Last week, I issued a public apology to over a thousand subscribers — something I had never done in the three years I had been running my career-coaching business.
No one made me do it, but my personal values demanded it. I just knew in my soul that it was the right thing to do.
I had stepped outside of the trauma-informed path I was on and exposed them to marketing practices that were anything but trauma-informed. I really felt like I had failed them and struggled with the guilt of that failure for days before I actually hit the “send” button on that email.
I really didn’t know what to expect, but when you are a trauma survivor, your brain automatically takes you to the worst-case scenario because it is trying to keep you safe. Making mistakes in the past was dangerous, and there were severe consequences.
But that was in the past, and that is not now, so I sat in the discomfort of not knowing how my subscribers would react, bracing myself for the “beatdown” I thought would come…but that never happened.
Instead of criticism, I received compassion. I received more than a dozen emails from subscribers who acknowledged that they saw and felt the change in my approach, but instead of judgment, thanked me for having the courage to apologize, admit my mistakes publicly, and do the right thing.
I cannot find the words to tell you what that did for my soul…when you are expecting punishment, but you get grace. It meant the world to me, but it took some time for me to allow that grace to seep into my soul to neutralize the guilt and failure I felt.
Most of us have inner critics who beat us up when we are down, to keep us from failing. We have a lot of muscle memory around failing in the past and how painful that had been for us. But as we enter the healing journey, these kinds of reparative experiences begin to add proof points to our database that there is another outcome besides punishment for us when we fail…grace and compassion.
We are all human, so we are going to fall from time to time. But when we lack the inner compassion to move forward, we sometimes need to lean on external compassion, which is what I did this week.
I leaned hard into the compassion that my followers showed me. I breathed out the guilt and failure that I felt, and inhaled hope. Maybe, just maybe, it was possible for me to recover from this misstep. I regrouped. I started the work of reframing the failure as a setback. I remembered what my first therapist told me about setbacks: “Setbacks are temporary, as long as you don’t give up.”
When we’ve had a setback, we are tempted to move through it quickly because we want to put as much distance between ourselves and it as we can, so we don’t get stuck there. There is something to be said for “failing fast” and picking ourselves up so we can move forward quickly, but only if we do not move too fast that we miss the lesson altogether.
I couldn’t have received that if I’d rushed past the discomfort to get to the lesson. I had to sit in not knowing first.
Not a dramatic intervention. Not a full stop. Just enough of a pause to let the experience settle before I started analyzing it.
That might look like giving yourself a few days before you decide what a setback means. It might look like talking to someone you trust — not to process it into a lesson, but just to say this was hard out loud and have someone witness that. It might look like noticing where the experience lives in your body and letting that be information, rather than something to override or explain away.
For me, this week was a pause—a slow, deliberate consideration of what my next steps should be. What does this decision to follow the leading of my nervous system mean to me and those I serve? Where do we go from here?
I’m still sitting with those questions, and I imagine some of you are sitting with your own version of them right now.
So I want to ask: have you had a reparative experience — a moment when you braced for punishment and received grace instead? Maybe it came from a colleague, a mentor, a friend, or a community you didn’t expect to catch you. Maybe it’s still waiting to arrive.
If you haven’t had one yet, I want you to know they are possible. And if you have — I’d invite you to let it do its work. Don’t rush past it to get to the next thing. Let it add to your database. Let it become proof that there is another way this can go.
That is how we begin to heal the relationship between failure and identity — not by never falling, but by slowly, carefully collecting evidence that falling doesn’t have to mean what it once did.