Growing Pains and Self-Love

There are no shortage of lessons to be learned in life. All lessons are hard lessons. It's important to remember that no one is too old to learn a life lesson or two. Everyone says that they hate learning things the hard way, but that's not true. We're a slave to pain and chaos, which is why learning is extremely difficult and exhausting. I think the hardest part of learning from an experience is trying to retain any self-love that is left after the dust settles. How do you learn from your mistakes and come out of a scenario with your dignity intact? Is it possible? Is the answer at the back of the book? It's almost impossible to avoid the embarrassment of falling on your face in front of other people. They don't call them growing pains for nothing! It's easy to feel foolish for getting your hopes up or believing in something so strongly only to discover that it isn't real, and it's hard to love yourself despite the fact. What's the remedy to breaking your own heart? I know that the remedy to making mistakes is to learn from them, but how do you repair your ego once it's in shambles? Is self-love like a house? Do you always have to build it from the ground up? Is there a twelve step program to rehabilitate the ego after a run-in with failure? I'm still trying to figure it out.