Making Mistakes and Managing Shame:

Story Time

When I was beginning my post-grad program, in the middle of covid, I moved apartments. I was the oldest and most perfectionistic of the bunch of my new roommates, so I naturally took on the bulk of planning and organization and directing. I rented a moving van on move-out day so we could put all our things in storage. I was strapped for cash at the time and anxious about the cost of the move, so I said no to insurance. I thought the chances of needing it were too low to justify the cost. Huge mistake.

I’m not a particularly good driver. And I’d never driven a vehicle that size before. I didn’t grow up in the city, I didn’t learn to drive in the city. I had spent the whole day going from apartment building to apartment building and it hadn't occurred to me that vehicles (especially large ones) don’t always fit in the back parking lots of little, old, renovated apartment buildings.

Long story short, I scratched up the side of the truck backing out of a parking lot and accrued what could have easily been thousands of dollars worth of damage. And knowing that I hadn’t paid for insurance, I expected I would have to pay for the repairs myself.

I did what I always did at this time in my life: I took some time alone to manage the panic attack, I called my mom, I cried in public. I knew that the hardest part of this whole story wasn’t going to be the money, it was going to be navigating the emotional consequences of a mistake of this scale. My mother likes reminding me, education is expensive. And in this case, it certainly was. I learned a lot that day, about myself and the world and problem solving and being an adult. And I paid for those lessons in literal tears and hyperventilated breathing.

That night I dropped the truck off after hours, went home, and waited for the inevitable phone call. I didn’t sleep a wink. But insomnia is normal for me, and absolutely expected when my anxiety is so high. My nervous system was in chaos and it was going to take time for it to re-regulate. So, instead, I spent the night journaling and reflecting. I find this is the best way to spend sleepless nights, it ensures that I make meaning and build resilience. Here’s what I learned that night:

In a day we make hundreds of decisions, from brushing our teeth to locking our doors to paperwork and conversations. And let's say out of every one hundred decisions, I make 99 of them fairly well. This, actually, makes me an extremely good bet. 99 out of 100 is super reliable. So starting at a base-rate, I’m killing it. But that still means that I can make many bad decisions in a day. Our minds are wired to always focus on the negative, as a survival strategy. But the issue with that is we forget constantly the things we actually do well. So, it’s important to remember that for every mistake there are many, many successes. And what failures do come up, most are of little consequence.

So, framed this way, mistakes are worth the cost, 1 to 99 is a great ratio. If given a choice for free will, I’ll take those numbers. I could live my whole life making one mistake out a hundred, and it’d be worthwhile. But there’s more. I am not a stagnant being. For every day I live this life, for every mistake I make, I learn something. I am significantly less likely to make the same mistake again. Which means my reliability rate is always going up. The bigger the mistake, the bigger the lesson learned, the bigger the pay off. And it’ll never be perfect, but it is always getting better.

Thought of in this way, my mistakes aren’t just a price for my successes, they’re an active investment in them. My mistakes are a direct and necessary part of my accomplishments. Paying thousands of dollars I don’t have on repairs is going to suck, my future self is going to be grateful for it, whether she knows it or not.

The thing is, that phone call never came. I was never forced to pay for the repairs (I expect the guy who rented me the truck took pity on me). I would have, undoubtedly, but it wasn’t necessary to the psychological impact that day had had on me. My lesson was learned, and I’ve never thought of myself, or my mistakes, the same way again.

Unlearning Shame

Our society, our parents and our teachers and even the shows we watch, teach us that the proper response to making a mistake is shame and guilt. The reasoning behind this, as much as there is any reasoning behind it, is that emotions like shame and guilt motivate us to do better. There’s a serious flaw in this system. Emotions like these tend to act more as paralyzers than motivators. They feel heavy, they shut us down, they make us stagnant. 

My theory is that we rely on these emotions too often, which makes them lose their effectiveness. If shame or guilt were rare emotions, saved for moments where we really did something terrible that needs to be rectified and avoided in the future (hurting a friend or betraying a coworker, or in extreme cases, murder or rape) then their novelty would act as an energizer. As it is, we tend to respond to these emotions in one of two ways: We bury ourselves or we numb out. We tell ourselves that we should feel this way, we punish ourselves by rolling around in this terrible feeling. Or we ignore it and suppress it and go on as normal. In both situations we miss the most important part of the process: the learning and the growth. This is what I call a shame-based society: one where shame is everywhere and rather ineffective because of it. 

So what’s the healthy way to respond to mistakes? Shame and guilt may still play a part, but ideally only to the extent that they really do motivate us to do better. Any more than that, and it defeats the purpose. Which means some other emotions need to be added to the mix. Feelings like confidence and determination and resilience and maybe even anger. These states activate us, they imbue us with energy and focus. They push us to be the versions of ourselves we are still growing into. Learning to change our reactions to mistakes means practice. Particularly, practice in changing our thinking: acknowledging that mistakes are inevitable, necessary, and a lot less important than we think. And working on our emotional regulation: Mistakes need self-care, they need forgiveness, and they need support. Without these things they’re just missed opportunities. We can’t turn off our emotional reactions, but we can decide that a feeling isn’t so important. In short, replacing self-criticism with self-compassion (a process proven to increase our performance and well-being) and adopting the belief that we need to be allowed to freely make mistakes, always.