Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s 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 address our past mistakes.
I think we have a really difficult time accepting the fact that each of us is innately flawed.
We are an 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 20s and 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 20s are important for making mistakes.
We're also going to look 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 onto 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 R's 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 or 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 20s and I am 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 20s 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 B 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 are 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 you know some of the errors of your ways.
Additionally when applying self -compassion in these situations I think it's important to recognize that our 20s 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 12 on your 18th 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 20s 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 and 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 -20s and the last part of our brain to mature is called the prefrontal cortex we speak about this a lot
because it is so it's 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 17 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 19 or 20 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 20s 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 are the 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 on to others as we would want done on to ourselves so causing someone else 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 2012 maybe 2011 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 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 inaction or 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 there's 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 inaction the things that we cannot do 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 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 an ideal 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 2000s 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 undo
the past no matter how hard we try and yet 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 inaction 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 cancelled all the time sometimes for very very valid reasons but when we see this play out so frequently sometimes we feel that at any point that media outrage or even that personal outrage could be turned at us for minor things we spend so much of our 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 like we are a bad person and one day 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 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 to 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 bed 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 30 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 18 is who you would be when you were 80 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 a lot 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 acknowledgement of what went wrong and the ways you may have acted in a matter 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 been
really special maybe it's more pathological like a compulsive tendency to lie or to oversell your capabilities 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 oh you know we say things like they started it i just lost my cool 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 he's 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 same 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 R's 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 were 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 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 future the worst feeling is knowing that you've messed up
and bearing your head in the sand being like i don't want to feel like a bad person so i'm gonna forget this ever happened and then six months a year goes by that feeling is 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 piece 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 uh 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 20s so thank you for listening and we will be back next week with another episode this year i've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so i decided to commit to dry january to really kickstart 2025 and just test myself heineken 00 is the perfect companion for dry
january because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for friends out for drinks whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals i'm a big beer fan so i also love the taste of heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls heineken 00 is available at your
local heineken retailer or for delivery at heineken .com you must be 21 plus to purchase enjoy heineken responsibly and good luck with dry january
