I can so relate. The mistakes. The regrets. The guilt. The anxiety. The sleep disorders. I’ve got it all in spades.

I don’t know what to tell you? I’m working on it myself. Sometimes I think of people who stepped in and helped me through difficult times in my life, and then I try to pay it forward even in small ways to other people I meet who are themselves in a bad place. I find this therapeutic.

I suppose on the bright side, my past has made me a humble person who is not quick to judge others. But there’s a fragility there too, and I fear for how I would cope with whatever new challenges await. These are rather uncertain times.

Maybe you can take some comfort in knowing you’re not the only one in this funk? I think you’ve actually made me feel better about it a little bit. Anyway, best of luck to you that you find your way.

It’s possible to bury old mistakes in a pile of new experiences, but you have to allow yourself to have those experiences

Forgiveness for yourself very powerful.
When I needed to be forgiven and I couldn’t reach that person this practice helped me a lot ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGd1F6QoHsw) Of course, mindfulness practices are very useful too. Best of luck.

You don’t.

It’s okay to remember your past mistakes and regrets since they help you make better decisions in the future

personally i refuse to, as soon as i fuck up i berate myself for everything until i want to throw myself into a meat grinder

edit: not recommending anyone else do this, this is my specific success plan only and nobody else should use it

What works is planning. Plan what you’d do, if the situation were to arise again. Once you have a plan, your mind will stop bugging you. Works for me!

Remember how forgiving you are of others and apply that to yourself

I stay high to keep my long term memory at bay. Unfortunately I’m still covered in scars which makes it harder…

my therapist would say you dont have to cure your anx disorder but to live with it. instead try different techniques and practice those that work. ACT. CBT. DBT. good luck on the forever fight.

brute force new mistakes

How often do you lay awake thinking of other peoples mistakes?

My point is, everyone else is too busy thinking about their own top ten to worry about yours, so you are basically the only one keeping that moment alive. Once you can get far enough away from the situation to realize that in the grand scheme nobody cares, you’ll be able to forgive yourself a bit easier (in my experience)

I remember how other wildly successful people have made mistakes and try to remember I can’t do a near zero fault run in life.

You can never change the past, but you can change the future.

Your mistakes are going to continue, in fact they will probably get bigger. I’ll be vulnerable, I fucked up majorly and was let go from a previous job. It was a stupid fuckup, I should have caught it earlier, and it caused real money to be lost by the company and I let down my team. That guilt and embarrassment will stick with me for a long time.

However, I can’t let it stop me. It paralyzed me for a bit, I lost my confidence and stopped wanting to try at my position, but then one day I just started thinking about it. What did I actually do wrong, where did I go wrong, how did I let people down, and I decided I wanted to do my best to avoid that. So now at a new job I remember that incident, and I call out things earlier, I’m a bit less cocky, I do several little things that I just had to learn the hard way I guess.

The long point of my anecdote I guess is that those feelings never really go away, you’ll always be laying there at night and thinking about them. Growing though is acknowledging them, not trying to hide from them, and figuring out how you want to better yourself going forward.

Someone once told me that it is wery easy for you to remember these instances and think at how you made a fool for yourself or how you were wrong or maybe even bad towards someone. These things are still vivid after 10-20 years.

However remembering how others were towards you fades a lot easier, to the point that remembering such instances from others against you from 5 years ago is difficult.

It sometimes helps me thinking that others likely moved on and probably do not even remember the episode, so I should let it go.

That’s called ruminating. Are you neurodivergent? Therapy and/or correcting the behavior every time you catch yourself doing it.