Many people make frequent visits back to their past mistakes. They haven’t quite figured out how to move on and leave the past in the past.
Not that’s it’s an easy thing to do. It’s often the most difficult thing we could ever do.
But it must be done.
We don’t want to necessarily forget the painful past, but we need to be able to not be hampered and held back by it, because time keeps scrolling forward, and life (and people) require us to be fully present.
Everyone’s healing process is different. Nobody’s path forward is the same. That said, there are high-probability practices that help us heal and move forward. We can cover those in a future article.
The alternatives are to either live stuck, in a state of denial, never giving our unresolved pain a second glance (despite the fact that it’s keeping us stuck), OR to do the opposite–continuing to ruminate on our unresolved past in a way that only hurts us.
Sometimes both alternatives are just part of our process towards healing, “phases” we find ourselves in, almost “needing” to go through them.
The Museum
Yes, some are stuck in ruminating about past mistakes and regrets.
Due to repetition, they’ve cut a well-worn path in their brains to these mistakes and painful memories, so that it’s become very easy to slip into this “channel” of thought.
It’s as if they’ve constructed a Museum of Mistakes.
This museum is filled with various exhibits memorializing their past mistakes. Once they enter the museum, they decide which exhibits are most important for that day’s tour.
Once at the exhibit, they can examine the relics, replaying what happened “on that day”, re-telling themselves the story, yet again.
Or, perhaps they may make a visit to the “archives room”. Once there, they can pore over the documents that chronicle their past failures. Some have them all neatly categorized–relationship failures, job failures, health failures, financial failures.
Some linger in their museum for quite awhile–they make a day of it. Others are earnestly trying to cut back on their visits, and do a quick run-through, or just look at a couple of their favorite exhibits and leave.
Shame
One thing these visits all have in common–they trigger shame, with the person leaving their museum feeling worse about themselves than before they visited.
This is why this museum is dangerous–shame is the most toxic “substance” that exists. Shame kills our spirit.
Every Museum of Mistakes leads us into an experience of shame, to one degree or another. At its worst, this shame has the ability to stick to us–it’s not only the most toxic substance, it can also be the stickiest, refusing to brushed off.
Shame colors how we see everything and keeps us travelling paths of repeated difficulty and pain.
Not only this, but the bedrock of most personal issues is shame. It’s the very foundation of many of our private struggles, as well as our relational struggles. We definitely don’t need to be fueling it.
With a Little Help From Our “Friends”
Of course, sometimes there are people in our lives who “fund” our museum. They want us to remember our past mistakes. It’s as if they become the “donors” and benefactors of this venue.
These interested parties are standing at the front door, holding it open, inviting us in to have another review of our past mistakes, even directing us to specific exhibits.
Our museum may even have “docents”, volunteering to give others tours of our exhibits, happy to recall our failures to any party willing to listen. They have wonderful memories of our failures, or so it seems, by the pleasure they get in recounting them.
Here’s the thing–if anyone keeps this museum “open for business”, they’ll remain stuck and continue spinning their wheels, eventually causing themselves (and others) further harm.
If they really do need to remember, perhaps they could condense all the major exhibits, relics, and archives into a brief document, with one recommendation–what did they learn from each past mistake and “failure”, in a way that will make them smarter and better equipped to succeed in the present and the future?
The Usefulness of Remembering
That’s the only truly useful reason to remember–so that we learn.
Or, so that we can use these mistakes as “comparators”–how are we doing now in this area? It may be a reality-check, where we see that we haven’t changed much, and if we can stay out of the self-criticism and shame, it becomes an opportunity for us to get serious about changing so we don’t have to repeat the same mistake and add another exhibit to our museum.
Of course, the comparator also is an opportunity for us to see our personal growth, being encouraged and grateful for our progress.
But we don’t need a museum of mistakes for this. A museum just sitting there staring at us will eventually be entered.
My recommendation is that we lock the entrances to these museums. Barricade them. Better yet, bulldoze them into oblivion and plant a garden instead.
Or here’s a thought: clear out all the exhibits, burn all the relics, and replace them with new exhibits–ones of your wins, victories, and successes. Tell yourselves THESE stories.
It can even house your current “stories of struggle” that are still in process, but that elicit in you pride that you’re courageously pushing against something in a worthy effort.
Moving On
It’s not always easy to move on from our past mistakes and failures. And I know this isn’t the complete answer by any means (I abhor the oversimplification of complexity), but I do know that one reason we get stuck is because we’ve developed the habit, or the “mindset”, of negativity, and of beating ourselves up.
Again, it’s the power of shame. We’ll deal with this important topic more in a future article, but in the meantime, I encourage us all to push against any tendency to memorialize our failures in a way that ignites shame.
You are more than your mistakes. Ideally, these are part of our process of growth and learning, as it’s impossible to grow without “failing”–and I put the word failing in quotes because it’s not really failing if we learn from it and parlay this learning into growth.
Press on my friends.