Some of the pain your experiencing isn’t coming from what happened to you but how your defining a right and wrong choice and so creating regret.  The good news is this is something you can change and a good place to start the healing

“Many people imagine that there is a right and wrong choice to be made in every situation. If their decision leads to the result they desire, then they made the right decision. If it doesn’t, then they made the wrong decision. Right and wrong are determined by the outcome that follows.” – Nancy Colier

This attitude toward our choices, as well as this version of life, can cause us a great deal of pain, pain often labeled as regret. Regret more often then not is anger directed a one self.

The emotion we experience as regret is information that we wish we could undo the past and had more control – (its petty much all ego). We get stuck in the emotion of regret by staying fixated in the past – in such a case regret is a waist of time – We want a do over and then sulk when we don’t get to have one. If only, if only, why me, not fair, life sucks… I suck… down the rabbit hole we go.

Regret as information is helpful if we delve down into it. We can’t change what happened so we looked at what we might learn from the experience. (honestly – without creating victim and villain stories. If your creating victim and villain stories your still in regret and aren’t being honest). We see we have done the best we could with what we new in the time. We accept the responsibility that belongs to us and let go and even forgive what does not belong to us. We realize that based on the what we felt and new at the time we would make the same choices and did the best we could with what we had.  Regret turns into acceptance. Yes we could do better and deserve better and so we take what we learned to do better.

“For every choice we make, we use the experience, information, and intentions available to us in that particular moment in which we make it. We make the decision we make in an attempt to achieve the goal we desire, with the resources we possess now. Life then unfurls in the way that it does; it becomes what it is in part as a result of our choice and in part as a result of the mystery with which life manifests, the mystery that at times seems bigger than all our choices. The truth is, there’s no reality existing somewhere else that says, “Darn, you’re not going to get to join us over here in the happy life, where you could have ended up if you had made the right choice and picked the other path.” That other, imagined happy life is and has always been just a thought. The particular reality that would have come, had we made the other choice, never was and never will be our reality.”

“There’s only one thing we can know for sure, and that is that whatever situation we’re in now, it will change. It will change in part through our choices and in part through life’s eternal changing nature. Rather than squandering your attention on old choices made, moments that are gone, turn your most powerful gift, your attention, to what’s here now. Bring the best of you, your wisdom, and your full presence to the next choice that presents itself, here, with a sincere intention to do the best you can with who you are right now. Be in this choice, this life, this now, and stop imagining that reality could be or could have been anything other than what it is.” – Nancy Colier

 

Dear Nao:

You are welcome. Anger is natural, of course. We can’t help but feel whatever it is we feel.

As humans, in most cases, we have a choice to not act certain ways when angry. When a parent feels angry at her/ his five year old child, for example, it is okay to feel that anger. But is it okay for the parent to act aggressively toward the child, to yell or hit the child?

And when a parent does yell or hit the child, do you think the parent is loving the child at the same time?

anita