Everyone screws up sometimes. Most people screw up over and over, and this doesn’t have anything to do with how smart they are. When it comes to relationships, even the most intelligent people sometimes make goofy choices or say things they don’t really mean or do stuff they shouldn’t do. It happens.
The most important part of making mistakes is what you do afterwards. The common, human tendency is to try to defend yourself, to explain why you did what you did or didn’t do what you didn’t do. It’s as if you think that the other person’s understanding of the situation, and why you acted the way you acted, will somehow make it better, certainly make you feel better. Only that’s not usually how it works.
You still feel stupid and usually the other person still feels offended and doesn’t understand it anyway. That’s because defensiveness—explaining yourself—doesn’t work. It sounds as if you’re excusing what you did (or didn’t do) and usually things don’t get better between you and whoever.
So, you feel even more stupid and now you feel misunderstood.
When you’ve made an unfortunate choice or a outright mistake, it’s normal to feel stupid and to beat yourself up. It feels pretty bad, though. Sometimes, you even feel stupid in situations when you didn’t particularly mess up. You might just have expressed something awkwardly or missed a social cue. This happens to everyone, but it can haunt you, making you cringe every time you think about it.
You need to learn to shake the stupid off. Tell yourself—as many times as necessary—that yes, it might have been a not-smart, crazy thing you did and that this wasn’t new to the human race. People mess up sometimes. Remind yourself that you aren’t a terrible, horrible person, then work to understand the choice you made.
It’s important to step back from your guilt or shame about this in order for you to fully learn from the moment. If you made a relationship choice with unintended, unforeseen consequences, you very much want to make sure you don’t make this choice again. You need to learn from this.
One definition of insanity is to repeat the same actions, expecting different consequences. You don’t want to do the same kinds of things(stuff that doesn’t work)in relationship after relationship. You want to see what you need to see, but you have a greater chance of doing this if you stop beating yourself up about it.
If the regrettable choice you made was, in your eyes, really bad or if it had some distressing relationship consequences, it may seem like stepping away from the stupid feeling is avoiding deserved consequences. Maybe you think you ought to feel stupid. Trust me on this, it doesn’t help.
You need to learn whatever there is to learn and in order to do this most effectively, you need to stop beating yourself up.