Quote 1

Christian Krohg. The Day After, Self-Portrait (1883) Wikimedia Commons.

“I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.”

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

We all experience regrets. Some make us reflect wistfully on the past, and others may trouble us deeply and feel very painful.

Pasternak is saying in the above quotation that people who have no regrets are actually less loveable than those who ‘have never fallen or stumbled.’ He is referring to the richness and the depth of learning that we all gain from experiences of slipping up, from getting things wrong. Such learning infuses us with life, with vigour and colour and with real value.

How often do people feel stuck in regret, guilty and remorseful, feeling that they should have done things better, got everything ‘right,’ complained less, been more ‘perfect.’ In fact, what making errors reveals is our humanity, showing that we have deeply engaged with our life and have truly been involved in the difficult process of living.

Those who really live have wrestled with problems and taken risks, and will, inevitably, have grown as people, developing compassion and resilience. They may have regrets, but these are regarded as lessons, revealing how they might be different in the present and future.

Quote 2

Silence – Alexej Georgewitsch Von Jawlensky. 1913. Wikimedia Commons

“I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.”

Publilius Syrus

Many times we may regret not keeping silent. It is easier to react in the moment than it is to pause, and think, to contemplate and mull over what we intend to say before we say it. Keeping quiet, instead of reacting quickly, can be a way to avoid feeling regretful about unnecessary arguments and conflict.

In the heat of the moment, people can cause hurt and pain that may be remembered for years to come. Silence at the appropriate time gives us an opportunity to think and reflect, to consider what might be the best response in the circumstances, in order to try to avoid regrets in the future.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Viktor E. Frankl

Sometimes words that are left unspoken may, in fact, be the most meaningful. Making the space inside oneself to listen in a deep way can also help another person to feel really heard.

Silence increases our self-awareness and our sensitivity to the environment around us. We become more contemplative, more reflective, and we give other people opportunities to express themselves. Staying silent is better than gossiping, better than shooting from the hip, better than escalating anger with hot-headed reactions that we may later regret.

Quote 3

Regret (also known as Love Spurned) – Philip Alexius De László.1892. Wikioo

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”

Kurt Vonnegut

‘If only’ is a distressing phrase, provoking disturbingly regretful feelings.  Constantly thinking about what ‘might have been’ will make us long to experience what never happened and could never happen.

Hindsight. Andrew Hoyer. Flickr.

We all know that ‘hindsight is  wonderful thing…’ and that constantly looking back and regretting that we did not do things differently can feel like being stuck in a murky quagmire of remorse, sorrow and pain.

Many people come into therapy with impossible dreams, impossible wishes and hopes. They are filled with regret and want the past to be different.

The psychotherapist Yalom neatly sums up this attitude in these words:

“Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past,”

Yalom

Wishing that the past could be different is a way of getting oneself stuck, angrily, regretfully mired in aching, throbbing memories of a former life that no longer exists and can never exist again. Wishing to change the past will mean that we cannot focus on our present life, so full of regrets are we for a past that did not feel fulfilling or meet our deepest needs.

Walter Langley – Memories 1906. Wikimedia Commons

Such empty regrets will cause feelings of emptiness in our daily lives, resulting in a lack of decision and a lack of action. Learning to let go of such painful feelings will be an important part of the therapeutic work.

It will involve the realisation that we cannot rewrite our life script, we cannot change anything, especially at times of loss, times when we cannot make reparation or fix things. Perhaps it will also mean forgiving ourselves for what we might now see as mistakes or bad decisions. Perhaps we can also learn to accept the fact of our own human frailty.

Quote 4

Memories and Regrets. Alfred Stevens. 1874. Wikimedia Commons.

“…regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.”

Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.”

Lucille Ball

“I think the only advice I can give you on how to live your life well is, first off, remember… it’s not the things we do in life that we regret on our deathbed, it is the things we do not.”

Randy Pausc

The past is utterly unchangeable, and constantly yearning for a different past is often a way of standing still and avoiding taking responsibility for our lives in the present.

‘The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.’

Omar Khayyam

Not accepting all this keeps us static, unmoving and inactive. Dealing with such approaches to life issues is a fundamental aspect of existential therapy; this can help us to accept difficult realities and move on in our lives from a state of destructive, self-judgmental regretfulness about what ‘might have been.’

The client in therapy needs help to grieve all this; therapy is very much about resolving grief and the deep, painful regret at the loss of something real or something hoped for. Having worked through such pain can mean we might be able to have a new beginning…

“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

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”

Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

Quote 5

Landscape at Sunset – Carl Gustav Carus. 1830. Wikioo

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

 Fernando Pessoa

The poetic phrase ‘an eternal sunset of what we are,’ beautifully encapsulates the sense of sadness and loss in relation to ‘longing for impossible things,’ the feelings of a dulling life, hopes fading, dreams dimming, ambition dying away. It is as if we are drowning in our regrets, overcome by waves of pointless longing.

Writers have created many graphic metaphors to describe feelings of regret…

“My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.”

Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.”

Fulton Oursler

A Prison Scene – Francisco De Goya. 1814. Wikioo

“Regret keeps you stuck on pause. So does prison…”

Colleen Hoover

Whatever choices we have made have been made, and there are always regrets, no matter what decisions we have chosen. Nothing is absolute, nothing is clear-cut or totally ‘right.’ There are always shades of grey in every choice. 

Sickert, Ennui. 1914. Wikimedia Commons

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both………. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

Søren Kierkegaard

Moving forward from feeling stuck in our regrets may involve taking risks and being prepared to learn and benefit from whatever transpires as a result.

Fears of becoming entrenched in the pains of regret can, in fact, be motivating and can inspire us to take risks and be active, despite our anxiety.

Everett Shinn: Girl on Stage. 1906. Wikimedia Commons

“What drove me to give voice to this dream, to step in front of the camera again not knowing what the outcome was going to be, was…fear of regret. I don’t want to live my life with regrets.”

Ke Huy Quan

Focussing on what we can do is also important, rather than eternally grieving and regretting what we may have lost…

“My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.”

Stephen Hawking

© Linda Berman