If you think about it, feelings are affected, even "created" by your own thoughts and words. When we feel bad/traumatized, often it is because of something totally out of our control ("Act of God"/earthquake, tsunami, loss of job due to collapse of country's economy, car accident, etc.) but, sometimes, we feel like things could have been done differently and that someone should have done them differently, whether ourselves or the drunk driver that ran over the neighbor's child or the guy who went on a shooting rampage and killed innocent people.

There is no must-feel-this-way-in-this-situation rule about emotions and even when we think of how people "should" be serious and sad at funerals, that's a cultural rule, not an absolute one that says something is wrong with you if you laugh (the Mary Tyler Moore show where she laughs at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown comes to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuckles_Bites_the_Dust).

How we feel is a function of our own psychology. It is information, for us, to orient us in relation to ourselves and others and the situations around us. Someone you care for dies, you may feel sad or angry and that can tell you you really cared for that person. A lot of people are missing and dead from the tsunami in Japan but I am not particularly sad or angry, probably because I don't know anyone in Japan and I don't live near a nuclear reactor so I'm not too worried about nuclear accidents at the moment, etc.

I know a lot of things now, about myself, others, the world, at 60 years of age, that I did not know at 25 years of age. But to lament what I did or did not do when I was 25 would be like a child learning to read or do math wishing they'd learned it earlier; or a child learning to walk feeling like they'd wasted a year crawling.

When you did whatever you did that you are holding over your head now, you did it for a very good reason and because, at the time, that was THE thing to do. If it had not been what made sense for you to do, you would not have done it! If I offer you $10 or $100 you are going to choose the $100 but if in an hour I announce that all those people who chose the $10 are going to get an additional $1,000 would it make sense to call yourself "stupid" or "greedy" for choosing the $100 earlier? No!

When we regret our earlier "mistakes" it is with 20-20 hindsight. At the time, we did not have that! It's like worrying about the future which isn't here yet so can't be known! In an hour some guys are going to come pick up old, broken, unneeded furniture I have and I need to clean off cabinets and tables before then so they can do that. What if I sit here instead and worry about "What if I don't get them cleaned off in time?" A very obvious and simple example but no different from "What if I don't get the job" or, "What if I can't pay my rent next month". True, one would think the impact on my emotions would be less if something "bad" happened because I sat here worrying about not getting the table/cabinet cleaned out/off in time and thus didn't versus if I worry about not being able to pay the rent and am not able but, even that, one cannot predict because only I am me; the impact whatever I worry about (and, since I'm the one that is worrying, they are truly "my" worries so other people's judgments about how likely/serious the worry is don't count) may have on me is wholly mine! I "decide" by what I choose to worry about and how "much" I worry and by how I let the effect of whatever happens in reality affect me what my feelings are going to be!

I don't know how you have decided what your character was back when you did something you decided was "bad" that you have deemed it "out of character" and not only out of character now, but, by default, out of character then!

Children lie and steal and do some pretty adult-determined "bad" things but it has been proven that they don't know what they're doing, are unable, because of not having developed that portion of themselves yet, to understand. Think of Piaget and his experiments with children and how droll it is to watch a child try to figure out which container holds more/less just because they are different sizes, even though they contain the same amounts. We are like that in many other "hidden" developmental ways! If we are ignorant of something, we can't know it, no matter what our age! If we have not developed as people, as adults, we cannot do things our brains are not able/ready yet to do. If we are ill and our brains are affected, we cannot do certain things; would you criticize a fifteen year old mentally handicapped child for not being able to read or do math?

Why feel badly about yourself? Do you enjoy it? What good does it do? Let go of it; you are doing the best you can do!