‘I Should Have Known Better’: Learning to Meet Your Past Self With Compassion

I hear from so many people, so many times: guilt, shame, and the painful thought, “I should have known better.” But how? How could you have? You didn’t know then what you know now. So often, we judge or shame our past self with the knowledge and experience that our present self has. We look backward through the eyes of the person we have become and expect the person we were then to have possessed the same wisdom. It’s unfair to our past self. You did the best you could with the information you had at the time.

I, too, was once in the place of shaming myself. I was critical of choices I had made and thought I should have known better. Only to find out that so much of the way I was treating myself was coming from my past—from childhood. How we treat ourselves today is often connected to what we were directly or indirectly taught as children by our caregivers or parents. We may have learned that mistakes deserved criticism and punishment rather than curiosity. That getting something wrong meant something was wrong with us; that’s shame, by the way. Shame says, “you are what you do”. And without realizing it, we can carry that same posture into adulthood.

We become the one “shoulding” on ourselves. That’s why I teach people: “no more shoulding on yourself.” We are all older and wiser because of the experiences we’ve had and the mistakes we’ve made in the past. Making mistakes is okay. It’s part of learning. The wisdom you have today may exist precisely because of what your younger self lived through.

A big part of learning to forgive yourself is allowing yourself to feel the pain of the past and learning how to comfort yourself using compassion. Compassion was the vehicle that moved me out of shaming myself and being so critical of my younger self’s choice. Instead of looking back at her and asking, “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you know better?” I now understand her. I can recognize what she knew at the time, what she didn’t know, what she was carrying, and what she needed. We all do the best we can with the knowledge and information we had at the time.

Learning the language and posture of compassion takes time. But it is possible to heal pain from the past. Even the deep past. Even something that happened decades ago. Sometimes people believe, “But I can’t change what happened. ”And that’s true—you can’t change the facts of the past. But you can absolutely change your emotional experience of the past.

Even if it’s 40 or 50 years later, you can learn to meet the version of yourself who experienced that pain differently. You can offer compassion where there was once criticism. Comfort where there was shame. Understanding where there was judgment. Your past self doesn’t need the wisdom you have today used against her. She needs you to bring that wisdom back to her—with compassion. It’s possible. There’s hope for healing.