From Self-Destruction to Self-Compassion: Why you Must Stop Blaming Yourself Now

Humans are fallible, and we all have wisdom gaps, whether we admit it or not. Wisdom and good decision-making skills come with age and experience; the version of you 10, 20 years ago is not the same version of you today. You have grown, you’ve matured, and you now see life through the lens of clarity and the benefit of hindsight. Be that as it may, our existential reality is punctuated by success and failure, victories and defeats. To err is human, but living with regret is a choice.

How often do we start each day with the painful residue of yesterday? The haunted memories of our past mistakes, because we struggle to forgive ourselves. I believe the ultimate goal of life is not to live it so cautiously that we avoid making mistakes. We are, by nature, imperfect beings, finite in knowledge, prone to error, and shaped by the limitations of our circumstances. Guilt and regret, those persistent specters of the past, arise from our capacity for self-reflection, a double-edged sword that allows us to learn from our mistakes, but can also imprison us in cycles of self-reproach.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once observed that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward. This tension between retrospection and forward motion lies at the heart of our struggle with guilt. If left unexamined, regret becomes a corrosive force, eroding self-worth and stifling potential. Yet, when confronted with wisdom, it transforms into a crucible for growth.

How should we handle guilt and regrets?

Reframe your past self not as a villain, but as a person navigating limited awareness, experience, and capacity. You did the best you could given your age, knowledge, experience, wisdom, or the lack thereof. If you know better, you will do better. The renowned author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said it best: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” This is not about evading accountability, but about embracing compassionate realism. You are not who you were ten years ago, and the judgment you apply retroactively is often filtered through a more mature lens. Accept that what was done cannot be undone, but it can be understood, integrated, and redeemed.

In addition, release guilt over things that were never yours to carry, including survivors, or success guilt. This is a subtle psychological trap, often rooted in over-identification with the pain of others, or a distorted sense of justice. You are not the author of everyone’s story. You are only responsible for your role in it.

Much of our regret stems not from outright wrongdoing, but from the internalized tyranny of perfectionism. We measure our worth against arbitrary timelines, social comparisons, or idealized expectations, many of which are neither rooted in wisdom nor reality. This is particularly prevalent in high-achieving individuals and creatives, who often bear the invisible burden of “not enoughness.”

You have to replace idealism with clarity. Life is seasonal, iterative, and nonlinear. Success is cumulative, not instantaneous. The good book, the Bible, says in Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s elephant metaphor (eating it one bite at a time) echoes the principle of patient process.

Your growth, therefore, must be measured not by how fast you get there, but by how faithfully you respond to where you are. Let self-expectation be proportional to your present capacity, not your imagined ideal.

Guilt and regret are not enemies but guides if we allow them to be. The past cannot be rewritten, but its weight can be lightened through acceptance, recalibration, and purposeful transformation.