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Regret is the point-down inner critic’s favorite sport. Regret is lamenting about past choices that we now consider to have been mistakes. Since the past can’t be wiped out, neither can regrets about it. Our work is not to get rid of regrets but to handle them mindfully and usefully.
We can begin by realizing that what happened in the past does not have to be taken as the whole picture. Regrets serve to keep us stuck because the inner critic mutters, “You have made so many mistakes because you are inadequate and unskilled. You are too messed up to work anything out or try something new.” This is, of course, the voice of fear, the king of all regrets. Once we accept the given that we all make mistakes, fail to act, and impulsively and unwisely choose, regret is no longer about shame. It is about saying yes to our human predicament with all its intriguing intrigues. We may be looking at the givens of all human experiences and thinking they refer only to us. Indeed, regret thrives on isolation: “Only I could have been that dumb.” Actually, we have all been that dumb and worse. Our compassionate sense of ourselves in this frail human family makes regret less impactful. In that context, regret can help us cultivate the virtue of humility.
In addition, regret is about grieving. The root word “gret” means grief. “Re” refers to repetition. We keep spinning our wheels in our grief experience, never resolving it. That is why regret keeps gnawing at us. We repeat rather than complete. All our errors and losses are meant to go to grief, then to nostalgia, then to letting go. When we interrupt this protocol, we wind up stuck in regret.
Using our journal, we can work with regrets by seeing how they may relate to our life themes:
We take all our regrets, annoyances, bad luck experiences, mistakes, and ask how they fit into the tapestry of our whole life, how we made something useful from them. This will reveal a coherent theme in our life, a personal myth, a uniqueness we came in with but may not have dared allow ourselves to know.
We pay special attention to finding the features of ourselves that we repressed, disavowed, or refused to acknowledge. This may feel dangerous. We ensure our safety by practicing in total privacy. We murmur, “I will admit my dark side now just to myself.” This releases a liveliness we may have been keeping imprisoned without knowing we were doing it. Here is an example: We honestly question how and if we have loved authentically in the course of our life. We will admit that some of what has passed for love of others was really controlling or possessing. We may follow it up with a conversation with the people involved, in which we admit the agenda we had over the years. Today, we want to upgrade our way of loving so that it is sincere. The confession will also help with growth in humility, the most appealing of all the virtues.
We can practice futurizing a regret: We shift from putting ourselves down for our errors to appreciating the growth that has resulted from them. We then promise ourselves a future in which we will be careful about not making the same mistakes. We design a future that will be wiser. We have moved from being victims of the past to being students of it.
Adapted from: David Richo, Ready: How to Know When to Go and When to Stay (Shambhala).
