28 Embarrassing ‘Blunder Year’ Pics People Wish They Could Forget

The resurgence of nostalgia doesn't seem to be going away soon. We love to remember our favorite movies, TV shows, characters, and toys, but nostalgia is often only about the good things. We tend not to want to remember things that confused us, brought us pain, or made us feel embarrassed.

Yet we're okay with some embarrassment. The Blunder Years subreddit walks the fine line between hurtful embarrassing memories and relatable embarrassment perfectly. Folks share photos from their past to, as the subreddit's bio puts it, "laugh and regret together."

We spoke with emotions and empathy expert Karla McLaren about how the impact of sharing embarrassing moments from our childhood and teen years with others impacts our mental health. "Memory is a strange thing," she says. "It's not an accurate record of the past, and each time we replay a memory, we change it."

However, McLaren claims that there are both positives and negatives in remembering our cringey memories. "Sharing past experiences can be very healthy if you're looking to find the humor or the growth you've experienced since then. But if you're revisiting it and increasing your sense of dread or pain, it can be counterproductive."

That's why McLaren warns people to be careful when reminiscing about their regrettable past. "Focusing on what you learned and how you've overcome difficult things can be very healing, but you do have to take care!" Remember: as long as you're revisiting things that only make you laugh or cringe with humor, it's all good.

As teens and pre-teens, we have lots of insecurities: we think our noses are crooked, our hair is the wrong color, or our feet too big. Looking back at ourselves during that formative time might help us overcome some of them. "Sharing your clumsy, silly, or shame-inducing blunders has a kind of daylighting effect," McLaren notes. 

According to McLaren, one of the best ways to deal with shame is to be open about it. "This helps you because you're not keeping secrets from yourself," she explains. "But it also helps others to see you do it, so that maybe they can bring some light and fresh air to their own very human blunders. It can also help you and everyone else laugh, lighten up, and create closer bonds," the emotions and empathy expert says.

When embarrassing moments like the ones in this list are put on the internet for everyone to see, it's important how we frame that embarrassment. "If people are humorous and lighthearted (and not treating the embarrassed person as a target), it can lighten up the whole experience for everyone," McLaren says.

"But if the embarrassment is being used to mock, shame, or bring another person low, then it's just exposing, unkind, and often abusive. It really depends on the context and the intention."

This generation, it seems, is doing just fine with embarrassment and shame. The recent "Rejection therapy" trend is all about people going out of their comfort zone and getting used to their anxieties around it. People are going around and asking to speak into a plane's intercom or to take a nap at the mattress store and thus becoming insensitive to the word "No."

Mental health experts say that it's similar to exposure therapy. You go into a controlled environment and face your fears head-on. Psychotherapist Rachel Goldberg told Bustle that it "[reduces] the intensity of the fear response and [promotes] confidence." Who knows, maybe sharing that embarrassing childhood pic may help you overcome an insecurity too?

In the end, everybody gets embarrassed about something. According to Kristin Neff, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Educational Psychology, when we're self-aware and don't take our embarrassing moments so seriously, we start to understand that everybody fails at some point. "Everyone struggles. This is what it means to be human," she said.

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