I have been thinking a lot about regret lately, and I thought I would write about it here to help sort through and clarify said thoughts and hence help me process things.

As I have mentioned before, I have been working hard to rid myself of most of my regret lately. Not all of it, of course. Only a sociopath has no regret or anticipation of regret, often to their undoing.

But I want to be rid of most of it, because it’s not a productive emotion in excess and I have come to realize that I have it in far, far too great a quantity, and it is one of the major things holding me back and keeping me in the same unproductive “holding pattern” that I have been in for most of my adult life. Both regret, and the anticipation of regret.

Let’s make that distinction. Regret is simple… it is that feeling you get that you wish you had done something differently in the past. You wish you had made a different choice, went a different direction, seized an opportunity you let slip through your hands, or had kept your stupid mouth shut.

On the surface of it, this is a useless emotion, because the past is fixed. It’s done. Wanting to have done something differently and feeling bad because of it serve no purpose but to make you miserable for no reason at all.

But regret serves a vital purpose because it is the active agent towards our learning from experience. In the ideal case, we make a choice, regret it for as long as it takes to learn what went wrong and to fix in the mind the emotional potentials to prevent similar mistakes in the future, and then the regret would fade and leave us with a fresh and open mind.

But sadly, the human mind does not work so cleanly. The fear of particularly painful or emotionally disturbing events recurring causes us to cling to regrets, afraid that if we let them fade from our minds, we will forget all about them and the bad thing will happen again. The emotional potential is far too strong and becomes a liability instead of a

And then there’s the anticipation of regret. Simply put, it is the feeling you get when contemplating potential actions that you better not choose a certain option because you can imagine yourself regretting it. This is the primary way regret educates us, by setting up those emotional potentials I mentioned earlier to remind the individual not to make the same mistake again, and it does this via the simple emotional language of aversion/fear.

And this is fine… when it works correctly. Another way regret malfunctions is that it overgeneralizes. This is how many phobias operate. A single one-off freak occurrence, because it creates a very strong negative emotional response, ends up causing a broad and categorical fear that encompasses all kinds of situations that pose absolutely no threat of the bad experience recurring, thus cutting the individual off from many positive experiences to absolutely no sufficient end.

And now we come to me. I almost forgot that was my destination, what with all the philosophizing and stuff. Sometimes, my mind wanders off without me and it takes me forever to find it again.

Silly old mind.

Anyhow, I realized recently that, far from being the regret free person I thought I was when I was younger (of course I had no regrets, I hadn’t made any big choices yet!), I am paralyzed by an enormous burden of regret.

And what is worse, the regret has become a living thing that rules my life, because I am so afraid of making mistakes that I do nothing, thus increasing my crushing burden of regret about never doing anything with my life. I add to my own burdens constantly, and yet, a sick and terrible voice rules me inside and the song it sings reads “Doing nothing is always better than trying anything because when you aren’t doing anything, at least you aren’t doing anything wrong!”

Clearly, I have to free myself from this poisonous line of thinking. I am very tired of going nowhere and doing nothing with my life. The view of life as an infinite series of rooms with an infinite number of doors and only one of them leading to something good is clearly nonfunctional to the point of virulent toxicity. It has to go.

So I have been putting a great deal of effort into monitoring my mind for this sort of toxic thought, and squashing those thoughts before they go too far, and replacing them with healthier thoughts, ones without self-recrimination or regret.

It is not easy to change on this level, and it will no doubt be w long and winding road that leads to my goal of a clearer, fresher, more relaxed and content mind. I will need a lot of help from my therapist as I clear out roadblocks and try to give myself the kind of deep down healing, way down in the deepest and most vital organs of my mind, that will lead to me becoming the stronger, happier, more even keeled and capable version of myself that I know for an absolute fact is in there inside me somewhere.

I was not always like this, and therefore, I can be different again. At one point, I had strength, and energy, and hope, and resilience. I want that back. Not the same thing exactly, but just as good, or even better. I want to banish the darkness that I have wrapped myself in, and feel the cool breeze and warm sun on my skin again, and breath free once more, ready to face the world, instead of just hiding from it by losing myself in my lost and lonely labyrinth.

I will find my way out of the maze just as soon as I no longer need to be lost and hiding any more.

I just hope I don’t end up regretting it after.