How Did I Move Past Regret?

Not easily, and with many loop backs. It took many years for me to move past regret. Regret that I didn't stand up for myself. Regret for what I viewed as lost time. Regret for all the things I didn't do. Regret for things I had done in an effort to keep the peace.

When I first left, I was in survival mode, and it was all I could do to go to work and get through the day. There were many days I would come home and cry, wishing I had done things differently. I felt guilt over breaking up my family, even though I knew I had to do it.

For a long time, I had no idea how to move past these feelings. I journaled a lot, writing everything I was feeling, and that helped me vocalize what was inside. I would tell myself I had nothing to feel guilty over, but I didn't really believe it. Regret sat on me like proof that I'd failed, like I'd done something wrong, when really I had just made the best choice I could with what I knew at the time.

There were several things that started shifting this pattern. Counseling helped me understand the choices I had made and helped me work through much of the trauma underneath them. Joining Flying Free helped even more — through coaching and the courses I went through, I started understanding why I had made the choices I made, and realizing I had never really understood what a healthy relationship even looked like. I had a difficult childhood with a lot of trauma and no examples to go by, so how could I have seen it? In many ways, I was just following a pattern I already knew.

I also read books that helped me understand what I was living through, even when they weren't easy reads. The Body Keeps the Score is a technical book, but it taught me something I needed to know. It taught me that trauma doesn't just live in your memories, it lives in your body, and it has to be released before you can really heal. Understanding that helped me stop expecting myself to just "think" my way past the regret and the guilt. It helped me make sense of why healing was taking so long, and why it had to happen the way it did.

I think the biggest shift came when I began to feel compassion for the girl who wanted a family she never had, who wanted to give and receive love. I began to forgive myself.

I also had to let go of the guilt I carried about breaking up my family. My children are grown now, with their own lives to lead. I couldn't keep feeling regret over choosing myself, when choosing myself was what finally let me show up as a whole person for them too.

Regret keeps a person focused on the negative, looking at choices as failures instead of lessons. When I could start seeing the choices I had made not as failures, but as decisions made out of love and the knowledge I had at the time, something inside me shifted. I stopped blaming myself, and I even started thinking about my past with gratitude.

I love the life I have now. Whenever a thought pops up, which it still does occasionally, I think about how much I love my life, how proud I am of all my hard work to grow and move forward, and of the person I have become. I like her so much!