What You Need To Do to Come Back After Making a Huge Mistake

We all Make Mistakes! Our mistakes can be little like dying our hair a weird colour or breaking a plate at a friend's dinner. These kinds of mistakes are less than ideal but are usually fairly easy to repair. What do we do when the mistakes we make are major? When what gets damaged or broken is not our hair or an inanimate object but our closest relationships, friendships, our good rapport with a colleague, or reputation. How do you come back after a mistake that big?

In relationships, friendships, colleagues, family members, or the court of public opinion here is what you need to do to come back from making a huge mistake.

Own it!

In this stage, we drop our egos and admit that we messed up. We admit it to ourselves, to a friend, to a sponsor, to a safe and trusted family member, or write it in a journal. We climb a mountain and yell it into the void. "I messed up!".

In this stage, we do whatever we need to do to accept that our actions hurt other people or ourselves. We take away the excuses. We take away what the other person or people involved may have done. We take away our reasons for it and we just accept we made a mistake. The first step to healing and moving past anything in life is acceptance.

Take Some Time To Reflect

There's always a bit of an incubation period from acceptance into awareness. This stage involves learning that when we have past trauma and attachment wounds, we often react to other people and situations from a triggered state (fight, flight or freeze) and we may have been trying to protect ourselves in the moment in question. It doesn't mean what we did was okay. It doesn't mean we get a pass. What it means is that we are not bad people for our response. It means we gain understanding that our actions or reactions came from a place of survival and we were triggered into responding outside of how we may have wanted to. From that place we can work to heal these parts of ourselves and move forward with more compassion and grace for ourselves, as well as, other people. With this new awareness, we can move forward to react differently, next time or in a new situation.

At this stage, it may be necessary for us to speak to a therapist or mental health professional about it. They can help us understand our actions and cycles. They can also give us tools and scripts to do better next time or if a similar scenario arises.

Apologize

If it is safe to do so, for ourselves or the other people involved, we can express our regrets and feelings of guilt or shame around what happened. We can apologize for what we did, our actions, and our side of things. This doesn't mean we take ownership of everything that happened around the situation. If there are other people involved, they also may have acted from a place of trauma and trigger. It's not our job to take on their side of it or take responsibility for any of their feelings. But we can and should own and apologize for our part in it.

It’s important in this stage to have no expectations around other people forgiving us or absolving us of any responsibility or our feelings. That's why we had step 2. Apologies are not always meant to bring us closure. They are meant to let the other person know we regret our actions and did not want to hurt them the way we did. Apologizing is meant to repair our relationship with other people. Discussing the situation openly and recognizing how our actions affect others can help us break unhealthy patterns and cycles. It also allows for healing.

Furthermore, if we want to apologize we should only do so if it doesn't cause damage to the person or people involved. If it was a long time ago and the people have moved on with their lives, it may be unnecessary to apologize. Doing so could cause them a lot of unnecessary pain we don't need to bring up for them to revisit. We could end up causing further damage. We should, also, forgo apologizing if it put us in an unsafe situation. If the other person or people involved will cause further harm, vilify us, abuse us, or blame us unduly, it may be best to forgo an apology. The other person has self-work to do and we don't have to put ourselves in harm's way. We can move on to do repair work.

Do the Repair Work

If we apologize, and the person or people forgive us and want to continue a relationship with us, the work is not over. We need to do aftercare and repair work, whatever that looks like. It will look different for every person and situation.

That could mean showing up, consistently and with the intention to show up better equipped to handle scenarios such as the one that caused us to react the way we did. It means that we don't take our triggers and traumas out on other people in our lives. It means that we do continued self-work, go to therapy, take our meds, work on gaining more self-awareness around our patterns and behaviours, and do our best to show up with compassion and honesty for ourselves and others, even when it is hard. It means taking better care of ourselves so we can be in a healthy place. It means we express ourselves when we are struggling in an honest and vulnerable way that doesn't cause harm to everyone and everything around us.

It is also worth noting, that it is well within the person's right to set boundaries with us and/or end any further involvement with us. That's fair. It's awful. It doesn't feel good, but sometimes we do so much damage over time or continuously that people no longer want to be around us and that is their right to set boundaries with us. You absolutely do not have to like it but you do have to accept it. In this case, the repair work is around healing ourselves. Working on ourselves for us so we can build new relationships or friendships. We can start new from a place. One where we work to change our patterns and try not to repeat them.

Work on Changing Your Behaviour

The best apology is changed behaviour. At this stage, we work on showing up as a better version of ourselves whether that person or people are in our lives. If they are, our job is to work on being a better spouse, partner, sibling, parent, friend, coworker, employee, or whatever the case may be.

How do you work on changing your behaviour? That may be different for different scenarios but the previous steps should help and so should the next step, which is to live with honesty and integrity, show up consistently and with the intention to do and be better this time around. This means, taking care of ourselves, putting our heads down, and doing our healing work. Whatever it takes to help us change the problematic behaviour that caused the mistake in the first place, that hurt those we care about love, or need in our lives. We work on changing that.

If we are not able to apologize for whatever reason or if the person we hurt has cut ties with us we still need to do the work at this stage. We just do it in a different capacity. We can change our behaviour and start from a different and better place with those who will come into our lives in the future.

Take Care of Yourself

Once we have apologized and we have begun to do the repair work and rebuilding of relationships, rapport, or our reputation, we need to do the work to keep ourselves healthy and strong. When we make mistakes and cause harm, it is because we are not in a good mental headspace. We were or are struggling. We were having mental health issues. We were at our capacity for what we could handle.

At this stage, we work on living a life that supports good mental health by taking care of ourselves. That could mean, making yourself a priority, starting a creative hobby, going for daily walks, taking care of your appearance, starting a spiritual practice, joining a rec league sports team, making some new friends that support your new lifestyle, going to support group meetings. It could mean a variety of things. Learning what makes us happy, fills up our cups, and puts us in a good mood is a very individual thing. So, at this stage, we go on the journey of learning what we need to live a life that makes us feel good, fulfilled, and healthy.

This is important because living a life that bolsters mental health can help us choose our responses to the people we love and have in our lives as opposed to reacting from our wounds which can cause damage to everyone around us. When we know that key point, we can do the work to help ourselves be better and feel better. From that space, we can do better in many areas of our lives.

Forgive

The last step is to forgive ourselves and others. This may take time. It takes work, compassion, and healing from our wounds. Forgiveness is about radically accepting ourselves as we are. All of our flaws, so we can understand and accept those of others.

We are all multifaceted people. We have all been hurt by others and some of us have some serious past trauma to heal from and move past, which is why we react from places of deep pain to one another. That doesn't make us bad people for doing that, it makes us human. No one is perfect. We can't all be love and positivity all the time. That is just not realistic. We can all be toxic at times. We all get angry, frustrated, angsty, depressed, and emotional. We all have acted out in unhealthy ways from time to time. We all have a shadow side. None of us are alone in this. We have to learn to understand our darkness, and hopefully, with lots of self-work we can one day accept that side of ourselves, as humans, deeply flawed and deeply feeling and deeply affected by hurt, pain, and trauma, of which there is much in the world.

We are all doing our best in each moment with what we have until we know better or get tired of living in a way that is so damaging to ourselves and others and make the necessary changes to live a life worthy of living. With forgiveness, we come to an understanding that we did hurt people but we are not inherently bad because of that. We learn we are simply feeling deeply while living in a messy world, doing our best to get through it all.

"I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world."

-- Glennon Doyle

Lastly, no matter what, we are worthy of forgiveness, even if others can't forgive us. That is part of their journey, to heal and find closure in the situation. If we have taken all the above steps, we have done all we can, the rest is up to them.

For ourselves, we can continue on our journey doing the work to show up and be better. It will get easier with time to come to terms with what happened or the situation. We can move forward knowing we did all we could and that is all we can do. We can move on, and live life from a place of better self-awareness, continue to take care of ourselves in a way that supports good mental health, and do the healing work so we can respond from a place of compassion and caring rather than trauma and pain. Life is full of ups and downs and the goal is that one day we will reach a place of peace, with who we are and who we once were, and everything that happened along the journey of our lives. It's all learning.

“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”

-- B. F. Skinner

I truly hope this piece helps. Coming back from making big mistakes is a humbling process but a deeply changing one. If you are here reading this you are doing the work, I wish you luck and so much healing.

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Is there anything else you would like to add about moving past a mistake and how to come back from one? Leave a comment below, if so.