A feeling of regret and fear of future regret are two things I hear so many childless women talk about. We regret decisions and choices we made in the past that have led to our current circumstances. We also are afraid to make decisions in the present because we might regret them later.
I'm going to unpack it all in this episode. You'll find out:
It's entirely possible to step into peace and acceptance of your path without feelings of regret. If you want that, send me a DM on Instagram with the words "ep 94" and I'll show you how.
Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide. You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way.
Click here for your free guide
A feeling of regret and fear of future regret are two things I hear so many childless women talk about. We regret decisions and choices we made in the past that have led to our current circumstances. We also are afraid to make decisions in the present because we might regret them later.
I'm going to unpack it all in this episode. You'll find out:
It's entirely possible to step into peace and acceptance of your path without feelings of regret. If you want that, send me a DM on Instagram with the words "ep 94" and I'll show you how.
Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide. You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way.
Click here for your free guide
One of the most common things I hear from childless women is regret, or the fear of regret. And regret shows up like this I wish I had frozen my eggs. I regret not doing IVF sooner. If I hadn't broken up with that guy, I'd probably have a baby by now. And fear of regret sounds like what. If I'm never okay with being a woman without kids, will I regret it if we stop doing IVF now? Will I regret giving up on the adoption route? I'm going to unpack all of this regret, this fear of regret, and show you what to do to get past it.
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Sherry Johnson, and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self-worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of lightbulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman, about yourself, about your innate power to change yourself, your future and maybe even the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening. Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast. I am your host, sherry Johnson, and on today's episode I want to delve deep into a topic that I hear a lot about from my clients and from my audience, so much that it's become a key pillar within my Meaning Beyond Motherhood framework that I teach inside my group immersion. So what you're going to discover today is, first of all, what regret is and what is its purpose in our lives today, and also what you need to do in order to let go of regret and or, depending on you and your situation, the fear of regret.
Speaker 1:So let's start with what even is regret and why do we feel regret? Regret is all about blaming ourselves for a negative outcome. That's how it's different from disappointment. Disappointment is we have expectations that aren't met, for whatever reason. It might not be as a result of something we did or didn't do, but regret is about what we it's about blaming ourselves for what we did or what we didn't do. So in that are two types of regret. There's action. So regret for what you did, like things like mistakes, poor choices, things that we said and, by the way, this is closely linked to shame and guilt, because sometimes shame, that feeling of shame, will make you regret something. And then there's the other type of regret is inaction, and that stems from things that we didn't do. So those are the missed opportunities, things we didn't, you know, doors that opened and we didn't take advantage, things that we wished we would have done or said that we didn't. And all of this does actually serve an evolutionary purpose. All of our emotions stem from something that serves, or that used to serve, an evolutionary purpose.
Speaker 1:If you make a mistake and you then feel regret, you're more likely to make a better decision in the future. If you say something to someone, say, way back in tribal days, when we lived in close communities, in tribes, in groups, in small societies, it was imperative that you remained a part of that group for survival. And so if you said something and or did something and then regretted it, something that maybe might risk your place in that society or that community, then you will make a different decision. You learn from that, you make a different decision, you say something different next time. It becomes a problem in today's society when we start ruminating on what we regret, especially when we can't change it or do anything about it. So it's one thing to allow regret to change your future, to do something differently as a result, but it's another when you make a decision that you can no longer change and you now have a present and a future that you need to live with as a result of that decision. And when you ruminate on that decision and continue to wish you had made a different choice, to continue to wish you said something different or did something differently, that's not actually helpful. In fact, it can do the opposite. That regret, that rumination, can make you say, stuck in decisions. It can actually cause your body to there's like a physical reaction within your body that can then stay with you and, looking back at all the decisions that you made along the path to get to where you are now, it causes you to just wish you would have made different decisions, asked different questions, and yet you just stay stuck there because it's not allowing you to move forward. When you stay stuck in regret say, for example, that you didn't stay with that guy or that partner, that person who maybe had a different level of fertility, or that person who wanted kids, and now you're with someone who didn't want kids. That decision, you can't go back and change that decision and it can't actually change decisions that you made in the future. So that's what can happen when you stay stuck in that, wishing things would have been different.
Speaker 1:My early regrets on my childless path one of the big ones was not doing IVF sooner. I waited a long time. I had this idea in my head that I had lots of time, and so I tried a long time to do things naturally before I finally gave into some IUI cycles, so intrauterine and insemination cycles, which is not as invasive as IVF, in case you don't know what that is. And it wasn't until I was 44 that I finally said, okay, let's do IVF. And by then by the time I saw a specialist who the specialist, who specialized in IVF. His recommendation was that we use a donor egg with IVF, which brought in a whole other set of. That's not just a decision to do IVF, it's IVF plus the donor egg and the donor egg is.
Speaker 1:There's so many nuances and complications with that decision, not just physically but psychologically, the considerations on your relationship, there's so many things. So I regretted not exploring that option right from the get-go, and I kept ruminating over it, wondering why did the fertility doctor allow me to go through so many rounds of IUI before he finally said you might wanna try IVF? Here's the stats. He just presented me with the stats and I said well, I'm not one of those. That was what was going through my mind at the time. I'm not one of those. I'm healthy. I'm, you know, my body feels good. I'm not one of those people that's going to need that and you know, it's only in hindsight that I can look back on that decision and see what it would lead to. So I'm going to talk about that a bit more in a lot more, actually in a bit.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about what happens when you stay in, stuck in the fear of regret. What happens, then, is that you stay stuck in decisions because you're afraid of what happens if you make one choice Over another, and this can happen just with gosh. I have trouble making decisions in a restaurant If I order this, am I going to enjoy it? What if I regret ordering this? And I wish I had that, so I can stay stuck in all kinds of tiny decisions. But what happens when those get bigger? There's, you know, the fear of deciding not to do IVF with a donor egg. My fear of regretting not moving forward with that was intense, and so we stayed stuck in a decision. We kept my husband and I kept talking about it and I kept bringing it up and I didn't know what to do. And when we finally made the decision, it was actually a relief and it really allowed us to move forward with our lives. And it wasn't a cut and dry decision. As I said, we went back and forth. Even after we made the decision I still kind of came back to that and revisited it a few times. But once we finally moved, for once, we finally made the decision and said, okay, we're not going to go back on this. Then we could really truly move forward with our lives.
Speaker 1:The other thing that you might do and if you're someone who is still in your fertile years, for example, if you fear regret, it may also cause you to keep going, to keep doing more IVF cycles and I know, I've heard of people who have done, you know, 15 cycles and when you fear what happens in the future, you will shut down your intuition, you shut down that feedback loop that you receive from your body. And so, even though your body might feel exhausted, your heart might feel exhausted One or both of those is telling you to quit, to stop and let yourself move forward. You will keep pushing through. If you have fears about the future, if you fear regret, that's going to keep you moving and going and doing things that, intuitively, are maybe not the best choice, and you'll shut down that intuition. Now let's talk about what happens when you make peace with your regret. This is a whole other side of the coin and, by the way, you can become almost addicted to regret. It becomes a familiar place and it becomes really difficult to make peace with your past and let go of that fear of the future. But when you do make peace with your regret, you will actually feel at peace with the past. You're also going to be happier in the present and more accepting of your child's path or whatever path you're on. That's going to apply to many different parts of your life. You can accept that the decisions that you make in the present are the best that you can do with the information you have at the time and the emotional state that you're in, and you can also make clearer decisions in the present that are based on what you truly desire instead of what you fear.
Speaker 1:I have a client just to give you an example of this. I have a client who was trying to make a decision on whether to adopt or not, or to sort of accept her their childless path. And the more we delved into that decision, the more she could see that everything that was keeping her stuck in the decision was fear. She had all these fears about the adoption process, about who the child might be and what challenges might come with that. She had fears about their marriage. She had fears about her mental health, all kinds of fears about what the adoption route might bring. But then, on the other side of that coin, she also had a huge amount of fear around. Would she be able to manage the childless path? Would she be okay? So she stayed stuck for a long time and couldn't move forward with the decision until she really started to delve into the fears and actually finding ways to dissipate that fear. And there actually were a lot of things that she could do to dissipate it.
Speaker 1:So it becomes really important to let go of that fear of regret in order to really tap into what you desire, because that fear will cloud everything. It won't really allow you to tap into that intuition. As I said, it won't allow you to tap into the wisdom that's within your body, that's telling you or showing you what to do. So how do we actually let go of regret or the fear of it? This can be really tough because especially the fear of regret, because the whole world tells us to fear regret.
Speaker 1:I distinctly recall having a conversation with a friend of a friend, someone who I didn't know very well, but for some reason I opened up to her about my, my fertility situation and the struggle that I was having in what to do next, and she turned to me and said you don't want to have any regrets. So all I will say is do everything that you possibly can to have a baby. Well, the assumption that went along with that is that I'm going to regret it if I don't have a baby. And there's actually a ton of research out there that show that there are many mothers who regret having a baby. They regret having children. They won't readily admit to it, but the research in a blind research study. It's much more easy to anonymously share your feelings, and so that happens more often than you would think, and but she was already in a position to have made one of those choices, the choice to move forward with having a baby, and she had needed help. She needed to do IVF, so, and that worked for her, so she was on the other side of it. So I believe that, at least for a time.
Speaker 1:So how do we let that go? How do we let go of both regret of things in the past and the fear of the future? So, as for the past, forgiveness is a key piece of it, and this is really around forgiveness of yourself. This is something that is so big. Regret in general is such a big part of the childless path that it's something that we focus on right in pillar one of my program, and we have a beautiful process for doing this, for making peace with the past and forgiving yourself for the decisions that you made and letting those go, forgiving yourself for not taking advantage of opportunities that you might have missed and all of those things that you can no longer change. So let's go back to that hindsight. We can only have regret in hindsight. You hear people say I might regret what I'm about to say, but and then they go ahead and say it because they said and it's I might regret, because in the present you don't know how the other person is going to react. You can't see the future. So it's not until afterwards that you can actually regret what you said, if the reaction was was negative or wasn't what you expected. And then you don't regret it if, if the reaction was fine. So it's only in hindsight that we can look back and regret something. So accepting that you made the best decision that you could with the information that you had at the time allows you to let that go.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I've been really practicing lately is having faith, and this can mean many different things. It doesn't necessarily mean, you know, we. I think there's a lot of charge wrapped up in that word faith, because it can be linked to, or the assumption is, that faith means a religion. In my world, faith just means faith in your higher self, faith in the universe, faith in God, faith that everything has happened for you. That is what I strive for is imagining that everything that has happened has in some way happened for me, and when I take that or look at my path through that lens, it immediately causes a mindset shift that allows you to begin. It changes your brainwiring and it opens you up to the possibility of why might that have happened for me and what are the things that have occurred as a result of that that are positive, or what might be in my future as a result of that? Because I made that choice in the past. So I've begun to practice trusting that it couldn't have happened any other way. There was a reason for everything to be playing out the way that it is, and my current practice is having faith that everything has happened for me. All of my choices were for me. I made all of my choices for me and my best interests, in what I knew at the time, the information I had, the state of mind that I was in at the time. Okay, so forgiveness is a big key piece to letting go of regret. That faith piece, by the way, also comes into play in the fear of the future and the fear of what you might regret in future, and I'm going to come back to that in a second.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the present first. So, if you are in the present, what is your intuition saying about the present and what direction you most want to go. Now Most of us have lost touch with our intuition. We've been conditioned by a patriarchal society. That logic, analysis, pros and cons, that is what's going to lead us to the best decision. But how often have you done that and made a decision and then said, oh, I knew that wasn't going to work. How did you know that, when everything on paper said it was a good decision? How did you know that it wasn't going to work? That's your intuition. And when you look back on decision and say that, even though everything on paper told you to go ahead and make this decision one way, you've just tapped into your intuition. So what was it that that helped you to know? And how can you tap into that as you make decisions in the present? Now let's talk about the future.
Speaker 1:So making peace with the future is maybe the hardest one, maybe not, I don't know. For me it's. It can be really tough. The what ifs are our imagination, for what if? Scenarios can be really paralyzing. We go through it. You know dozens of worst case scenarios. We tend to, especially when we're struggling with a decision. We tend to imagine what are all the worst possible things that can happen? Not what are all the best things that can happen. And this is where that faith comes comes back into play. I like to surrender my decisions to my higher self, to the universe, to God, whatever works for you. And then I trust that what I feel inside my body is telling me something. I trust that whatever happens as a result of my choices is meant to be so.
Speaker 1:Even I don't always follow my intuition. Sometimes I can hear it loud and clear, and yet there's still a fear there that is keeping me from following that intuition. And then I look back. This happened just recently when I took on some work that I knew that I shouldn't have taken on, and I felt it, but I had a fear that that money wouldn't come in another way, and so I took on the work. And now I look back on that decision and think that was you know. Now I don't want to do that work and I know that that was the wrong decision and it's not aligned work. It doesn't feel good and I knew that at the time. I knew it, and yet that fear stood in the way.
Speaker 1:But what I'm doing now is trusting that. Maybe I look back on that choice and I regret it. I can let go of that choice and trust that I learned something from it. I trust it. I'm trusting now that I made that decision because I needed to learn a lesson about money. I made that decision because I needed to learn a lesson about my intuition. Now I needed to be able to learn to trust it more and to know when that intuition is speaking loud and clear. And that allowed me to do that. So now, when that decision, when I'm faced with similar decisions, I know how to tap, I know that my intuition is right. I can have more faith in myself, my higher self coming through.
Speaker 1:So those are really the three, really a kind of frame that up as what to do about regret or fear of regret, as past, present and future. And past is really about forgiveness and accepting letting go that you made the best decision with the information you had at the time. Being in the present is tapping into your intuition and really feeling into what decision that you want to make, what direction do you want to go now. And then the future is making peace with what might happen and trusting that whatever happens is meant to be, it will happen as a result of the choices that you are meant to make Now if you're listening to this thinking, sherry, that's easier said than done. You're right.
Speaker 1:I can't wrap up years of this mindset work that I learned and now teach in a matter of a 30 minute podcast episode. But if you take one thing away from this, it's that it's possible to let go of regret. And when you make just that tiny mindset shift and you open up to that possibility, then you shift into empowerment mode and that's when you can move forward. So just see if you can make that tiny tweak that it's possible to let go of regret and see what happens. And if you'd like to take that a step further, if you'd like help letting go of regret and the fear of regret so that you can really step into peace, step into acceptance of your path, then just head over to Instagram, send me a DM with the words episode 94. And I will show you how to take this 100 times deeper. Thank you so much for listening. I've got another great episode coming your way that I'm just working on for next week and I will talk to you then.