Post-Mortem Analysis: Moving Beyond Guilt and Blame

3. Bargaining

Rewriting the past to avoid the pain

In non-death losses, I don’t bargain by begging.
I bargain by analyzing.

I call it a review. I call it a post-mortem. I call it being responsible.
But if I’m honest, it’s my mind trying to rewrite the past just enough to make the pain feel optional.

It starts with the same sentence every time:

“If only I had…”

If only I’d said it differently.
If only I’d noticed sooner.
If only I’d pushed harder, backed off earlier, documented more, trusted my gut, swallowed my pride.

And once that door opens, I’m back inside the loop—replaying decisions like replay is repair.
I start looking for the exact point of failure, because if I can find it, then I can convince myself there was a clean way through this. A version where I didn’t end up here.

Bargaining, for me, isn’t emotional.
It’s logistical.
It’s timeline-building.
It’s trying to be “fair” to every detail, so I can prove this didn’t have to happen.

But the truth is: sometimes analysis is just pain wearing a suit.

In this series, I’ve had to learn the difference between a post-mortem that helps me and a post-mortem that hurts me.

The one that hurts is punishment.
It’s me putting myself on trial.

The one that helps is what I keep coming back to:

A post-mortem—not for punishment, but pattern recognition.

That line is the pivot for me. Because it changes the question.

Not: “What should I have done?”
But: “What conditions made this inevitable?”

That second question is harder—and cleaner.
It forces me to admit that not everything is a personal failure. Some of it is structure. Some of it is incentives. Some of it is power. Some of it is people disappearing the moment support is no longer convenient.

So when I feel myself slipping into bargaining, I try to ask better questions—the kind that map the terrain instead of cutting me open:

• What incentives were operating here that made this outcome likely, no matter how careful I was?
• Who had the power to change the trajectory—and didn’t?
• What was implied as support… and what was actually available?
• What did I keep tolerating because I was trying to be loyal, reasonable, and professional?
• What became “normal” that should never have been normal?
• What signals showed up early—and what story did I tell myself so I could keep going?

And I’ve given myself a rule, because otherwise I will stay in the loop forever:

If my analysis doesn’t produce one boundary and one next step, it’s not pattern recognition anymore.

It’s bargaining.

So I end it like this:

One boundary: Next time, I will not…
One step: Today, I will…

Because the past doesn’t accept edits.
But I can still read the pattern.
And I can still move forward without dragging the entire blame story with me.