Do you have regrets? If you are human, you have indeed done things you wished you had not or wished you had taken additional steps along with those you did take. Reflecting on how your life could be different and better if you had made other choices is inevitable and not necessarily a harmful activity. Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” We can learn from consideration of alternative scenarios related to choices we could have made, which we then utilize to inform our future decisions. Unfortunately, some people get hooked on dwelling on the past. Feeling unhealthy emotions like anger, depression, pity, shame, and guilt and then ruminating on past mistakes undermines your present experience. It is likely to reduce the enjoyment you can derive in the future.
In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), I help people learn from the past while avoiding dwelling on the past. The first step in overcoming unhealthy regret is to recognize the difference between the experience of a healthy negative emotion and an unhealthy emotion. Healthy negative emotions like sadness, disappointment, displeasure, concern, and “healthy regret” acknowledge a negative state of affairs in the past associated with our decisions or actions. They focus our attention constructively, allowing us to learn and apply what we have learned about our past choices in the future. We experience motivation to change what we can at this point in the game, but these healthy feelings allow us to enjoy what we can and move on. Unhealthy negative emotions like depression, anger, self or other pity, shame, guilt, and “unhealthy regret” overfocus our attention on the past. We do not reflect on the past constructively. While experiencing these unhealthy negative emotions, we will likely generate biased thinking about what could have been. We suffer and reduce our ability to enjoy the present, and our unhealthy feelings may limit the goals and dreams we make for the future. We may experience significantly reduced motivation to change life’s current or future circumstances.
The theory of REBT holds that unhealthy negative feelings associated with past actions and decisions come from having rigid and extreme attitudes towards ourselves, others, and life conditions. Here are a few examples of such unhealthy attitudes that have self-defeating influences on our current feelings and future actions:
- Because others warned me it was a bad idea, I (absolutely) should not have followed through on my desire to do what I did.
- I am a total failure for creating these unfortunate circumstances I now face and missing out on the opportunities I could have enjoyed had I restrained myself and not been so short-term oriented.
- It is awful that I created the circumstances I now face.
- It is unbearable to strive to enjoy life now and move on.
Of course, there are different permutations of the rigid and extreme attitudes specified above. Common to these various permutations is the tendency to think rigidly, and in extreme ways, about some alternative decision or action you could have taken and the results which followed from the decisions you made and actions you did take.
REBT teaches you to challenge your rigid and extreme attitudes to transform your unhealthy negative feelings associated with past decisions into healthy negative emotions. Doing so will help you immensely. There are four good questions to use for this reflective process:
- Are my rigid and extreme attitudes towards my past decisions helping me to accept reality as it now is and to change what I now can, or are my attitudes holding me back from effective action given how things currently stand?
- Are rigid and extreme attitudes valid? What evidence is there to support their truthfulness?
- Would I tell my child to think this way about a past decision that led to an unfortunate outcome? If I would not, why would I not?
- What attitude would I encourage my child to hold to make the most of life and move on?
I wish to emphasize one aspect of unhealthy regret, self-devaluation, which often results from bad decisions. Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, had a way with words. To emphasize the pernicious outcome of holding a rigid attitude towards ourselves for having not made the wrong choice, he humorously said, “Shouldhood leads to shithood. You cannot be a shit without a should.” Once having made what one believes is a bad decision or taken the wrong path, depreciating oneself as a person for not doing what one “absolutely should have done” only compounds one’s problems. The alternative to self-devaluation is to accurately describe the self as a fallible human and unconditionally accept oneself while acknowledging one’s missteps, holding oneself responsible for the outcome of one’s decisions, and learning from the process. Unconditional self-acceptance is essential to coming to terms with one’s past.
I will use the above questions to challenge the first two attitudes leading to unhealthy regret:
Rigid, self-defeating attitude: Because others warned me it was a bad idea, I (absolutely) should not have followed through on my desire to do what I did.
Questions aimed at challenging the above attitude:
- Is my rigid attitude towards my past decisions helping me to accept reality as it now is and to change what I now can, or are my attitudes holding me back from effective action, given how things currently stand? Answer: My rigid attitude that “I should not have followed through on my desire to do what I did” prevents me from accepting reality as it now is. It leads me to feel unhealthy regret and self-directed anger, to suffer, and to feel amotivated to change what I can and enjoy life to whatever extent is still possible.
- Is my extreme attitude valid? What evidence is there to support its truthfulness? Answer: My extreme attitude is not valid. There is no evidence to support the mindset that I (absolutely) should have followed through on my desire to do what I did. It might have been better if I had not done what I did. However, no natural law of the universe prevents fallible humans from making bad decisions.
- Would I tell my child to think this way about a past decision that led to an unfortunate outcome? If I would not, why would I not? Answer: I would not tell my child to think with this rigid attitude because it does help them cope with the outcome of their decision, learn from it, and enjoy life to whatever extent possible. It would make them suffer in misery for having made a costly mistake.
- What attitude would I encourage my child to hold to make the most of life and move on? Answer: I wish I had heeded the warnings from others that I was about to make a wrong decision, but I did not (absolutely) have to heed those warnings. To err is human; to learn and move on is divine.
Extreme, self-devaluing attitude: I am a total failure for creating these unfortunate circumstances I now face and missing out on the opportunities I could have enjoyed had I restrained myself and not been so short-term oriented.
Questions aimed at challenging the above attitude:
- Is my extreme attitude toward my past decision helping me to accept reality as it now is and to change what I now can, or are my attitudes holding me back from effective action, given how things currently stand? Answer: My extreme attitude that “I am a total failure for creating these unfortunate circumstances I now face…” is certainly not helping me accept reality and change what I can. It makes me feel (unhealthily) regretful, shameful, (self-directed) anger, and depressed. I ruminate on the past. I do not feel the motivation and confidence I can move on from the current circumstances and still have some enjoyment in life.
- Are rigid and extreme attitudes valid? What evidence is there to support their truthfulness? Answer: My attitude that I am a total failure is invalid because there is only empirical evidence I failed this time and perhaps other times. Still, there is no evidence I have always failed and will always fail. I am defining myself as “a total failure” when I could hold a healthy view that I am a fallible human who failed this time. This way of thinking would be sound reasoning about having made this mistake.
- Would I tell my child to think this way about a past decision that led to an unfortunate outcome? If I would not, why would I not? Answer: I would not encourage a child to think this way. I would not because it leads to suffering from self-directed anger, shame, and depression. It will undermine their future decision-making confidence as well. It will lead them to not learn from the experience and to have a hard time enjoying life despite their mistake.
- What attitude would I encourage my child to hold to make the most of life and move on? Answer: My decision to not heed the advice of others and follow through on my short-term desire proves I am a fallible human, not a total failure. I will not define my total self based on one error, even when that error has profound consequences. Instead, I will choose to accept myself with all my good and bad decisions, learn from them, and make the most of life from this point in the game.
To extend your learning, you can use the four questions above to answer healthily the remaining two attitudes (extreme attitudes 3 and 4 above) using the four challenging questions I have demonstrated how to use.
Once a person has transformed their rigid and extreme attitudes into flexible and non-extreme attitudes and feels healthily sad, disappointed, displeased, and annoyed, they need to build conviction in these new attitudes and internalize them. REBT argues that we are biologically predisposed to “should on ourselves” and “down ourselves.” So we will have to work persistently to adopt these new attitudes in the face of having errored. To this end, I advise you to do these things:
- Go over the logic many, many times. Review the challenging questions with their answers above.
- Each day, take a voice recorder and say the healthy attitude I created above with a firm voice three times. Then listen to this recording. I call these rational pushups, and by doing this exercise daily, you will build conviction and feel healthy negative feelings to replace your unhealthy negative feelings.
- Act in ways consistent with the new attitudes I created above. Make decisions, take new calculated (not foolhardy risks), and keep adventuring to maximize pleasure in your life. Keep learning from your mistakes while unconditionally accepting yourself despite having made other mistakes. Strive to make different mistakes because you learn from former mistakes.
- Teach these ideas to your friends and family. Show them that to err is human; learning and moving on is divine.
Your Golden Takeaway
Remember, you never get back the past. However, with REBT, you can learn from it and move on to enjoy the present and make for a better future. Now get cracking! Time waits for no one.