A setback can hurt without becoming evidence that the whole effort was foolish.

Pain looks for an explanation, and the fastest one available is usually that you should have known better. So a single bad outcome gets promoted into a verdict on the decision, the years, and your judgment in general. Most of the time the reasoning was sound and the result was not, which is an ordinary feature of anything uncertain. A loss is information about one attempt rather than about the whole of you.

When the retelling starts turning into blame, describe what happened as you would if a friend had done it. Separate what you could have known from what only hindsight supplies.