Financially ruined family

[Madeamistake1]

Name changed for this.

Without going into detail, I made a massive decision/mistake recently that almost certainly has life long financial implications for my family. We're not going to be destitute, but will affect the size of the house we can buy etc. Plus there are emotional implications too.

I'm really struggling to forgive myself and have slid into a deep depression. I have a baby boy and feel so guilty that I'm giving him a worse life than I could have done if I hadn't made this mistake.

How do I forgive myself and move on? The regret and guilt is eating me up.

People say "you couldn't have known this would happen" but I kind of did, and did it anyway. I wasn't thinking clearly.

I'm on ADs and still feeling so low and like I've ruined everything.

It's done and gone. Turning yourself inside out will not change it and will make no difference.

Time for a re-set.

You have until now and end of December to go over it, learn from it, and prepare to move forward.

From 1st January 2023 it's done and not revisited. Everytime you think of it, you must instantly say to yourself 'no, that's done with and time to move on'. You literally train your brain not to dwell.

Forgive yourself and make this life lesson count.

OP, you can’t change the past - but you can certainly stop letting it spoil the present.
Whatever your mistake was, apologise for it, seek forgiveness from yourself and anyone else affected by it, and then let it go. Focus instead on the future, on working to minimise the effects of the mistake as far as possible, and on accepting any consequences that can’t be altered.
Humans are fallible, we all make mistakes, but what matters is how we pick up the pieces and learn from them. Look forward, not back.

You can never know what might have happened had you done things differently. If you hadn't made this mistake/had made a better choice, it might have had completely unexpected consequences that were worse than what you are living with now; or you might have been on course to make the mistake later on in your life, without the wisdom making it now has given you.

The lack of context makes it harder to say, but how proactive are you being about minimising the impact on your family as much as possible? (Practical measures, accessing advice, full disclosure, frank discussions, etc.)?

"Feeling guilty" will only get you so far, but actual attempts to repair the damage could get you further as well as convincing your family - if this is possible - that you're prepared to take real responsibility and that there's a way forward

This life thing is simply a series of Resets. Sometimes a Reset is prompted by a good event but most of us would agree that usually we need to Reset because shit has happened for whatever reason. I can't tell you the number of times in my 55 yrs I've had to stop, change direction, adapt my ambitions, accept some things were never going to happen for me, pull myself up by the britches and focus on what's ahead even if it's much narrower than I hoped. Every time you learn and move on. And one day you'll bring these feelings into play when you tell someone, perhaps a loved one, 'hey I've been there and done that. Don't go there'.
I live in a smaller house than I hoped, with less income, and less freedom than I thought I'd have in my 50s, but what's mine is mine and nobody can take it away. There is food on the table and a roof over our heads. And we are together.

You can't change the past but you can change how you react to what happened..........

It's about learning from mistakes and moving on.
You can keep dwelling on what happened in a negative way or you can use it to drive the way you move forward.

Focus your energy on what you can't change rather than things you can't.

Do your family forgive you? I would be working on that before trying to forgive myself

It's impossible to give advice without knowing the context.

Have you been honest with the people this mistake has impacted?
Was this decision something you alone made, or were other people involved too?
How have the other people impacted by this mistake reacted?

Yes. My husband is a lot more chilled and probably less materialistic than me. He's probably struggling more than he's letting on, but says he's optimistic about the future and what matters most is us being together and happy.

My son is too young to know any different.

We all make mistakes. It important thing is that your intentions were pure. You’re remorseful and have accepted responsibility. Your family have forgiven you. You need to forgive yourself as well. You should realise you are as deserving of loving yourself as much as the love others who know you have given you.

It's normal to beat yourself up in the aftermath and keep having intrusive negative thoughts but do seek counselling to help you get your mental state back on track. It's a good thing that your husband's disposition is one of calmness. Is the situation finished? i.e. nothing can be done, nothing is ongoing? People make huge mistakes all the time and eventually you will be able to move on. A friend's partner lost thousands in a crypto scam and he's had to rebuild slowly day by day.

To be fair, it depends on what it was. An investment that didn't pan out is perhaps easier to forgive than gambling it away, for example.

Have you lost money like savings? In which case you saved up the money in the first place to lose so you can save it up again.
move on and try to forget about it.

what matters most is us being together and happy.

You have to find a way to really understand and accept this. Families can be happy with little in the way of material wealth, but if the mum is on a downward spiral, how can they ever be happy? Your DS in particular won't even know the difference and won't set any value by finances anyway, and it sounds like your DP has a good handle on what counts. So you need to park the financial angst and work on yourself to deal with the real problem that's bogging you down here. Perhaps it's the same thing that made you make the risky decision in the first place and there's a bigger issue that you can understand and deal with better in future. But focusing on that past decision as the big issue is not going to help you. Indeed it'll only add to your and your family's unhappiness. Seek out counselling and go on a longer, maybe harder, but ultimately more effective journey to getting yourself better.

(To add with TW - my cousin almost killed himself because of a bad financial mistake but luckily called for help and was saved and is doing much better down the line now. The thing he couldn't see, but now can, is that his family could recover from the financial problem, but they'd never recover from losing him. So please do get more help from your GP and RL friends if you feel yourself sliding.)

The important thing is to learn from your mistakes and ensure that it doesn't happen again.
Look at the positives in your life and start building from there.

I’m sure you are really upset, but you have to look at the big picture you still have a home, you have a healthy baby and husband that both love you. You can have all the money In the world and not have your health or a member of your family can have a life defining illness and you would give every penny you have to make them well. Pull up your big girls knickers and get on with life. Count your blessing not your £££ .

Depends - if you kept all the family savings in the FTX exchange which has now gone bust - I'd not be too impressed if I was your DH but as they say, hindsight is always 20/20.

@MakingNBaking your reply made me cry. It was so thoughtful 😢

I think it's easy to look back with hindsight.

Was it stocks/Bitcoin related? Lots will be feeling similar if so.

People say "you couldn't have known this would happen" but I kind of did, and did it anyway. I wasn't thinking clearly.

One more thought - this reminds me of something I read about gamblers, which is that it's not the thought of winning that is the true motivation, it's the thought of losing. Obviously on a conscious level they want to win, but the thing that gives the big thrill is the risk, like the vertigo urge to jump off a building. There's something in the way you talk about your situation and the way you're still focusing on what you could have had and now won't have that feels like this mindset. You put it on your son, but he's a baby and won't have these thoughts, it's you obsessing in the way gamblers do before convincing themselves to take another risk to get them out of the hole and so it goes on, chasing the thrill. I've no idea what your financial issue was and likely you won't think it's related to gambling, but it could well be worth exploring the kind of help gamblers get because it sounds like there's some overlap and you need that level of support.

I think advice will change if you said it was to do with gambling or similar - as that would be harder to recover from and is a mental health problem. There's no sense in us saying 'oh money can be saved up again' as unless one seeks help for the gambling, future savings are likely to be squandered too.

LISTEN to your (excellent) DH. It sounds like the only thing that is truly going to muck this up for your life is the way you react and deal with this issue.
Your husband has forgiven and is trying to move i and make the best of it. You spiralling into a pit of self-recrimination and depression if what is really going to cause the damage here.
Others have given good advice about how to reset yourself. Only you can actually make it happen.

DH Grandma had a very very difficult life, some truly awful things happened to her.
If anyone ever complained she would just say “nobody died”.
Apart from death most things can be fixed, or at least recovered from

Rather than wallowing (which is understandable), you need to focus on fixing it. In time that will make you feel more positive. Are you putting plans in place so that it can't happen again? Are you seeking help if it was something caused by poor mental health/addiction/impulse control issues? Have you looked at what steps can be taken to ameliorate the situation... cost cutting, stuff that can be sold,extra shifts at work/overtime?

Yes it's really shitty now but you can work through it if you manage to stop seeing yourself as the "failure who ruined everything ".