I find the only way to stop thinking about the embarrassing moments is to try and think about an embarrassing moment about someone else. You find it’s harder to come up with those memories and that shows your embarrassing memory is forgetton by most people. So you shouldn’t dwell on it either.
I just told my kid about this after he hit a kid with a rock inside a snowball. Bad shit you do will haunt you forever. Oddly enough, your conscience is the best reason to be a good person. I mean, other than lawful consequences if its bad enough.
No law is as brutal as my conscience. If something is illegal, yet I don’t feel remorsen for it (like with pirating), I don’t give a damn and keep doing it. But if I feel guilty about something that is not only not illegal, but even encouraged, no matter what, I NEVER do it again.
Exactly. I feel bad about shit from 30+ years ago. I stole a sucker when I was like 5 or 6, and that part was easy. Enjoying it was not. It was a sucker. Like $.25 at the time or something. But it wasn’t about the money, it was that I did a wrong thing and haven’t stolen anything since. Pirating feels different since it’s not a physical object. Also, if one pirates stuff that’s good enough, I’m likely to buy.
Another thing was when I was like 7 or 8, we were in PE and running sprints and I pretended to be so worn out I was about to collapse, and pantsed a kid. I didn’t even dislike the him. I honestly didn’t know why I did it. I just did something wrong and I feel way more bad about it than the offense itself. I wish I could apologize to him but don’t remember his last name, and I feel like I wouldn’t deserve being let off the hook anyway.
This moral auditing is what makes me a much better person today. Unfortunately not everybody has a moral auditing department in them.
We remember those moments with shame because we keep reliving them and reveling in the shame.
Remembering something taints the memory with your current mindset.
When those memories come up, choose a different response. Laugh at yourself. Forgive yourself. Love yourself.
Those memories will change in response when you stop the self-abuse. And it really does feel better too.
When those memories come up, choose a different response. Laugh at yourself. Forgive yourself. Love yourself.
Any recommended reading on this topic? Choosing a different response when these memories come up is really difficult for me, personally. Even when I acknowledge that I’ve grown as a person since then, the memories themselves still just feel jarringly awful.
I’ve found a lot of success in working through things logically when the painful memories return.
What does this memory teach me?
Have I learned all I can from this memory?
If it has taught me everything it can, I can set this memory aside, as there is no purpose in dwelling on it.
I am a better person because of the lessons learned, thank you memory, you have served me well. You may rest
This puts me in a position of acknowledging my imperfections without suffering long term regret. I can’t change the past, and if I’ve learned from it, then I need to live in the Now, not the Then
Here is an article discussing it.
I would personally think that Buddhist techniques like mindfulness and meditation would be helpful here.
I don’t know how I really achieved it, but one thing I do remember I did was altering my negative self-talk so I would be alarmed and notice I was doing it.
I basically changed “I should kill myself” to “I should kill (some other specific person)”, as the latter horrified me. Might be a similar technique.
Much appreciated! I’ll give it a read.
Those with smooth brains don’t, there is plenty of evidence in the current US administration.
That’s because they don’t perceive them as cringe or awful. It’s wrong from the start
Shame / embarrassment is an extremely powerful teacher, for better or worse.
The current theory is that shame evolved in humans as a survival mechanism to keep humans in groups. Shame is our brain’s corrective tool to avoid behavior that would ostracize us from a social group. If an early human were outcast by their tribe, their chances of survival or reproduction plummeted.
Self-awareness & anxiety, two common traits of humans.
Yeah…
But that’s not a shower thought, it’s something we’ve known for a very long time.
It’s like saying the sky is blue due to wavelength scattering, it’s true, but regardless of where you are when you realized/learned it, it’s not a shower thought.
Well, in that case, I need a “Shower Realization” community, 'cause I didn’t know this 'till now.
E=mc2 could be a shower thought if you haven’t learned it before… Yes in the course of all of human history someone might have thought of it previously, and whoa to history if maybe they weren’t in a shower, but the white noise, and warmth of a shower can allow your brain to chew on things you may never encounter in the world, and indeed be born of a showering state of being, indeed I would be surprised if most shower thoughts hadn’t already been thoroughly documented by some scientist looking to be the next George Washington Carver. Shower thoughts do not have to be original, but they should at least shed light on things in a way you, and maybe most people, wouldn’t consider. Personally, I hadn’t considered why my brain does that since I at one point was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder(gad), and frankly every moment was terrifying, and my brain and myself were just stuck in a cycle of nightmare scenarios, and now that I’m past that, it makes sense why sometimes I remember cringe scenarios and it isn’t gad starting to take hold again.
