How to Deal with Regret

When your ten-year-old sits on the top bunk of his bunk bed, looks at you, and yells, “Eff you!” then refuses to stop no matter how many privileges are revoked or threats are leveled, you have a lot to think about. But not very much time to do it. School starts in 20 minutes. No one is fed, no one is dressed, and the dog still needs walking. Plus, cursing is a bright-red line. A real effing bright one. So up the ladder you scramble as your son freezes and in his eyes you see a look between terror and defiance, because this isn’t the first time you’ve gotten angry or grabbed his spindly wrist and dragged him down from his perch. But that’s the look you’ll remember through the day and the days and months after. Because grabbing your child in anger is also a bright-effing-red line, and that look of reproach is the same one with which you fixed your own father years ago.

It fills you with a feeling so dark and so painful that the only tolerable thing is to banish the thought and slam the door. This is regret.

Out there in the wilderness of unacknowledged feelings, the regret grows. It has good company. At 40, my list of regrets is long: how I behaved in my marriage, how I spent money when I had it and (even worse) how I spent it when I didn’t, all the dumbass things I thought were important and weren’t…Most of them are what Daniel Pink, author of the new book The Power of Regret, calls “closed door” regrets. That is, they can’t be undone. But my son is only ten and repair is still possible. So that is what Pink calls an “open door” regret. I’m finding these open doors much more difficult to cop to, because you can’t loiter before an open door. You have to walk through it.

The first step, whether the door is open or closed—whether the damage can be redressed or simply must be accepted—is that you need to acknowledge regret. For me, and for many men, I believe, this seems like weakness at worst and self-sabotage at best. What can be gained from the bummer Pep Boys of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda? Shame and dissatisfaction? Better to heed the wisdom of a thousand terrible tattoos proclaiming “No regrets!”

This is exactly the type of thinking Pink wants to undo. “Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness,” he writes. “It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.”

What to do with the regrets you have

To defang regret, Pink outlines a method of digesting it: self-disclosure, self-compassion, and self-distancing. It seemed easy enough—especially the self-disclosure part—so I tried it. After school drop-off, I took a moment to do what any middle-aged man would do when he’s feeling upset. I called my mom—yes, it was 6:00 a.m. in California, but she’s used to this kind of thing—and told her what happened. “By acknowledging the regret to ourselves,” Pink tells me, “we already lighten some of its burden.” Once the regret is in the room, Pink suggests instead of trying to salve ourselves with indiscriminate self-esteem—I am a great person!—a more useful approach would be building compassion for ourselves, or, as Pink writes, “replacing searing judgment with basic kindness.” I might not be the greatest person, but that’s okay. I’m still worthy of love.

Sounds simple but isn’t. Loving the person who hurts the person you love is a tall order. But not surprisingly, if you don’t have compassion for yourself, it’s nearly impossible to have compassion for anyone else. So I tried to reframe my regrettable actions not as evidence of my inherent irremediable crumminess but rather as just another flaw, of which I have many.

The third step, self-distancing, allows the regretter the space to analyze and strategize about what happened. You can do this a lot of ways—through time, narrating the experience as if it happened years ago, or through space, recasting the experience as if it happened far away—but the method that worked best for me, as a writer, was through language. I made a dash from the first to the second person. Thus, “When your ten-year-old sits on the top bunk of his bunk bed, looks at you, and yells, ‘Eff you!’ ”

It’s tempting here to write, “suddenly,” as in “Once I embraced regret, suddenly my relationship with my son transformed!” but nothing is sudden. Reorienting the feeling from a weight pushing me down to an engine pushing me forward has been a slow conversion. But that’s the gist of what’s happened. And it has pushed me in unfamiliar, uncomfortable ways, like apologizing to my son, like weathering his tantrums without throwing my own, like taking a few f-bombs for the family’s sake.

As I made cautious friends with regret, I wanted to know how other guys felt about it, too. I found a group of men with experience wrestling with regret and asked how they were processing it.

.

Aquil Abdullah, 48, rower. Missed the Olympics by 33/100 of a second.

My regret: For pretty much all of 1999 leading up to the Olympic trials in 2000, it was looking like I was going to the Olympics. I was the fastest person competing in the single sculls. I was poised to become the first African American male to represent rowing at the Olympics. Then, during the selection trials in Camden, New Jersey, I lost the final by 33/100 of a second. If I had lost by a large margin, I wouldn’t have had so much regret about the way I trained. I felt like I could have controlled something that could have changed the outcome. Did I eat the right thing? Did I lift enough? Did I put in the miles? Or was I mentally weak? I’ve held on to the memory of that terrible feeling. I’ve returned to it, to never wanting to feel it again, to push me forward. I finally made the Olympic team in 2004, winning my qualifying heat by nearly three seconds.

.

Kenneth Waddell, 30, car salesman. Cocreator of the viral Milk Crate Challenge, which caused injuries.

My regret: Last summer, me and my friend Jordan [Browne] were hanging out in Kobacker Park in Columbus, Ohio, when I came up with the idea of stacking up milk crates and challenging people to climb on them. Jordan filmed it and posted it on Facebook. It found its way to TikTok and went viral. People around the world started trying to do the Milk Crate Challenge, and I know a lot of them have been injured. Obviously, we didn’t want anyone to get hurt. That wasn’t our intention. It was just something we did for fun, having kids engage in competition as opposed to violence. I don’t regret creating it, to be honest. My only regret is that we didn’t patent it and get an LLC and obtain the copyright. Now there’s a Milk Crate Challenge video game and Milk Crate Challenge merchandise, and we aren’t capitalizing on it.

.

Ron Sheppard, 73, retired. Most married—and divorced—man in the UK.

My regret: I’ve been married and divorced eight times, starting in 1966, and I was most recently divorced in 2013. The best thing about living on me own is that I’ve got the television control and I can have me music on when I want. Sometimes I go to the beach and watch the waves, letting seagulls eat me sandwich, and think, I wish I had someone to grow old with. I don’t regret any of the marriages, and I would like to be married again before I die. But what I dearly regret is that I never told anyone about the childhood trauma and sexual abuse I went through as a boy. For 47 years I carried it in my head. Finally I saw a psychologist who said I was addicted to love because I didn’t get the love I needed when I was younger. If only I had sought help earlier, my life could have been so different. But I’ve had a good life. At least it’s been colorful.

This article originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of Men’s Health.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io