be a
fear of getting hurt first. So maybe you're physical with other
people because if he was keeping the door open, so were you.
Or maybe you have a fear of vulnerability or maybe you've experienced trauma
in the past. But begin to become curious about why this
situation played out the way it did. If I'm to bring it back to the
friendship example, I found myself in a friendship that really wasn't
serving me and I had to ask myself how I ended up there.
How did I end up in this friendship that just wasn't good for me?
And the truth was, I met this person when I was really lonely and
I wasn't very intentional about going into the friendship and
I had to see that. I had to see that there were red flags from
the beginning, but because I was feeling lonely at the time,
I ignored the red flags. I also saw that this person
was very similar to a family member I have. So I
had taken on this role in this friendship that I had also been playing in
a family structure, And it wasn't until I looked at that role in my
family structure of feeling less than to someone
that I saw this pattern so clearly in this friendship, and I
realized I had to let this friendship go. But throughout this process
of breaking up with this friend and ending this friendship, I had to forgive myself
over and over again because I had to see that many of the
decisions I made were unconscious and I wasn't able to make new
decisions until I was conscious. And that's so often
what happens in our life. When we make mistakes, often times we are acting from
an unconscious place, an unintentional place. We weren't thinking about
the consequences of our actions and so we have to forgive ourselves
for that. And we have to be kind to ourselves like we would be to
someone outside of us and say to ourselves, hey, that was a mistake.
But it's okay. You didn't know better in that moment.
You may have thought you should have, but for x, y, and z
you didn't know better. Or maybe, hey, we did know better,
but we chose this out of fear. And by becoming curious and bringing
awareness to the situation, you're going to be able to
see it with a bigger perspective, witness it rather than feel
like you're really in it. You know, that's what awareness does. It creates a
witness perspective where we're able to see ourselves in a new way.
Rather than feel consumed by our thoughts, we're able to take a step back
and see the situation, like I said, from a bigger perspective. And so I
find that that really helps with forgiveness. And so when you're
becoming curious with yourself about why this situation played out the way
it did, why you were lying, why you were physical with someone else, the
things you feel regret about, I invite you to become curious with yourself
if you have played out these patterns before. For example, in
my life, as a trauma survivor, one of my coping strategies is
escapism. So what that means is is I find ways to
escape my life, to run from my life, to flight from my life. It's a
fight or flight response. And I mention this here because so many
times when this escapism comes up, I have to become
aware. I have not always been aware of this. Okay? I still
struggle with becoming aware of my escapism tendencies.
So, for example, this summer, I talked about in last week's episode, I was
feeling very trapped in my life, and it was a trauma response showing
me a few things I had to look at. But throughout that whole process,
I wanted to get in my car and run away. I wanted to move to
Mount Shasta, give up all my responsibilities over and over again.
I honestly almost did. I had to be talked off a ledge by my therapist
multiple times. And it's funny because I had this
urge to self sabotage my life over and over again. My life
here in Scottsdale, that's where I live, is really good. I have a yoga
studio I love. I have a home I love. I have a loving partner.
I have friendships. I'm on the board of a nonprofit for sexual assault
survivors. I'm just gonna drop here. If you're in the Scottsdale Phoenix
area, check us out. Surviversrise.com. We host a lot of events here.
Moving on. But I share this because I wanted to run for my life and
I had to be so conscious not to. And I have had to
forgive myself for that. And that when things get really good,
my instinct is to get up and run. There have been times
that I have had to forgive myself for that tendency. You know, when I was
in my twenties, I used to do that in relation and in friendships. If friendships
got hard, I just ran. I just ghosted them. I just didn't speak to these
people anymore. I share this here because there are times where I could just judge
myself and be like, oh my god. I can't believe you abandoned that person. I
can't believe you just stopped talking to that person. You're a horrible person, Amanda.
Or I can say, dang. Why did I do that? Why did that
friendship end that way? I've had to forgive myself time and time again for many
mistakes I have made, but it is through forgiving myself and
looking at my mistakes that I grow and learn. I forgive myself for
those moments where I fall short of who I quote unquote think I should
be. Because this brings me back to you're not a horrible person and
you may have been called a horrible person, but nobody but you gets to
define you And, no one moment in time defines you.
And, he may always view you as a horrible person. That's a
hard truth about life. I look back at life and there were moments
when I drank too much where I'm like, those people are always gonna hate me
or they're always gonna think I'm a hot mess. That's not
true. That's not true for me, but they may always think that about me. And,
I can either torture myself by thinking, oh my god, what do these people think
about me? Or, I can focus on what do I think about me? Who am
I every day? What actions do I take to show myself daily
that I am not a horrible person? And oftentimes
this feeling of being horrible can also go back to childhood,
feeling like we weren't enough to our parents or in school or with friends
at that age. So I invite you to get curious with yourself and really look
at if the feelings you're having now stem back farther. The
last thing I wanna share is that the most important thing, as always, is please
be kind and compassionate with yourself. You do not deserve to hold onto
this forever. As I've said so many times throughout this episode we all make
mistakes and you do not deserve to berate yourself or punish
yourself. Let yourself off the hook for this one. Be kind to yourself.
You have to allow yourself to feel all your feelings, to be honest with
yourself, and if you choose you can learn from this, but
you also have to allow yourself to let this go. You do
not deserve to carry this burden forever. You are a beautiful
soul. You wouldn't be here if you weren't. It makes me sad
that the self reflective people and the empathic people in the world are
often the people who beat themselves up the most. There are so many people
who don't choose to learn from things. They just keep playing out the same
patterns or they keep hurting people and they don't care about the consequences.
You do. That says a lot about you. It says a lot
about your heart. It says a lot about the person you're going to grow and
to be. That's what life is. It's about growing.
We never stop. Isn't that so cool? We can learn and change and
grow throughout our entire life. That's exciting. We put so
much pressure on ourselves to be perfect right now, forever.
Ah. Oh my gosh. What pressure? To live our whole
existence perfect? Oh my gosh. I can't even handle that
pressure. I won't be tensed even saying that. I am so
imperfect. And that's what makes life interesting. So really be
kind to yourself. Offer yourself grace. Offer yourself compassion. When healing from
regrets and forgiving ourselves, we want to balance that
self awareness, being curious, feeling those feelings with
kindness and kind words to ourselves, encouraging ourselves we're not
horrible people, telling ourselves who we do want to be, reminding ourselves
that what we see on the internet isn't necessarily true, and
my mantra that I held onto all summer is that I will not always feel
this way. So when you find those hard feelings come up, just remind yourself, I
will not always feel this way. I will not always be here.
This too shall pass. And, before I wrap up this
question, I just want to remind you that you are worthy of love.
Everyone is worthy of love. And you will 100% have another
special connection. I have no doubt. So if that helps you, know
that Amanda has no doubt for you. And the next time you enter a relationship,
you won't be carrying around this guilt. You'll be more self confident, self
assured. You'll know your own strength because you'll see a challenge
you overcame. You know, that's another thing about mistakes is that
we build strength. We build self respect. We build self esteem
because we see ourselves overcome challenges. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's
actually beautiful. So I invite you to remind yourself every day that you're worthy of
love. And I'm gonna let you in on a secret. Many people, even in
relationships, don't feel worthy of love. So just because
you are single right now, it doesn't mean anything about you.
I'm 32, and I cried all summer because I
realized I'd been keeping Evan's love out. And I realized I felt
unworthy in so many ways. And I let his love in more and
more, and I continue to do that. And I've continued to do that for 13
years. I didn't get in a relationship and just feel worthy of love.
Through the relationship, I've had to open myself up to more and more love.
And I mention that here because feeling love and that worthiness of love
has been an inside job for me. I can really only let in as
much love as I love myself. And I am humbled by that
time and time again. And I want to remind you that because if
you're in a relationship or you're not in a relationship, it's an inside job. The
more you love you, the more you will feel that love in your life in
all relationships and all aspects. And all this
is done one step at a time. And so I know you're worthy of all
your heart's desires. You will find your person. You will find your people. And you
will find the love of your life. And I am sending you so much love
today. Thank you so much for this question.
Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. As
always, I am so grateful to here with you and to offer you a new
view on healing, and this week it was talking about regret. So everybody out
there, be kind to yourself. And if you enjoyed this episode, I invite you
to leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the podcast. Reviews
and star ratings and subscribers really help to grow
the podcast. So I am forever grateful for all your support and for
everyone who continues to come back each week and listen. So thanks again for
joining me for another episode of New VIew Advice. As always, I hope I was
able to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending
you all my love. See you next time.