Healing from the Pain of Regret

Healing from the pain of regret. What is regret? It means feeling sad or disappointed over something that has happened or was done. Being regretful is usually not the same as being repentant because the word repent means to turn away from it. Most of us really don’t mean it when we say we repent of a thing because we have no plans of turning away from it. It’s really just regretting. We allow that thing to haunt us. We allow the situation to freeze us or paralyze us, but we really

You have not turned away from the last thing that has caused you harm. Jesus when we're dealing with regret we have a feeling of deep sorrow, deep disappointment concerning something that has happened to us or something that someone has done. You can even slip into a depression because of regret. It could be a loss or even a missed opportunity. A lot of us are living in places of regret because of something we either miss out on or something that was done to us.

There is a lot of pain concerning missed opportunities, wrong decisions, wrong relationships, in wrong friendships that we step into that are rooted in regret. One of the things about the trauma of the past is that the enemy uses it as one of his main tools. The enemy lives in the past and godly lives in the future. The reason the enemy lives in our past is because he can only rehash what we give him. He does not have any ammo or anything else to use against us. He is waiting always observing and looking at our past to find something to use against us. He cannot live in the future because he’s not the omniscient or all-knowing God. He just looks for clues.

The journey of healing our past is a journey of first, identifying the areas we have been wounded; forgiving ourselves and those who have wounded us, we must deal with the shame, regret and fear. Once we have dealt with those things we can begin to walk into our authentic self. Our authentic self is who we were created to be, our strengths, and our weaknesses, free from trauma and pain.