Our search for the self happens in the present, in the Now as people enjoy saying these days. In fully entering the present, we remain informed by the past, but the past imposes us no burden, no sense of regret for what we should have done. When we do feel such a regret, it seems quite difficult to let go.
My students, and I for that matter, use the phrase, "I should have" with startling regularity. In many if not most cases, students used that expression to berate themselves for their natural need to learn through not knowing, acting out of mistaken knowledge, or simply making a choice that didn't work. Then we say, "I should have known that" and give ourselves a swift kick.
We all know the phrase "We learn from our mistakes," but precious few of us actually take that as a forgiving release from the pressure we feel not to make mistakes or the shameful regret we feel at having made mistakes. In most of our encounters with parental figures and other authorities, they use "learn from our mistakes" as an invitation to punishment, and that sort of learning teaches us to regret every mistake we make but not learn from them. All this regret of past actions puts us into the dominator company of the "tyranny of the shoulds" as the psychologist Karen Horney called it[46]. In this meaning perspective, we set some level of perfection as our unreachable goal. Many students tell me they are "perfectionists," a state nowhere to be seen in the world in the way we generally use the term. When they inevitably come short or fail at this impossible goal, they use the opportunity for self-hatred to one degree or another. The phrase "I should have" serves as one marker for such a feeling.
When I worked with students who wanted to pass the GED and get a high school diploma, I found they showed this very behavior. No matter how well a student did generally in learning new material, she/he would encounter some answer she/he missed. When we discussed it, extraordinarily often, she/he would say, "I should have known that." I would ask why she/he should have known what they didn't know. "It seems so easy now," she/he would answer. Everything is easy once we know. Until then, it's hidden in an unknown language. I asked if using that phrase helped her/his learning, and generally, she/he didn't think it did, but it also seemed a natural phrase to use. Meaning perspectives almost always feel natural even when they hurt—which is often the case. It is in learning from mistakes, the most natural form of learning.
In the phrase "I should have," we find the tyranny of the past used in punishing ways. When I say "should," in this phrase, I speak in the past about the past. I make a demand of myself in the past from what I know in the present and punish myself for not living up to that demand. That doesn't make sense. That never makes sense. How could I know something and do something in the past when I didn't have the knowledge to do that thing in the past? If I leave something at home which I intend to give to a friend, and I meet that friend accidently when I go out, I can say "I should have taken the book," and I often do. It makes little sense to simply carry the book around arbitrarily in the hopes I will meet that friend. I did not know I would meet that friend, and I still persist in shoulding myself. We burden ourselves with what we should have done instead of accepting what we did as what we did which was the best we had at the time.
This acceptance comes to us as one form of forgiveness. When we practice such forgiveness to ourselves and to others, we free ourselves from the burden of the past in our search for the self. We can use our past as a research library into the nature of choices and their consequences. That's valuable and hard won information. The past no longer serves as a burden, a punishment, or a cage. When we accept and forgive ourselves and others, we can release ourselves and others from the past as a trap and transform the past into an informative guide and as compassionate link to others in their mistaken understandings and actions. In this way, this form of forgiveness happens in concert with compassion and unconditional positive regard. Acceptance of ourselves and of others works to join all three in their operation and effect.