When you feel you have failed, you may be overcome with self-recrimination, disappointment, and despair. Holding in your painful feelings can have negative effects on your health, your relationships, and your future success. Notice each emotion as it comes to you. Take time to name the emotion, be it anger, sadness, fear, or shame. This will enable you to work through it without turning it on yourself or others.  Take time to process your feelings. If you try to fix or move past your disappointment before knowing how you feel; you may act rashly. Suppressing painful feelings can lead to health problems, such as chronic pain, sleep deficiency, and even heart disease. After the first shock of disappointment wears off, whether it takes minutes, hours, days, or weeks, work on accepting what happened. It will be harder to move forward if you blame yourself or others, or pretend that what happened didn't matter or didn't happen. Write down or reflect on everything that happened, what lead to it and what the consequences were. State only the facts, without blame, judgment, or justification. Write in a journal if you have one, or write yourself a letter.   If writing is not a helpful form of expression for you, find someone you can talk to. A trusted friend or family member, or a counselor, can help you move past denial.  Solicit the perspective of any involved parties who were not emotionally invested in the situation. For example, a friend might have seen early signs of a fissure in a failed relationship. If you find yourself unable to move past denial – for example, you refuse to discuss or acknowledge what happened, or look at how you may have contributed to the failure, or you ignore the repercussions of what happened – examine what is holding you back. What are you afraid will happen if you acknowledge a failure? Maybe you feel like a failure because your child has a substance abuse problem, and instead of dealing with it, you remain in denial and give her money to buy "clothes" when you know she is spending it on drugs.  Identify fears that are irrational or excessive. Do you worry that failure calls your intelligence and capability into question? Do you imagine that you are the only one who has ever experienced this setback and that you are being judged? Are you worried that everyone will be disappointed or lose interest in you if you do not succeed? Reflect on the consequences of action and inaction. What can you achieve with action? What might be worsened by inaction? Maybe you feel your relationship failed, and to avoid going through the pain of another breakup you refuse to date or examine what went wrong in the relationship. Inaction might allow you to protect yourself from rejection or the emotional pain of a breakup. It also means you are missing out on the fun and companionship of dating and might be turning away from a potentially great relationship.
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