What regret can mean and how to deal with it
What makes regret so complex and what we need to be looking at in order to move through it
Alex: “Wait, hold on, stop the camera a second.” Phew. Deep breath, quick internal check-in to myself that sounds like, “Lis, where ya at?” Quick internal milliseconds convo here.
Cue Alex: “Alright, what was I asking you?”
Me: “I believe the question you wanted me to answer was what happens when someone comes in with regret, but what you’d initially asked me, right before you switched it up, was whether there were any regrets I had.” Pause, very quick pause.
“I’d prefer to answer the first version of that question, what happens when people come in with regret, if that’s okay?”
Alex: “Okay, great, yes, let’s start.” Exhale.
The breaks in the filming of the Kokoro Series Episode on “regret,” were a cool drink of water between takes. We’d gone from talking about something really heavy, to needing to take a pause for technical reasons. The leaning-into-it-going-deep and the pausing-to-come-up-and-out were in sync honestly, with the natural ability for the senses and the psyche to hold space for process. A little meet-cute therapy parallel experience to the topic we’d been diving into.
I’d been up early that morning, in preparation for the show, and my colleague and I had already spent a ton of time in the car in deep discussions around psychics, spiritual mediums, symbols, signs, and synchronicities. The day had already gotten off to a pretty caffeinated cerebral start and I was excited. I was there, with Alex Lang, the host of Kokoro, to talk about something I see in the therapy room, something that pertains to most human beings if they’ve lived a life where they’ve made choices for themselves of any kind. I was there to talk about the subject of regret.
When I arrived with my colleague at Alex's home, he was in the middle of grilling burgers, meticulously compiling the ingredients, for what he would later explain on the show, as comfort food to complement what could be, and is, a difficult topic. Regret, like many things, is not an easy subject to breach. Many people spend the majority, sometimes even all of their lives running from one hot-wired experience to the next so as not to touch it. Regret can contain a big-ness that’s hard to comprehend and work through, no doubt. It’s tough to know where to even begin, but what Alex was doing, I made note, already mirrored the process of what it’s like to move through something really hard. We hadn’t even gotten into the content of the show yet, but we’d already begun the process. Alex was mirroring what happens in psychotherapy, in trauma work, and organically in life. Dark happens alongside, within, and amidst light; comfort as the container in which to do so. And we all, no matter what, need comfort if we’re going to, and if we’re going through process. The burgers did indeed serve as a good companion to the tough conversation we were about to embark on.
Alex begins this episode on regret, sharing the story of a woman, who with her husband, experienced a near-fatal, tragic change in life circumstances involving an accident their son had at a very young age. This pivotal moment in time changed their life, the life of their son, and the relationship they each have with their son, but the story centers around the mother, who details the experience and the regret she carries with her from that moment. The questions Alex asked me were thought-provoking and deep, which I appreciated, because his story-telling interview style allowed for a conversation and not just answers. This was a beautiful fit especially because while regret can be created from one pivotal moment in time, working through it is a series of deep, personal, meaning-making questions from a place of deeply personal, meaningful space. When you can begin to weave a story around something, giving it context and place amidst the abyss of what it can feel like, among the nothingness that you have difficulty finding context for, you begin to create new and different awareness and meaning. It’s this new, different, expansion of possibilities and connection of context around something that creates the meaning we need to help us move through.
People often avoid talking about things they most regret in life, (hell, I even wanted to avoid it when Alex almost asked me). One very common response, “Why? Nothing’s gonna change it.” And there is absolute truth in some of that. Nothing is going to change the outcome of a circumstance that already happened. The outcome is already what’s occurred. We do not exist on a plane where we get to time travel to change our actions, or the actions of other people, that’s true. This isn’t Deadpool and Wolverine. We aren’t in a Marvel movie. You’re right. And I’m not here to convince you otherwise. But regret does not live in isolation like we’d care to believe. It is kept in a fortress of solitude, absolutely, but that’s because other things are keeping it stuck there in time and space.
Holding regret is like holding a tension rod. Through it, runs shame, guilt, sometimes even blame and anger. These emotions are difficult to work through, no doubt, but we hold onto them, continuously checking their pulse because it keeps us feeling as though we’re in control of an emotion, albeit a difficult emotion, but still, control nonetheless. Control doesn’t care what it controls in its effort to be controlling.
If we can keep a pulse on what we’re feeling, that prevents us from experiencing any unanticipated response to what happens when we let go of the tension rod, or move something out of place, right? No. What happens instead is we get really great at holding a tension rod. We get great at compartmentalizing, and we get used to - to a default - at being dis-integrated. Pivotal moments in time in which regret is born out of, become a fragment in the existence of our life, armored up so well with its counterparts shame, guilt, and anger.
If the fragment remains a fragment, left on its own, untouched, unprocessed, we then become fragmented internally, in our sense of self, due to the loss and disconnection that occur from not connecting it to the other parts of our self. This is trauma, and this is traumatic response. Trauma has two parts, always. Number one, is the incident itself, but number two, and often more damaging to our internal psyche and sense of self, is the way it was or was not handled or processed. And this is where we lose sense of who we are in our totality. This unexamined story of our selves is where shame, guilt, anger, and blame, very, very difficult emotions to get through, lie. They are meant to keep us away from any further or future dangers and threats. These emotions are purposeful, all emotions are. They think they’re doing us a favor and keeping us safe. Again, they’re only keeping us divided. We live small, we live fragmented because we think we have to. When we drop the tension rod, other emotions are released. Yes, they are difficult as well. But they are necessary. Because while on one side of regret lie shame, guilt, anger and blame, the other side holds the loss and grief that are waiting to be processed and worked through for healing to happen.
There is grief and loss that lie in the deeper underbelly of regret. We often don’t get to work through these, most detrimental pieces because of the shame, guilt, blame and anger that meet us at regret’s door. But if we follow the thread down and through, looking at regret from the lens of grief and loss is where we can begin to find meaning and healing. It’s often where the most surprising, and missing pieces of the puzzle lay.
What did you lose? What are you holding onto? What happens if we look at it through this lens? What might be there you’re not ready to let go of? Regret through the eyes of grief and loss begins to shift the story, it begins to change the narrative. There is a process to grieving that is innately and inherently human that you can allow yourself to experience in order to experience the other side of healing. In the case of the mother Alex interviewed for Kokoro’s episode on regret, as in the case for so many people that carry it, the mother’s biggest loss wasn’t what happened to her son, it was not listening to her self.
What working through regret looks like is moving through the complexities of the incident and everything it touched. Not just the where, how, what, but all of its tethered states of being. Sharing the story of what happened, that’s one part. But then also, what happened to you as a result? What did you begin to believe to be true of yourself and of the world and where did you look for evidence of it? How did you build your story of yourself based on this and was anyone or anything there to point you in a different direction? What do you intrinsically believe to be true? And what would you intrinsically believe to be true if blame moved to the side for a moment to make space for the other parts of yourself that also existed at the time the incident occurred, before, after, and now?
None of these are questions to be taken lightly, they’re meant to be deeply reflective, and inquisitive and also, to explore the multitude of personality and experience we each hold within ourselves.
What we lose when we don’t process regret, is not only time, relationships, opportunities for love and belonging that we couldn’t have imagined existed, but we cast off parts of who we are internally. When we’re stuck in regret, it’s likely we stop short of examining the grief and loss pieces because the shame, guilt and anger can be so difficult to get through. But doing this is vital because it’s in the processing of the loss and the grief, the hurt and the devastation in the deeper wells of regret, that we begin to find forgiveness, compassion, grace, and peace, even if, most importantly if, they only come from inside yourself. That we begin to thread the needle through to create a confluence of meaning to an experience that once existed in dark isolation, in a void within us, to be held alongside us that we have the capacity to carry wholeheartedly.