When Looking Back Hurts: Healing Regret Through Self-Compassion and Grace

Have you ever looked back on a season of your life and wished it had been different?

Maybe you wish you had known then what you know now. Maybe you wish you had made different choices, shown up differently, or been able to protect the people you love from pain. Perhaps there are memories that still carry regret, remorse, sadness, or a lingering sense that things should have gone another way.

In this episode, I share a deeply personal experience that arose as I prepared to send family photo albums and keepsakes to my sons. Looking through pictures from years gone by brought forward an unexpected wave of emotion and a question many of us have asked ourselves:

Why did it have to be so hard?

As I sat with those feelings, I was reminded that healing isn't about pretending the past didn't happen. It's not about bypassing the pain or convincing ourselves that everything was perfect. Healing is about learning how to hold our memories with compassion, tenderness, and grace.

When we continue to replay our past through the lens of judgment, regret, and self-blame, we keep old wounds alive. But when we bring awareness, self-compassion, and spiritual understanding to those experiences, something begins to shift. The past remains the same, but our relationship to it can heal.

In this episode, we explore how to honor our feelings without becoming trapped in them, how to release old judgments, and how to view our lives through the lens of a soul's journey rather than a story of mistakes and failures.

Because the truth is, you cannot change the past.

But you can heal the way you carry it.

Learn more about Recover Your Soul in-person Retreats with Rev Rachel 

The Recovery Your Soul Podcast courses and content is for educational purposes only and is not affiliated with or representative of any organization, recovery group, or religion. And reflect the personal experience and opinions of Rev Rachel Harrison and her guests. RYS claims no responsibility, any person or entity for any loss, liability, damage caused or alleged to be caused, direct or indirectly by the use application or interpretation of the information presented within. 

Transcript

Regret Through A Spiritual Lens

Rev Rachel Harrison 0:00

It's only natural to look back on your life and some of the very complex and painful and difficult things that we've been through and wish that it was different. Regret and remorse are part of looking at what was. But when we can look at it through a spiritual lens, when we can start to understand and recognize the power we have and how we perceive it, see it, choose to heal it today, there is an incredible opportunity for us to shift what was and to step even more clearly into who we are becoming. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and Community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast. It's Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I continue just to have such appreciation for those of you who continue to be listening to this message and finding value in it and finding hope and healing from it as well. We are learning how to be okay even when the people in the world around us aren't okay. And even more than that, we're learning how to recover our souls, how to bring back to us the parts of us that we've abandoned or left in woundedness. And we're bringing us back into our wholeness so that we can live from our light and our wholeness. And that seems like a lot sometimes, but the more that we do this work, and the more that I've done this work, and I've witnessed so many people doing the work, either through the recovery soul process or their own healing and awakening journey of whatever that looks like, it becomes more and more true and apparent that this is why we're here, is to fully live and then also to release the old patterns and systems and stories that don't serve

Photo Albums That Bring The Past Up

Rev Rachel Harrison 2:21

us. Today I'm talking about something that's up for me right now. And it's around the past and the regret that I have for my life for 20 years on some level, and and the that those feelings that we have of remorse and really um having to be tender to ourselves in the experience of what was as we're releasing into who we are becoming and what we are here to be. And part of the reason why this is up for me is because Rich is leaving to go to California. He's driving in our 2017 Mazda, and he's bringing the car to my oldest son, Alex, and his fiancee and my grandson as a family car. And then Alex is giving his older sort of runaround, get better gas mileage car to Bodhi, my younger son, who has a really nice truck that gets almost no miles to the gallon in California. It's very expensive. And that allowed me to actually get the car of my dreams, which is a whole other journey and story of deservedness and um self-value and allowing myself to receive in a way that is new and different for me. So everybody got a car. We keep joking, it's like Oprah. Everybody gets a car. You get a car, you get a car, you get a car. And so since he's driving cross-country, it only makes sense that we would fill the car with stuff that's been really hard to get to the boys who live in California and we live in Colorado. And so part of what's happened is um I was a creative memories consultant back in the day, for anybody who remembers scrapbooking. And I made albums for all of us, right? So I would make a family album, and then I would make an album for Alex, and then I made an album for Bodie. So we've had all these albums at the house. And what's really interesting is that we have all these physical albums up to about 2006, maybe 2005, 2006, when things really started becoming digital. You know, this was back in the day of taking your 24 or 36 pictures on your camera, taking them to the place to get them developed, waiting for for them to come back and getting them. So anyway, I've been looking through and trying to find all their albums and uh looking through pictures. And, you know, I talked recently in one of the other podcasts about how I was looking through the digital pictures that I had to find the ones to put on the website that would coordinate with the stories that come out of the book, out of my teaching memoir, uh, Recover Your Soul, that really reflected our family and where we were at those times and where I was. And I went through a whole process of looking through those pictures as well and being able to see them from this other lens, right? To really recognize that there's an aspect of looking at these pictures that is important because most of the pictures, most of the time, we smile and we're capturing these really beautiful moments. Very rarely are we taking pictures of ourselves or of our family in the moments of crisis. So I have these albums for the boys that really only go up for them until you know four years old or something like that. So they're they're they're very early um albums and yearbooks. And I found my yearbooks, which interestingly enough, I took pictures of my most valuable pages, and I actually think I'm gonna um get rid of them. I'm not sure if I'll donate them to an art collective that might, somebody might use them for collage or whatever. I'm really in this place of like letting go of those old stories and those old experiences so that I can be more present here.

Codependency And Regulating Your Joy

Rev Rachel Harrison 6:17

So this morning I was journaling about Rich bringing the cars and and just how grateful I am. I was really journaling about how grateful I am for how close our family has become. And and I was thinking about how much I miss my boys on a lot of levels of wishing that we could be together more or spend more time together. And you've heard me say before that there is something to our healing that has been necessary for us to have more distance, that allowing us to have more distance has created a space where everybody's in their own lives. And I'm not watching every single day. You know, is he in a good mood today? Is he not in a good mood today? Was is he fighting with his girlfriend? Is he not fighting with his girlfriend? Is he showing up to work? Is he not showing up to work? All the things that every tiny little piece of what Alex specifically and then Bodhi did was how I attuned whether my day was a good day or gonna be a hard day, because I lived by the motto, I was only as happy as my least happy child. So, on some level, having us have this distance has created space for me to be in my own nervous system and to regulate my own happiness because that way when you do communicate or you do connect and they do share with you what's going on, and some of it's not easy, right? There's a lot of a lot of very difficult situations in the world, A, and B, it is expensive and complicated and hard to be a human being, especially adulting is is a is a big deal. So each of them bump up against their own things, and then there's also the addiction issues and their ADHD the issues, and um, you know, they're very real human beings, but because I'm not watching it on a every moment place, I can be within my own well-being of how I'm working in my head. So this morning I'm journaling, and I had this wave of sadness that flushed over me, and it was this wave of remorse for how hard it was for those years. And this part of me that continues to be curious as to why it had to be so hard always gets me emotional because the pictures are true. There was so much beauty and so much love and so much goodness, and at the same time, Rich and I were alcoholics, and there was a lot of complications in our communication, and the boys struggled in their own ways, and uh we weren't always present for them in the way that they potentially needed. And we each showed up in ways that were really beautiful and not all that great, which I think is parenting. And I had this vision in my head that said, why couldn't we have had that vision that I think we all have somewhere of a life that is dinners around the table where everyone's sharing their highs and lows for the days, and there's laughter and connection, and everyone's getting along, and we can't wait to spend time together. And those did happen at times, but a lot of that didn't happen. And as I was washed through this moment of remorse that kind of caught me off guard, I thought of all of you and how we're in this together and how much we have been through.

Journaling From The Heart Space

Rev Rachel Harrison 10:20

And what I think has been really powerful and profound in my own journey is that it's not about pretending none of that happened because oh, it did, oh, it for sure happened, but I almost immediately, because I've been working this practice, moved into my heart, and I touched into the place of myself that was feeling these deep feelings, and I allowed myself to be sad, and I thought, yeah, it was really hard for everybody in my family, not just for me, not just for my boys, not just for rich, not just for my mom, but for all of us as a unit. And I just let it sit for a minute and be true. And then I turned to my journal as I often do from my higher self. I moved up into my heart space that can hold the capacity for everything. But isn't about thinking and figuring it out, and it's also not from our sort of our lower energy centers that are attached to protection and uh safety. And I moved into my heart space and I said, How can I see this? How can I understand this from love, from understanding, from my soul's journey, from the perspective that is where I want to be living from? How can I be present with this? And I'm journaling, and I often will have a Q for question and then an A for answer, which lets my higher self or my guides or whatever you want to call it comes through. Whatever this wisdom is that comes through is amazing for me personally. And I've been grateful to be able to share it with you. And what it said was yes, it is very complicated to be here in relationships. And what you went through, you are remembering through the lens and the perception in which you experienced it at that time, which has a lot of pain. And that through this experience of allowing yourself to witness and see it, there's this opportunity to shift the energy around it and around the memories to release the woundedness and the upset and the anger and the resentment and the hurt, and just be present with what was with tenderness, compassion, and grace. And I immediately felt a release. I felt that feeling instead of whipping my mind around why did it have to be like that? And why didn't I do something different? And how could I have fixed it? How could I have changed it? How could I have made it better? I felt a compassion for all of us in that experience. And a knowing that it is so true that how we remember it, how we continue to process it, how we continue to play it out in our mind means something. And that I have a choice in how I'm gonna relive those experiences and what definitions and values I'm gonna place on each one of those moments and experiences. What I choose is what is. It is as you choose to see it. It began to speak about judgment and how we use judgment as a protector. And the judgment is this was good and this was bad. And then it reminded me that on a soul's journey, on a hero's soul's journey, all of it is the journey, including all of it, all of it. So instead of judging that night where we were fighting, where um, you know, I was crying and and there was upset, or things were said that were so harmful and so painful, or how I felt inside of my body, and what I worried about for the kids. And you could just go on and on and on. I remember driving with Alex and him being so mad, he got out of a moving car, and then you have a a kid who's who's running away from you, and the car has been moving, and you don't know what to do. Like there was stuff that was so hard. We have to stop living in the pain to feel the feelings is so essential because there's nothing like the capacity to feel feelings, fear, worry, upset. What they say in internal family systems, which is a psychology system, which I have just determined is whatever

Parts Work And The Pain Body

Rev Rachel Harrison 15:21

it is to me, because that's what we get to do. There's these parts, it's almost like the characters of that moment. If you were to be watching back a movie of your life and how that character felt in that moment, that is very real. But they can't see how much healing, how much growth, how much shifting, how much changing, how much awareness has happened since then because that part is still in that memory. And so that's what the guidance was saying was you want to give compassion and gentleness to that part and to that memory. You don't want to dismiss it, you don't want to um try to push it away, but you also don't want to sort of fall into that space. Sometimes I talk about how we can fall into our pain body. And sometimes you need to do that. That's part of the purging. But this is coming up so that it can be released. So instead of seeing it is coming up because, you know, why is this coming up again? It's coming up because it's another level of pain to be released, another level of how we're in the memories and how I'm gonna be in it. And that if I'm living from a place that's filled with regret and remorse, what it means is that I'm replaying those old systems, those old stories, those old situations that happened from the wound again and again and again and again. That wound created a scar. The scar has power, it has strength, it has knowing, it has evidence of what you've been through. You see, people, they've got, you know, physical scars on their bodies, and you're like, oh, what happened? They're like, oh, I, you know, had a surgery or I had a accident. There's a whole story that comes with it. And those that can tell the story about what they've been through and how it elevated them and what they experienced from it, what they learned from it, and how they grew from it, those are the values of those experiences. And that's the opportunity that we have to look back at that life. So I had 10, 15 years, sometimes I say 20, a very complicated life because I am a human being and this is what life is like. But we made a change. I made a change. Eight years ago, I decided to get sober for myself. Eight years ago, I decided I wasn't gonna live like this anymore. Step one and recover your soul, ready for awakening. There is another way. There is another way. And when we are ready to fully embrace all that we've been through, not from victim, not from woe's me, not from I can't believe that this all happened, but from our hero's soul's journey, where we say, Yeah, that happened. The guidance that came through on the paper said, When you do this work of healing, it heals it in the past. So even though I've given to tears because my heart is open and it and it means a lot to remember and be in those experiences again and feel those feelings, it's from a place of such grace and compassion to everyone involved. And that heals, that brings love, not conditional love, but the greater love into it. We cannot go back and change the past. Whatever happened, happened. No matter how much remorse, how much regret, how much wishing that it was different you do, you cannot go back and change it. It will not be changed, but you can change how you experience it, how you feel it, how you talk about it, how you remember it now from a more elevated, healed place, from a place of compassion for everyone involved, from a place where you can see how we had limited capacity at that time based on our beliefs, patterns, and stories in this work that we're doing in Recover Your Soul to update, to heal, to release the wounds that are running these, you know, um subconscious operating systems that do not serve us to our best benefit. This is the work. So when I look back at these albums that I'm sending off in this car with my husband to my kids, my hope is that they spend a lot of time looking at how beautiful those pictures are, how much they were loved and are still loved, and how grateful I am that they've stepped on this journey of their own way of doing it, which is very different

Sobriety And Ending The Cycle

Rev Rachel Harrison 20:21

than mine. But they've allowed me to speak about our life because we've been so transformed as a family. So, yes, my heart wishes on some level that it didn't have to be that hard. But my knowing knows that being a human being is very complicated, and there isn't anyone who comes onto this incarnation without having the experience. It's why we are here having the experience, and we're shifting how we think about it, how we show up in it, how we are co-creators of the life in which we live. And so then what came out at the end of my writing was like this gratitude, this incredible gratitude for everything that we've been through, how far we've come, and that the cycle of dysfunction stopped. And you know who stopped with first? Me. I made a decision. I didn't know what that would look like. I didn't know if it looked like I had to leave my whole family, but I was willing to do whatever it took to stop the cycles. And it's taken us eight years. But in those eight years, powerful and beautiful things have happened, and now my children have their own choice, it is their choice. choice to live their lives as they so choose. And they have lived in dysfunction and they have seen healthy relationship. The greatest gift that we can give to our families and to the world is to heal ourselves. Our healing heals the world. And the more that we show up in these systems which continue to be complicated from our most healed place and choose how we are going to see it and we're going to choose to release judgment. We're choosing to see through the eyes of love. We're choosing to be whole we're choosing to be in the depth of who we are. That's who we are. It affects the people around us in positive ways. And it doesn't mean that we make them all of a sudden have some sort of magical experience. But your shift shifts everything. So then the the wave passed of this this regret and remorse and it moved into the reminding myself that this present moment, this moment where we are right now is the only moment that exists. And the more that we can be here in our most awake state our most aware consciousness state it heals the past and it opens the door for a future that is from this co-creative everything's working out for me all is well I can be present with what is I can be happy regardless of what's happening in the world around me. I am sovereign in my well-being and I can have compassion and grace and love for everyone in their situation. I can see their souls' journeys and I can be present with my feelings and I can heal all of my wounds and my past and in that who knows what's going to come be gentle to yourself. There's a lot going on in the world in the energy in the collective and there's a lot coming up because your light is starting to shine so brightly that it is shining light on the places that have shadow and it's coming on purpose not because there's something wrong but actually it's coming to give you an opportunity to release even deeper than ever before. Again I was taken

The Present Moment Heals

Rev Rachel Harrison 24:32

by surprise this morning by that feeling but what a gift because now I feel a sense of relief and release that is another layer of my healing that I can send all these things off with my husband and the car to the kids and know that we are healing even deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper through this energy that I'm experiencing. I hope that you continue to do this work for yourself, that this recover your soul process or whatever other process you're working is the reminder of your soul and your wholeness because your soul knows the way. Until next time, Namaste. If something that you just heard resonated with you, I want you to know there's a whole community waiting for you. The recovery soul process is a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life and there's many ways to walk it together. Start with the free mini workbook at recoveryoursoul.net. It's a beautiful first step. You can join us for the free monthly support group on the first Monday of every month. And if you're ready to go deeper and work the nine steps you can join the self-study collective or

Community Resources And Next Steps

Rev Rachel Harrison 25:43

a soul circle or come to one of our in-person retreats or workshops and if you want to work with me personally one-on-one coaching is available. You can also find bonus episodes every Friday on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and I'm on YouTube with new videos that are posted weekly and grab your copy of the new Recover Your Soul Spiritual memoir. It is a spiritual journey of healing from addiction, codependency and people pleasing available on Amazon and it's our journey of healing through this process. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and all of it is recover your soul just remember you're not alone in this. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul