For 20 years, William Sieghart has cured the sad and the sick with poetry. Now he’ll do the same for you

CONDITION: making mistakes ALSO SUITABLE FOR: regret · living in the past · self-recrimination · self-loathing

PRESCRIPTION: The Mistake by James Fenton

Mistakes can bring out the worst in us – especially our own. To begin with, accepting that we’ve done anything wrong can be very difficult. Even if we manage that, we then have to guard against becoming so obsessed with the mistakes we’ve made and the damage we’ve caused that it paralyses us completely.

When you look back along the corridors and colonnades of your life and see mistake after mistake, hypocrisy after hypocrisy, it is easy to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by self-recrimination. You recall the good advice of friends, long ignored, and you flinch at it. As James Fenton’s poem “The Mistake” knows all too well, an “I told you so” can hurt far more than the sneer of an enemy.

The trick, when you’re staring down the barrel of your own stupidity, is to gather up the horror of it all, to understand and accept it. Begin by reassessing your own motivations as you look back on your mistakes. Try not to believe the false memory of how you got to where you are, but instead take responsibility. Question yourself. Work out how you feel about your own behaviour. This is your mistake, which means there’s something valuable in it, something that can teach you about yourself. Acknowledging and understanding your own mistakes are crucial steps towards learning to look at yourself in the mirror without averting your eyes.