Maybe I Can® with Debbie Weiss

Ep. 132: Let's Talk About Regret

• Debbie Weiss • Episode 132

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We’ve all had those “if only I had…” moments. In this episode of the Maybe I Can® Podcast, I open up about my own experiences with regret, including stories from my dad’s life and the final weeks with my husband, and how those moments shaped me.

Regret can weigh us down, but it doesn’t have to keep us stuck. Let’s talk about how to move through it with grace, perspective, and a little self-compassion.

✨ In this episode:

  • How regret can keep us stuck in the past
  • A personal story about caregiving, loss, and forgiveness
  • Why showing yourself kindness is the only way forward

💬 Leave a comment: What’s one regret you’re ready to release?

🔗 Learn more about Sprinkle Forward Group Coaching (Registration closes June 30th!) : https://www.debbierweiss.com/workwithdebbie

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Connect with Debbie:
Website: https://www.debbierweiss.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/debbie.r.weiss
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@debbierweiss
Email: debbie@debbierweiss.com

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Designed for those facing major life crossroads or simply seeking greater fulfillment, this course is your path to a more purposeful life.

LEARN MORE HERE:
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MAYBE I CAN BEGIN TO CHANGE MY LIFE

This transformative six-module journey of self-discovery and empowerment includes a printable worksheet and offers lifetime access to all materials. Designed for those facing major life crossroads or simply seeking greater fulfillment, this course is your path to a more purposeful life.

LEARN MORE HERE: https://www.debbierweiss.com/beginchange


Work with Debbie! See all the ways you can work with Debbie to help you live the life you know you're meant for: https://www.debbierweiss.com/workwithdebbie


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Morning Sprinkles of Goodness: Download your copy of this free guide to help you kickstart your day. Grab it here: https://www.debbierw...

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to the Maybe I Can podcast. I'm your host, debbie Weiss, and thank you so much for joining me today. Today, we're going to talk about those moments that we've all had where we think if only I had, blank, done something different, made a different choice. Basically, we're going to talk about regret. Basically, we're going to talk about regret, but before we jump into it, first of all I don't want to regret forgetting to mention that there is only a week left to register for the Sprinkle Forward group coaching. It's going to be awesome. I want to meet you. I want to work together and figure out what you need to do. I want to work together and figure out what you need to do, those sprinkles, those small shifts that we can do together to start changing the direction of your life. And maybe it doesn't have to be something as grand as changing the whole direction of your life, but just to improve your life or make it more fulfilling, or find out who the heck you are, or make it more fulfilling, or find out who the heck you are.

Speaker 1:

I was journaling this morning and realizing I don't know. I feel like, as women in general, you know, we do everything for everyone else. We worry about everyone else, and it's not our parents and our kids and our friends, and we volunteer at different organizations. We are just giving, giving, giving. I think that that is who we are as women, and we never step back and think I don't want to say what about me? But kind of what about me? What did I want out of life? What did I want out of life? And this topic is really what catapulted me into everything that I'm doing now, because at the age of 50, something for me about the number 50, for you it might not be 50. Maybe you haven't felt this way. Maybe it was 40. Maybe it was, you know, another age or a life event that made you really take a step back and take a glance of your life as an outsider looking in. And when I did that, I thought, okay, yeah, I've been there for everyone in my life, but have I been there for me? And who the heck am I? Do I like my life? What do I regret that I haven't done? And that's where I have since that time I was 50. In October I'll be 62. That kind of set me on this journey that I want to share with others, something that's happening.

Speaker 1:

I just wanted to give you also a little bit of I don't know behind the scenes. For me, I'm a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl. If you follow me on social media, you can probably tell that, because I do videos usually when I'm walking my dog and I don't have any makeup on, and sometimes it's clear that I haven't really given whatever I'm saying a lot of forethought to sound perfect and succinct and without pause, just like I'm doing now. I do the podcast the same way. Literally. I did not know what I was going to talk to you about until five minutes ago and then I thought this is it and I just hopped on here. Hopefully you like that authenticity. Hopefully you like that authenticity. I'm not the planner when it comes to this kind of stuff because, look, I'm here to share my journey and my own thoughts, hoping that you'll connect with it on some level and look at your own life maybe a little differently.

Speaker 1:

So today, when I was thinking about what do I want to talk about, I've been thinking about my dad. My dad, his birthday was June 26th, he would have been 90 this coming Thursday and he's been gone for about 14 years now. And when I was 17 and he was 45, almost 46, he had a massive stroke. This is in 1981. Back then, obviously, medicine isn't what it is today. I think today it would have been a completely different outcome, but it wasn't back then and he became permanently disabled. He was able to get back some function of his leg and did eventually walk again and all the things, but he was never able to work and my parents soon divorced after he had the stroke. He had the stroke and I was his caregiver for the next 30 years of his life. And oh, you know, I was actually going to originally talk about that.

Speaker 1:

Talk about, you know, I was daddy's little girl, no-transcript, and it was role reversal, right, and I think when we're middle-aged we expect that to happen, but when we're a teenager we don't expect that to happen. And so our relationship changed and just let's leave it at that Because, like I said, I could go down that rabbit hole, but I'm not. I was his caregiver. He drove me crazy, I drove him crazy. I wouldn't change a minute of it. I'm very proud of how I was there for him. I loved him and still do, and he was part of the catalyst for me having regret, or at 50, or for me even thinking about that, because he lived with so much regret for 30 years. For 30 years I can't tell you how many times I said to him Dad, it's over, nothing's changing, like I would get a little frustrated because it was crazy that this is what he was thinking about.

Speaker 1:

So let me give you a little bit of background. My mother, if she's listening, which she probably is is probably going to say Debbie, you don't have to tell everyone everything, but I have to in this case because there needs to be a backstory so you understand. So my parents were probably I don't know, maybe they were married about 15 years and my father had an affair and obviously there was something wrong with their marriage. Clearly, having an affair is not the answer and I do not condone what he did. I think it's awful what he did and that's why eventually my mother did divorce him and he never stopped loving my mother and he would always he'd get angry and like jealous. My mother eventually got remarried. She was with Joe, my stepfather, and he was fantastic for over 30 years. But my father it drove him crazy because every minute he was berating himself. Why did he do this. This was such a stupid thing to do and it was a stupid thing to do, but yet at a certain point we have all done stupid things right. They're all different. They're all you know.

Speaker 1:

I can share that one of my most recent regrets is that my husband died on December 30th 2022. Prior to that, he was diagnosed with terminal blood cancer. Six months earlier, right before being diagnosed with the blood cancer, about six weeks before, he had been hospitalized for depression and anxiety and you know, he came out. He was doing so much better. But when he received the diagnosis needless to say, for anyone, you know, that throws you into a lot of feelings, emotions that you just don't know how to deal with and his depression over the next few months really accelerated.

Speaker 1:

I think it really hit the peak when he turned 65, knowing, I think, in his mind, this is it. And eventually all the doctors there was I mean, he was seeing an oncologist, he was seeing palliative care doctors Everybody said, deb, you've got to get him hospitalized for this depression. He was not having his treatments, he was in bed all the time, he was angry and it was kind of ugly not kind of, it was very ugly how it all went down, kind of. It was very ugly how it all went down. He was eventually taken away from where I'm sitting in this room. This was his room, the last year of his life, and he was taken away by the police because he had threatened the social worker who had come in to talk to him. Not that he would have done anything, but as soon as that happened and they don't have a choice, of course would have done anything, but as soon as that happened and they don't have a choice, of course, understandably it was awful. It was awful, let's just say.

Speaker 1:

It turned into about four to five weeks of complete and utter hell for him and for me. And when he was finally released, he hated me and he was very mean to me because he blamed me for the whole thing. Now did I know, literally three and a half weeks later, he would die and I live with that regret. Oh my gosh, why did I do that? Why did he have to spend the last few months of his life having this happen to him? And I felt that way for quite some time and my friends and family would say you didn't have a choice and everyone was telling you to do this and it's not like you knew what was going to happen. And I think that sometimes we have to give ourselves grace and we have to remember I made the best decision that I could under those circumstances. Everything's easy to decide in hindsight. Right, hindsight is 20-20.

Speaker 1:

Now, going back to my father, of course there was no circumstance that having an affair was the right choice. He made a mistake, he owned up to it. He was living with the consequences, right? He lost my mother, he was divorced. He did not want to be, he wanted to be with my mom. He paid the price, but instead he beat himself up every day, every day. Why? Why did I do it?

Speaker 1:

And I think that there can be two sides of regret. There's this heavy side that he was feeling the guilt and the shame and the rumination. He was trapped. He could not get out of that loop and I was trapped like that for a couple of years as well, with my own rumination. But at a certain point we have to flip that to the more empowering side, because we have all made choices that we regret. Right, I mean regret simply means wishing we had made a different choice. There is no one, it's human. There is no one that esteems this. We've all made choices that we regret, but some of those choices on the flip side of the heavy side, if he got married again I'm sure he'd never do that again, as long as we learn from those choices. And maybe we needed to make that mistake or make that choice that in hindsight wasn't the best one.

Speaker 1:

I also remember and I'm not sure if I told you guys this story already, but years ago I was on the school board. I was the only out of like nine school board members. I was the only one who had a special education student. So that was why I was on the school board. I did it because I wanted those special ed kids to have a voice and something was going down and I was very unhappy about it and we were like in an executive session, which means it's private and anything we say does not get disseminated to the public and it doesn't matter what it was. I don't even remember.

Speaker 1:

And afterwards I was talking to this other special ed mom and she was going on and on and on and out of my mouth comes that's never going to happen because so-and-so said and I don't even know if I said who so-and-so was or I just said this is what they're saying, this is what other people are thinking, and I said it. And I said, oh my goodness, I can't believe I did this. And I asked her please, I said this in confidence, I wasn't supposed to, and she swore up and down that she wouldn't say anything. And then, I don't know, two months later, her husband stands up in public at a board meeting and says something in the microphone and now the whole board is wondering who the leak is. And it's me.

Speaker 1:

I can't even begin to tell you how sick to my stomach I was, how I didn't stop crying, how I said to myself what's wrong with you? You have such a big mouth. I can't believe that you did this. And you know, it was literally like being a criminal and thinking they're going to find out. They're going to find out, it's me. And for a little while I was trying to avoid. How are they going to piece it together? It was ridiculous. And finally I said I got to let this go and I called the president hysterical crying and I fessed up and I said gotta let this go. And I called the president hysterical crying and I fessed up and I said I'm gonna give you my resignation, and he was an amazing man and he said no, we all make mistakes. This was yours. You know what you did. We're not going to say anything, we just moved on. I guarantee you never, ever again, would I betray a confidence or say something that was not for other people to say, and do I have regrets over that. I did that Absolutely. But I learned something from it and so I took that regret. I made a choice I was very unhappy with, and it taught me I don't ever want that to happen again.

Speaker 1:

Regret doesn't have to be a punishment, right, we don't have to punish ourselves. It's a human emotion. We just have to learn from it. And if we stay in that place of regret, like my father was for 30 years, three zero you are staying stuck. You are keeping yourself stuck.

Speaker 1:

Remember, would you do this to a friend? Would you say the things that you tell yourself? You're such an idiot. I can't believe you did this. What's wrong with you? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stop it. Stop talking to yourself like that.

Speaker 1:

We all make mistakes. It really is. Where do you go from here? We made the mistake, we made a choice we're not proud of, we're not happy with Okay, everyone does it. It's really where we go from here. It's what will you do next and I'm saying that to you Is there some regret that you've been living with, holding onto? I want you to think about that. What's one small step you can take to start to release that You've got to, because otherwise do you live the rest of your life in that place of regret? Or instead be empowered and say, okay, I'm not happy with what I did. Now, what? What's next? So join me in wishing my father a happy 90th birthday up there in heaven.

Speaker 1:

I'm hoping that he is no longer holding on to regret and that what his regret taught me something Him holding on to that regret for 30 years made me open my own eyes to say I don't want that to be me and I don't want that to be you. Maybe you're thinking what if I always wanted to do this? You can Don't be that person at the end of your life, looking back with coulda, shoulda, woulda. It's now. I'm telling you Firsthand I've lived it. Regardless of what's going on in your life, regardless of how old you are, you start to take that little step forward. You don't have to live with regrets. There's something that maybe you always had on your heart to do. You can do it. I am begging you, stop making excuses, don't be stuck in regret and let's move forward together. You make it a good week and I'll see you next week, because maybe we can.

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Debbie Weiss

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