“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” –Deepak Chopra
Each year millions of Americans face the reality of living with a mental illness. Mental illnesses affect thinking, behavior, energy, and emotion, making it difficult to cope with the ordinary demands of life.
The stats are alarming: About 19% of the adult population, 46% of teenagers, and 13% of children each year struggle with their mental health.
These people may be in your family, live next door, interact with your children, on your work team, walk their dogs at the same park, or shop at the same grocery.
In this blog, I will talk about a universal emotion we all have experienced at one time or another. The inner strength we need can help you cope with, understand, and manage its hold on you before its corrosive influence begins.
Naming it to Tame It
In my work as a therapist, I’m a big proponent of identifying feelings and naming emotions. So much of what we experience is just below the surface of awareness but can contribute to stressful reactivity leading to other mental health issues such as anxiety, panic, and depression.
Emotional labeling is the practice of cultivating emotional literacy. Identifying what you are feeling as you’re experiencing helps create distance from your reaction and perspective.
The emotion I am speaking of can feel all-consuming. It is Regret.
A Complex Emotional Process
This universal emotion involves both thinking and feeling. Regret has been conceptualized as a “higher-order” cognitive emotion that causes people a lot of anguish and pain.
It is the emotion we feel when we fall short of our intentions and attainment of goals, have made unintentional mistakes, or fail to act or not act when we could have when faced with an opportunity.
Regret is not only distressing but left unattended, regrets can destabilize our health, increase stress symptoms, and disrupt the balance of hormone and immune systems. Usually self-directed, the stress of making mistakes or regretting decisions we have made under the weight of our own expectations is a crippling combination.
Regret is Not Simple
Our most enduring regrets stem from the discrepancies between our actual selves and our idealized selves. This is especially true for those of us who have failed our relationships, are strivers of potential, are sensitive, and struggle with perfectionism.
I’ve experienced this in myself and work with clients who are sometimes crippled by regret, devastated by their mistakes, and stuck in obsessive thinking about their failures while afraid to make new decisions and choices.
Regret contains within it a complex constellation of a mix of negative emotions –shame, remorse, guilt, sorrow, and helplessness. The plethora of emotions makes it challenging to identify regret when we feel it.
According to Kathryn Schultz’s Ted Talk, Don’t regret regret, she clarified four consistent and defining components of regret that keep us trapped in an endless mental loop.
- Denial and the thought, “make it go away.” A primitive (and childish) emotional response.
- Bewilderment and the thought, “I don’t understand; how could I have done that?” “What was I thinking?”
- Punishment and the thought, “I could have kicked myself!”
- Perseveration, focus obsessively and repeatedly on the same event and the feelings evoked.
Self-regret is one of the most significant factors my clients confront in our work together. In a recent session with a client, she expressed all four ways she felt regret. Incredibly painful for her, I could empathize with her human experience and felt a lot of compassion for both of us (I was her witness).
Statements like, “It’s my fault,” “I can’t believe I did this,” and “I should have done better” kept my client deep in the toxic grip of regret. She felt ashamed, anxious, disconnected, hurt, and angry. She quickly devolved into self-deprecating mode.
The constant “if only” that circulated in her mind caused her to second guess herself, beat herself up, and punish herself. She obsessively regretted her mistake, the wrong actions she had done, and mistook her failure as confirmation of what she believed was how she failed to live up to her “ideal self.” Her preoccupation with the things she ought to have done prevented her from stepping back and seeing the bigger picture.
Regrets can Seem Intensely Catastrophic
The intensity of regret contains a constellation of emotions within it. We can understand it as an “auxiliary emotion” — since it always follows the activation of another emotion. Regret is a blend of two or more primary emotions that are activated and then feed upon each other.
The dominant emotions experienced with regret are shame and sorrow. The consequent defensive or coping responses to shame are often present: attacking the self (I am stupid); attacking others (If only they would have); avoidance (I’ll give up and avoid certain situations, activities, or people rather than facing them); or withdrawal (I’ll emotionally disconnect and hide).
Indeed, regret is associated with memories of a personal history linked with imagining what might have created a better outcome if we had done the past differently. Stored resentment and regrets can alter our body cells, increasing physical and emotional pain, stress, and fear.
Once they enter consciousness, all our emotions have the thinking mind as a travel companion. Our negative thoughts serve to focus the information provided by what we feel, depending on the situation’s intensity.
For my client, the painful awareness of her patterns and how easy it was to fall back into a feeling of helplessness, shame, and sorrow triggered and reinforced her sense of failure. When the most tangible prospects for change, growth, and repatterning are activated, we are more likely to experience underlying perfectionism to get it right.
Assuring her that we would work through this together helped to calm her and opened her to the possibility of embracing herself with love and forgiveness, reframing her perspective, and imagining better outcomes in the future.
Our Memories Influence Regret
Memories have an indefinite potential to enter our consciousness when we least expect them. They help inform emotional bias in our present lives. Memorable regret activates the intensity through the force of overwhelming thoughts and feelings.
Disappointment may evoke memories of regrettable past choices. We often fail to consider with regret that a present stimulus—a situation, an event, an image, or a thought of which we may or may not be aware—activates an emotion that, in turn, evokes the memory that then triggers regret.
Regret illustrates how cognitions, involving memories and perceptions, among other factors, transform feelings into emotional thoughts and how these thoughts can further trigger emotions. Thoughts are initially motivated by an emotional response, and they do have the power to activate a cascade of other emotions.
Regrets related to past mistakes and failures can feel embarrassing, frustrating, and intimidating. Especially if they significantly impact others. Sometimes our regretful memories deepen a fear of connection.
What’s worse is that we dwell on our most intense regrets. We compare our choices yesterday to an ideal path that we think we should have taken, even though we have no concrete measure of where that path could have led us. We imagine it to be a better path. So, we start to think irrational thoughts: “If only I did that, this would’ve happened.”
Instead, remember the times when you found the inner strength to forge ahead, forgive yourself and others, and surmount your own negative emotions of anger, bitterness, resentment, vengeance, etc.
Learning From Regret Takes Inner Strength
During a lifetime, we will experience regrets, both large and small. When we look back in reflection, we regret the choices we made after we consider ‘what could’ve been had we taken a different path.’
That’s when it’s beneficial to interrupt emotional regrets with Inner Strength Ritual Essence. To help you draw upon your extraordinary capability to learn from your regrets when you need it the most, it strengthens your ability to bounce back from your failures and mistakes and try again.
Just like the tenacity of the Torrey Pine Tree from which this essence is made, inner strength to cope with life’s storms helps us adapt, change, and survive adversity. Its persistence has a special adaptation that helps it cope with the harsh winds of the Pacific Ocean in a tough landscape.
Our core is strengthened when we make peace with “what is” (it’s happened) and shift to a growth mindset where learning from our regrets can change our brains for the better.
Use Inner Strength Ritual Essence to
- Become aware of the intricacies of what you’re feeling.
- Label your feelings and strong emotions after making a mistake or trying to navigate conflict.
- Recognize that the universality of regret is distinctly human. We are all in this together.
- Make sense of unwanted complicated reactions of shame, sadness, guilt, anger, etc.
- Accept what regrets have a hold on your life.
- Offer empathy for that part of yourself who made a mistake.
- Reduce the influence of negative feelings on you.
- Forgive and stand firm in yourself.
- Overcome the ways you think about obstacles and bounce back from failures.
- Reframe your regret to learn from it and transform it.
- Set appropriate boundaries in overwhelming situations.
- Communicate effectively with those around you.
- Regulate your reactions in healthy, productive ways.
- Remind yourself you are doing your best.
- Believe in your capacity to do what is difficult, improve inner willpower and cultivate tenacity to cope with the storms of life.
Making Peace with Regret
Sometimes our regrets are not as ugly as we think they are. The point is not to hate ourselves when regret becomes all-consuming or when things go wrong. Learning to love the flawed, imperfect parts of ourselves and forgive ourselves for creating them isn’t easy.
Self-compassion is an effective emotional tool to help us confront and accept the universality of regret. Transforming feelings of inadequacy to release the pain and suffering of regret requires inner strength to grow through adversity to become more resilient and kind.
Regrets teach us important lessons about ourselves and life. If we have goals and dreams and want to do our best, and if we love people and don’t want to hurt or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. Through the honest feedback of learning, we can go on and start again to repair mistakes and make amends.
Regret reminds us we can do better and understand that life will offer opportunities for healing. That’s how Inner Strength Ritual Essence can help you to be a pioneer of your future instead of being held back by your regrets.
All my aromatic love,
Vidya
