Generally, I’m a laid-back sort of fellow. There are only a few things that make me angry, and I recently discovered one source of my anger for the first time. This thing can throw me into a rage, like Bruce Banner I become an irritable, discolored monster. The thing that triggers me is regret.
I absolutely hate the helpless feeling of looking back on a decision or a moment in my life and being unable to change it. Regret often manifests like a physical weight in the pit of my stomach. My typical response to feelings of regret is to shut them out. I don’t want to think about it or hear about it. Lianne will sometimes bring up something as innocuous as how we parented our children when they were younger, “We should have made them do more chores.”
It’s irrational, but when she says those types of things it makes me incredibly frustrated. I think the source of my anger is twofold. First, I take any feelings of regret personally. If I regret the past it means I should have done something differently to prevent it, but I didn’t. I failed. Second, there’s nothing I can do now about that situation. It is done. I can’t fix it. So why waste time and energy thinking about it?
Many of the definitions for regret use the word “wish” in them. Regret is “remorse about something that one wishes could be different.” What is the point of that? Wallowing in regret exacerbates the negative feelings, and if we stay in that place it never leads to anything better. This ties into my previous post about focusing on the things we can control.
Regret is not a proactive feeling. It is situated in disappointment, sorrow, even remorse. It merely wishes things were different without an act to cause a difference.
Monica Johnson
Regret is also backward-looking. You won’t get very far if your focus is on the rearview mirror. This is one of the ways regret leads to discontentment. We have a sense that things could be better, so we become unsatisfied with the way things are. Instead, we should use regret in a positive way. The key is to recognize it and figure out how to learn from the past in order to improve the present and the future.
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David Thoreau
I think I’m a little too quick to smother my negative emotions with denial and a cheesy joke. Emotions are useful tools … ALL emotions. Labeling them as “negative” isn’t the right perspective. A negative emotion makes us feel bad in the moment, but it serves a greater purpose. We shouldn’t park ourselves in a pool of regret. We’re likely to drown. We shouldn’t jump out of the water and start drying off immediately either.
We run into difficulty when our emotions are in control and we never let go of the regret, but healthy emotions help us improve. They lead to personal growth. We don’t like feeling regret, so we’ll take steps to prevent that decision from happening again. Maybe regret can lead us to reconcile with someone we’ve offended or to think twice before making that large purchase. For this reason, it can be therapeutic to name the regret, call it out, and spend some time with it. Then recognize that nothing can be done about that past decision, but we can surely change our future.