How to Feel (about) Mistakes
Published on 10.30.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com
A patient told me that as far back as she could remember, her mom had a “strong reaction” to her mistakes.1 If she dropped something, her mom would say, derisively, “What a klutz!” If she forgot or overlooked something, her mom would say, “What were you thinking? Were you even thinking?” As she grew up, this woman made a virtue of avoiding mistakes because she hated how they made her feel.
In this note I offer a way of thinking feelingly about mistakes. My approach starts from the fact, explored in the last note, that mistakes play an essential part in learning and thus in becoming our best selves. So trying to avoid them at all costs is just too costly. My patient’s story offers a way to work through the difficult feelings, and underscores why it’s work worth doing.
The first thing to do when things go wrong is feel our feelings. In the case of mistakes it’s likely the feeling will be negative, and likely we’ll want to avoid feeling it fully! Thus it’s not uncommon to go straight from the feeling to a story and a judgment. In my patient’s case, she started the session telling me about a “stupid” and “unnecessary” mistake she’d made over the weekend. I said we could get to the judgments, but first I was curious to hear what she was feeling. She said she felt ashamed and angry with herself. I asked her to tell me where in her body she felt it. She said her chest was tight, her stomach was upset, and she felt a burning sensation behind her eyes.
The next step, as we’re feeling our feelings, is to follow them. Staying with feelings—rather than defending against them—can help us find their true source. While shame, anger, fear, sadness and guilt are all negative feelings, they lead in very different directions. So I asked her to stay tuned to how she felt as she told me more about why she was so angry and ashamed. She said she had left a pen in the pocket of her jeans, thrown them into the wash, and now they were ruined.
When we follow our feelings, we’re sometimes surprised to notice they change—often in the direction of becoming more true and just. (This is not to say they always become more positive!) My patient noticed feeling better as she told me about what happened, and in particular as she saw how disproportionate her reaction had been. The half-conscious shameful story she’d been telling herself sounded less convincing when she said it aloud and heard me reflect it back.
I wondered aloud if she knew why she’d made such a big deal of something so relatively small. Whence the reflexive self-hatred and shame? The question made her curious. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just wired to overreact.” A great value of therapy is to get help challenging our default stories. In this spirit, I asked if that internal voice accusing her of being stupid and shameful was familiar. Did anyone in her life talk this way? She winced, ‘My mom. She still talks to me this way, still makes me feel like shit about the smallest mistakes.’ I smiled and said, “It sounds like these aren’t your true feelings at all; it sounds like you’re hearing your mother’s voice and mistaking it for your own. Fortunately, as a competent 42-year-old woman you have the right to thank your mom for her (unsolicited) help, remind her you’ve got your own voice to guide you, and show her the door.” (I know, if only it were as easy to do as to say.)
In sum, she started by feeling her feelings, her self-anger and shame, and the bodily sensations associated with them. Because they felt so substantial, she identified with them, feeling she was a shameful person. But as she followed them, her feelings started changing. She felt them “down-sizing”, as she put it, from catastrophic shame to a much more rational (and manageable) regret. Her feelings changed again as she recognized the connection with her mom, from being angry with herself to being angry with her mom. This more justly directed anger motivated her (as healthy anger often does) to set some boundaries with her mom, internally and externally. To experience in this way how feelings change helps us stop identifying with them, and treat them as the signals they are.
Thinking feelingly about mistakes and other failures usually leads us to be more gentle and understanding with ourselves. This in turn makes us more able to learn and grow from them. Indeed, the final part of her story beautifully underscores the connection between mistakes and growth. Our conversation in that session and several that followed had exposed a deep frustration in her life. Because she was so self-critical in the face of mistakes, she’d become overly risk-averse. (Who wants to be flooded with self-hatred and shame every time they make a mistake?) As a result, her world had become small and lonely as she carefully avoided situations—in particular dating—where she feared “making a huge mistake”.
But now she was uncovering the reasons why she was so habitually fearful, and—just as importantly—she was discovering by direct experience that she could live through her difficult feelings, learn from them, and metabolize them. She could tolerate making riskier choices along the way, since she both knew and felt their connection to a more expansive, less lonely life.
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Here, as in all these notes, I have changed details so that individuals cannot be identified from the descriptions.