Doh!
They say there is no way around this. We all make mistakes...damn I hate that phrase. Some even go so far as to say that this is a good thing. This is how you learn, they say. What a bunch of hooey! Mistakes are bad. Dress it up with sugar and chocolate frosting all you want but when you make a mistake, it is a bad thing. Hopefully you'll learn not to make the same mistake again. Hopefully the mistake won't be one where you'll experience lifelong consequences. Hopefully, you'll recover....hopefully. I guess there are two ways to view this.
First is in a psylo. A mistake, in and of itself. You do something that results in a a bad feeling for you. So you think "Hmm....that was not so fun.". End. What good can come of this? Well, without this negative emotion following the mistake, we would never associate bad feelings with this purportedly bad action. So I guess that's a positive, right? Associating bad feelings with bad actions will (we hope) prevent you from participating in these bad actions again...thus avoiding the bad feelings.
The second way to view a mistake would be to analyze the cumulative effect of many mistakes on your persona. The cumulative effects of multiple instances of associating bad feelings with purportedly bad actions. I would imagine that this affects a person in a restrictive way.
Since a mistake prevents a particular, purportedly bad, behavior, a series of mistakes prevents many, purportedly bad, behaviors. So the end result is that a person avoids many of these behaviors. Now lets apply this to the ever changing dynamic of life. Since mistakes don't cause a person to behave in a different way, but rather cause a person to not behave in a particular way, how do we know that the avoidance of that, purportedly bad, behavior will always be good? For instance, let me use the worst possible example I can think of. One of those snipers that was running around in Atlanta a few years ago points a gun at a crowded bus from afar. He shoots and kills an innocent person. He gets caught and put in jail. "You're a bad man" they tell him. "Bad bad bad". So he thinks "I better not do that again when I get out of the slammer. If I do, I'll get put back in the slammer and get all these bad feelings again. I made a mistake by thinking that shooting my rifle at a bus full of innocent people was okay." So one day he gets out of jail and he is avoiding shooting a rifle at a crowded bus. One day he spots a crowded bus from afar, full of terrorist suicide bombers, all with those dynamite vest things strapped to them, driving full speed towards a building full of innocent people. He just happens to have a rifle on him because...well...he's a sniper. "Should I pull out my gun and shoot?" he thinks. Having previously associated bad feelings with this, purportedly bad, act, he avoids taking out the rifle and the worst case scenario takes place. Little does he know that criminal law provides "defense of others", as a complete defense against manslaughter charges.
This is, of course, a ridiculous example. However, the point I'm trying to make is that while the cumulative effect of mistakes on the psyche are restrictive in the strictest sense, their resulting effect on behavior may not always be a good thing. There are situations when a person has to look back on their life and reassess the lessons they learned in the past against new situations.
