Dealing with the Pain Of Mistakes

I must admit, I’ve been very dismissive of emotions in adult life. Growing up, my mother was a very emotional person and with time I came to associate emotional instability with weakness and a bad household environment. Things were very unpredictable, irrational and unpleasant.

The nurture aspect of my upbringing set me off on a trajectory of logic, calm, linear reactions, Stoicism and being rational.

Recently I made a mistake that caused me a great deal of pain. This also gave be a bumper dose of emotions.

Mistakes and their fallout is a human experience. Common, relatable, unforeseen.

My character is one that always builds mental models, frameworks for decision making and constructing hand rails to get through life. I always try to find the good in the bad, to hopefully learn from a mistake and to make myself a better person over time.

This post is about mistakes and their role in our lives and how do we heal, improve and move on from them.

When the seas are good, we are steering a good course in life, we don’t need to reference this material. However in the down times when you need a helping hand - hopefully this helps someone get through what they are going through.

Time

The first comforting factor with dealing with the outcome of a mistake is:

Know that Time Heals

Just like time heals a wound on your body, time heals a wound on your soul.

Sadness, regret, misery, fear any negative keyword associated to a topic slowly fades, naturally with time.

It is comforting to know, no matter your personal ability or inability to deal with, self soothe, use logic, reasoning, psychology, counseling, use external support or help; no matter the outcome of efforts to patch that wound in ones psyche -

time will heal the issue.

I like this video below for its simplicity in illustrating the topic.

Exercise

I’ll have to be careful with my wording on this one because I’ve personally found it helpful but it could be taken in the wrong light.

I’ve made some large mistakes in the past. Ones that cannot be undone. These have caused me a great deal of pain.

Heavily exercising has helped me get through points of extreme suffering from mistakes or deep pain.

One could call this self flagellation, or self punishment.

I’ve done this and it has helped - Burdening my body has helped unburden my mind.

When my mother died - I walked. I walked for days, non-stop. It helped. I saw large parts of Sydney, Australia and New South Wales.

Other mistakes - I’ve just run.

Remember Forest Gump? It’s a lot like that. Thousands of Kilometers in a year.

The anger, sadness, frustration - mostly anger - can be burnt off.

When I see David Goggins, it confuses people why he is so driven. I immediately recognize his fuel type - Mental pain.

For me, this form of heavily exercising has greatly helped. It should be finite, not infinite. It should help remediate pain and not be a long term solution.

If it is long term, seek support or help.

Seeing the Good Side of Pain

Rationalize and walkthrough the benefits of learning from mistakes.

Our knee-jerk reaction to experiencing personal pain or suffering is to want to get rid of it, however there are good reasons to experience pain.

Negative reinforcement is the biological system that our bodies use to adjust our behavior based on feedback from the outside world.

Logically - the size of the stressor and our negative reaction to it proportionally adjusts our future behavior (see the body’s Limbic System and Neuroplasticity).

Some quick fictitious scenarios:

• Low Stressor - You forgot to return your Library books by 3 days. You returned them late and didn’t receive a fine. Low Stress - you were not penalized. You didn’t think about it and you will likely return books late again.

• High Stressor - You punched someone while intoxicated. They fell back, hit their head on the sidewalk and died. You spent months going over your actions with regret, months dealing with lawyers, the legal system and finally - sent to court. Somehow you escaped criminal conviction and it is now a black mark on your past, something you deeply regret. Meanwhile, you’ve stopped drinking alcohol, you don’t go out to socialize and you replay the night daily in your head. You will never repeat this action again.

Without pain, we would not have this negative reinforcement and we would keep on making the same mistakes. Stuck.

Feeling Alive

Another factor justifying the existence of pain is that we need contrast to feel anything. We need lows to contrast against the highs. We need pain to contrast against the happiness.

As a thought experiment, imagine you were floating in space. Blackness all around you.

How fast are you going?

It could be 0mph, 50,000 mph, maybe faster. You have no idea because you have no frame of reference. You need something to contrast against. You vs another object to give you an indication that movement is happening.

The same goes with the sensations of being alive. You need the bad times to know when you are experiencing a good time.

Without these sensations - you are not alive.

False Sense of Control

Our out-of-the box expectations of the Universe are typically incorrect.

One of those is typically that you can fully influence your environment and situation form self will. As our knowledge, physical ability and wealth increases - we do gain some control over our environment and circumstances.

Strong willed, stubborn people like me want absolute control over their physical reality. Personally - I find it enraging to the core essence of my soul, when I cannot affect my physical reality. The amount of drive and burning passion that this produces is hard to capture in words.

However -

you cannot control everything and trying to do so will cause you to suffer.

Now I’m not one to normally quote as I don’t hold ancient philosophers in high esteem. I’ve come to the same conclusions myself prior to reading many Philosophers materials. A robe and a beard doesn’t put someone in higher standing than my own reflections.

However, knowing that there are frameworks out there for when you are lost is beneficial.

Some viewpoints from Stoics and Buddhists - I love both schools.

Stoic viewpoint

“Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions - in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing. The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindered, not our own.” - Epictetus, The Handbook (The Encheiridion)

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming—in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you—means a loss of opportunity for some other task. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Buddhist viewpoint

The Buddha himself addresses control and non-control in the Four Noble Truths, particularly in the Second Noble Truth (samudaya), which states that suffering arises from craving (tanha)

He teaches that:

• What we can control: Our actions (kamma), our thoughts, and our attachments.

• What we cannot control: The impermanent nature of the world, aging, sickness, death, and the actions of others.

And importantly, suffering is present when the self is involved. The idea of self being a static, immutable constant is against Buddhists views. Or said another way, change and mutability is natural.