Power Over Our Own Regret

Regret is a condition common to people around the world. All of us, whether we admit it or not, hop into the magic time machine in our mind and go back to those moments when we wished we had done something differently, or not done something at all. We imagine in those moments our actions can trigger a different outcome, a different end result. Regret can cause a great deal of pain, especially when we allow it to hijack our emotions and bring up feelings of sadness, guilt and shame.

As a participant in several support communities, I often hear stories of regret from caregivers and patients living with rare, terminal diseases like ALS and FTD. Some caregivers lament their lack of knowledge, their lack of patience, their lack of emotional strength to handle with grace the difficulties of caregiving. Some patients regret decisions made before they knew what the illness was, and decisions they had to make – or go along with – once the diagnosis was made clear.  These expressions of regret highlight the sense of powerlessness many patients and caregivers feel in the face of illness.

The tears of a friend, explaining how she couldn’t keep her husband with FTD safe from a fall, despite her best efforts to divert him from an uneven walkway, echo in my head. The frustration of another, a patient with ALS, over his inability to help his wife with the simplest of kitchen tasks they both used to share responsibility for tear at my heart. My own regrets around my husband’s lightning-fast journey with both diseases can, if I let them, pull me down into a pit of despair that takes days to emerge from.

In an interview with Josh Wright of Behavioral Scientist magazine, author Daniel Pink mentioned of the research for his book The Power of Regret: How looking Backward Moves us Forward:

‘What really stuck with me were the stories about people in relationships that had drifted apart who didn’t reach out. And then in some cases it was too late, and in other cases, it was just bugging them the whole time. As I interviewed these people, especially people for whom the door was still open, I would actually become frustrated. “What are you doing? Just call the person! Reach out!”’

He and many other behavioral scientists recommend sharing regrets with your community in order to evaluate and alleviate negative emotions that come from them. It has been my personal experience, that by sharing those regrets with others who understand, I can examine what I think are mistakes, gain perspective from someone much less hard on me than I am on myself, and help me to learn how to put aside regret in favor of knowing better now, and doing better in the future.

The rare disease journey is one especially fraught with regret, pulling us back to the same impossible situations, the same impossible outcomes, often without resolution. Some would argue there’s no room for regret in a journey like ours, but I have found regret can be one our most useful tools, because it can teach us more about ourselves, help us learn from our mistakes, and help us to move forward in the most trying of situations. We move forward when we take power over our own regret and use it for self-correction as opposed to self-loathing. We can also learn from the regrets of others, taking instruction from their experiences and utilizing them for our own understanding. I have seen with my own eyes the healing moments that can occur when sharing regrets in this way, with expressions of compassion and gratitude that wash over the participants and the witnesses to those exchanges in a group setting.

My entreaty would be this: do not turn away from regret, nor should it be given more power over our emotions than it needs. Instead, embrace the opportunity regret has to change us, for the betterment of ourselves, our relationships, and of our personal journeys, wherever they might lead.