How do you cope with guilt & regret?

With hindsight I probably would have lived a different life. I’m not unhappy, and I don’t dwell on the past, but I would have been much happier living by the seaside, probably less materialistic and just generally more content.
I think I would have made the decision that we would earn a lot less, probably have a much smaller house, but on balance, we would have been happier.
Too late now, and perhaps it would have been awful, but I feel we should have taken a chance on it.

I've had therapy and also seen a priest ( that's probably not for everyone) but I've found forgiving others and myself has helped a lot.

I also think "It is what it is" because Acceptance is the final stage in the grieving process and sometimes we need to go through a grieving process before we are ready to leave the past in the past.

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Even after this you may think about it, but it will make it easier. I am in pain over things, but I tell myself "every day might not be good, but there are good things in every day" Old habits can be hard to break, but the cycle of guilt is miserable and only goes in circles. If you can forgive yourself you can cycle forwards into new things.

Very few people could say they have gone through life with no regrets - there is always a coulda shoulda woulda moment every now and then.
I think that you have to accept that you are not perfect, you are allowed to make mistakes, forget the should have done and move on.
If you spend a large part of your life worrying about how you could have done something differently, you don't have time to appreciate what you have now and what is likely to happen in the future.

I think we all have areas of guilt and regret in our later years and if you haven't you have just been lucky.
Maybe this is a situation women have experience more than men.
I've noticed it's easier for men to move positively forward after marital break ups.
Whereas most women in their sixties, seventies and eighties live alone.
And as much as I enjoy living alone, you have to be careful not to dwell on any past decisions you may have made that has brought you to where you are now.

I’ve always found it interesting to wonder how things may have turned out if I’d made a different choice at a given time.
But I don’t feel guilt about it, even though I know I’m quite impulsive, and possibly might have acted differently if I’d given it more thought.
There are a few things I think I acted pretty badly about, but I forgive myself, and learn from it.

CafeAuLait

It's situational, I guess. Sometimes we really did do our best. If we didn't then we have to find a way to make peace with that or accept that we regret something and always will. Is there anyone that doesn't have any regrets? I think we all do.

Good comments.
Show me a person who doesn’t have any regrets about their life and how they have sometimes acted ( or not acted, when they should) ...if you can , then there you will have a selfish and uncaring person or a sociopath.

It has to be lived with, and just as you would try and forgive somebody else then you have to forgive your younger self.
Guilt can become a self indulgence, far better to forgive yourself whilst acknowledging that you wish you had made better choices at that time.Now move on and don’t constantly revisit all your mistakes.

There is no one big thing which haunts me, but like most people, there are hundreds of times I could have behaved better, or made a better choice.
As a very young, very inexperienced mum, I feel I often acted selfishly, without enough consideration for my child, I dragged her around all over the place, which looking back seems awful.
But I was young, silly, lonely, unhappy, and I didn’t really know any better. I don’t feel guilty, but I feel thankful we got through that time unscathed.

My sister says I don't feel guilt because I have no conscience! Maybe she is right, but if I feel that something I have done or said has caused hurt or harm, I manage to put it behind me and if it's possible, mend fences. Both guilt and regret are harmful emotions that waste your life and eat into you until you can't think of anything else. I really don't have any sense of guilt. If I could have done something, or been someone else, I know it's pointless. Live in the moment.

I had therapy. Before therapy I had viewed it as for those without any grit and that it is better to ‘just get on with it’. But after having some rocky times with my sons I was desperate for anything to fix it.
Now I realise that I unfairly favoured the more pliant son and penalised the more independent one. I feel a huge amount of guilt I allowed dh to be continually drunk in front of them after his wet lunches with the city boys, that turned into all night booze sessions, because my older son had a problem with drink and I ignored it as I knew since he had seen dh drunk continually growing up so we didn’t have a leg to stand on.

I’m trying to let go of the guilt and be a good mother and grandmother now and make changes that show them I’m striving to be a new sort of person.

It’s not always easy though and two sons living abroad is tough.

hollysteers

Also, don’t look back, we are not going that way.

I like that. I might keep that saying. ?

Also, don’t look back, we are not going that way.

I made many big mistakes, “huge” as J Robertson said in Pretty Woman, but forgive myself as I believe my actions arose out of my very unhappy, unstable childhood. I don’t think a therapist could make more sense of it than I have worked out for myself.
Now so much older, I look back on that different turbulent person with compassion and appreciate the calmness that maturity brings (it’s taken quite a while!)
I agree with the earlier poster who said it was a comfort when our children turn out well, (she mentioned obtaining degrees and no blame) so there are good outcomes to be happy about on that score.
Without being overly religious, repenting, acknowledging my failures and handing things over to a higher ‘being’ or something outside of myself helps a lot.

I'm young but I still have massive guilt over a good friend that I treated like crap. She and I were both best friends at school, but we was not very popular and all I wanted was to fit in. I befriended a girl who knew those who were popular but she hated my friend.. Don't need to say who I stayed with. She ended up treating me like shit and so I ended up with no mates at all. I regret doing that to her so much and I would do anything to message and apologise to her but, I came off social media years ago with no intention of ever going back on there, and I just think it will not change anything now. I'm sure she's moved on so I should too. I got punished in the end because now I pretty much have no mates at all.

Thinking about this today.

I had an auntie, Mum’s older sister. She never marrried, was a rather plain, timid lady. She was a housekeeper for a wealthy woman. On her days off she came to spend the day with us. My sister and I took her very much for granted, she always brought us sweets and was generous to us at Christmas and birthdays.

She died in a nursing home, aged about 80.

This was nearly 40 years ago, and I now realise that we were a huge part of her life, which we never appreciated.

I so wish I had given her more time and thought, but didn’t.

Learn from it and don’t make that same mistake again.

Ever.

(If apologies helped then it would be a better world, but so often they don’t and you just have to live with the guilt)

Kandinsky, such a good question, so many of us feel guilt for past mistakes or for taking loved ones for granted.

What I do is,
say a wee prayer for the person I feel I have hurt ( whether they are dead or alive),
mentally, apologise to them and ask their forgiveness,
then try to forgive myself.

I find it helps me to let go of the guilt when matters can no longer be resolved face to face.

I'm not sure that anything can be achieved by judging your past self. After all, you are the person you are now because of the decisions or actions you made then; it is part of the journey we all go on. Current guilt about past actions will not help anyone now.

None of us know the future but we should never let our past dictate and ruin our present. You can’t do anything to change what happened but you can change you.

Thanks everyone for your replies.
Much appreciated

oops Tara Brach.

I agree with Sar53, we can't change the past so need to do the best we can now and put it behind us.

Guilt is such a crushing and diminishing emotion. It kills so much that is joyful inside of us. When my daughter was growing up I wasn't the best mother, not having had good mothering myself and therefor no positive role model. My mother had a lot of issues and was sometimes violent and mostly absent emotionally, and in those days women didn't get any support for emotional difficulty.

I felt guilty about my lack of good parenting skills for many, many years. I had a lot of therapy to debrief myself of all the guilt, sadness and shame I felt. Now I don't feel guilt or shame but there is still sometimes sadness that things couldn't have been different.

I have forgiven myself for something I didn't know how to do better!!

I have made amends to my daughter by being there for her now and by way of verbal apologies and have told her she has the right to be angry and I'm here is she wants to talk about anything from her past. Her response is always , 'I always felt loved'. Those words are so soothing to me and she is doing well in life, so I can't have been all bad!

I think we are often so hard on ourselves. Self forgiveness takes many attempts but why keep on punishing ourselves for the past. It's been and gone.

I practice mindfulness and it really helps. I breath into the present moment and see and focus on the love and beauty all around me and don't let the negative thoughts in the mind take hold of, and ruin, my day. I can recommend Thich Nhat Hanh and Tara Bach on Youtube to hear a lot about self compassion.

I have a few regrets and like most I have made a few mistakes.
If given a certain situation at a time I have always done what I thought best at that time and usually I know I made the correct decisions. These days I will work through things and move my life on and not dwell on past times/situations where nothing can be changed.

I agree with CafeAuLait in all her messages about what I call guilt, shame, and remorse.

However it is helpful that a friend gave me a reason for my despised behaviour that I had not thought of. Not an excuse, just a reason.

I have a few regrets, nothing major, I console myself that I’ve done better than most, had a full career, raised 4 sons. Definitely been sinned against quite a lot, so on balance I’m on the right side I’m content with that.