Obsessive regret, for many people with mental illness, can be toxic and potentially undercuts a tenuous stability during recovery.
Regret emerges in response to recalled destructive memories, but not in a nostalgic sort of way. It focuses negatively on the past instead of the promise of the future. Regret fills the mind with mourning for what could have been different in our lives, particularly what our lives would have been like if we did not have a mental illness. It cannot go well.
Managing a mental disorder requires learning how to walk into the future without being maimed by the unsolicited burden we carry through life. I know this because I am 73 and only diagnosed with bipolar disorder a few years back. During my vicissitudes of the mood disorder, I had occasional rare opportunities, call them rare moments of fleeting remission, to look back at the egregious mistakes in my life and my squandered opportunities. But I was bewildered, not knowing that mental illness was running through me like a turbulent river.
In the past few years, I now have the knowledge to understand my past behavior. It has awakened a clarity of understanding about what I did and why. However, I am very wary of lapsing into a melancholy or depressive state of regret. I am glad I awakened to my illness slowly because a realization of my hobbled life, if too sudden, could have led to suicide. For some people, the weight of ruminating on what might have been becomes an albatross that can drag them down beneath the raging waters of self-recrimination.
The famous American poet Theodore Roethke resonantly captured this challenge. I have my own interpretation of his words (which for him are about facing aging). I must not allow myself to trigger a precipitous downfall when I am mortified by an awareness of how I have not been in full control of my past life. In his poem "The Wakening," Roethke wrote:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Regret is only useful to me, given my history of bipolar, if the past can inform the present, resulting in actionable change.
I have many regrets about relationships that I mangled into oblivion. But I cannot go back years upon years to rebuild them. I was in a cocoon of depression and mania, while my friends, who I often alienated, moved on with their lives. I can ask for forgiveness, but I can't restore the lost time that would have fostered attachments to people like a tree with its root system of support.
Dwelling upon regret can, in itself, just create another regret, not regret for the past but regret in the moment.
Better to walk confidently into the future, with all its possibilities, through the door opening before you.
Mark Karlin is retired, after a long career in advocating against gun violence, as a hospital executive and founder of a progressive website. He graduated from Yale University with an honors degree in English.