A Powerful Practice to Help Process Regret

Sometimes wisdom appears in the least expected places. I was walking down a busy main street in Cambridge, MA, past a homeless man who had requisitioned a park bench as his temporary abode. His hand-written sign stopped me mid-step: “Pain is temporary, regret is forever.”

The feeling is a resoundingly familiar one. About a year ago, the renowned restaurateur Keith McNally penned a best-seller whose title summed up the sentiment unforgettably: I Regret Almost Everything. As a clinical psychologist, I am often humbled by how difficult it is for people to let go of regret. People often ruminate on this emotion, returning to the story again and again over the course of a long treatment.

What Makes Us Feel Regret?

I took a look at the recent research. Regret is thought to be a universal emotion. However, it can help us learn from our mistakes, as acknowledging the mistake can guide us to make better choices. There is a wide range of what people regret. There's inaction—not taking a chance in a relationship or a work opportunity. There are also moral regrets—not doing the right thing—and connection regrets, neglecting or breaking relationships.

As I reflect on my caseload, I see these themes again and again. One patient, now in her 80s, frequently brings up the suicide of her brother, although she did everything she could to keep him alive. And because we have revisited this story, I worry that I have nothing new to add. Another client regrets that she didn’t spend more time with her best friend, who died a long, agonizing death from Alzheimer’s.

I have often wondered why regret is so tenacious. And, more practically and importantly, what can we do to ease the pain? A gifted Zen Master that I study with, Roshi Jon Joseph, recently wrote a blog post that inspired me. In this evocative essay he talks about a telephone booth outside of Otsuchi, Japan that is called the “Wind Phone.” It is not connected to any telephone lines. It was created after an earthquake in 2011 which killed ten percent of the population. Thousands of people have used it to communicate with a loved one who has died.

I kept thinking about the potential that the white phone booth held. Obviously, I couldn’t go to Japan with my patient. However, I had spent years in graduate school studying and writing about cross-cultural and indigenous forms of healing for a major research study on human potential. Because of this background, I wasn’t bound by thinking in the traditional Western psychological tradition of Freudian theory or cognitive behavioral therapy.

One day, my patient told me that she needed to talk about her friend “Mary.” She hadn’t been sleeping again and she was having nightmares. Therapy wasn’t helping: Was it time for medication?

“Let’s try one more thing” I suggested, and told her about the Wind Phone, (my equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, bringing in some needed humor here). We imagined that a Wind Phone was in my office. She mimed picking up the phone and words rushed out: She had been haunted by what she didn’t say; she loved Mary so much; she still talks to her in her mind, especially at night. She misses her terribly. She went on and on with things that had been unsaid and unspoken. At the end of the conversation, we were both in tears. That was months ago.

I asked her recently how she was feeling about Mary’s death. “I don’t know what it was about the Wind Phone,” she shrugged, “but I feel like I really connected with her, that we actually spoke, and that awful ache is resolved.” She paused. “Thanks for thinking outside the usual phone booth,” she joked.

We can never say what makes something healing, but I have tried the idea of the phone booth with a number of people and have tried it myself, working with unresolved issues around my mother’s recent death and my significant regrets. In fact, it turns out that “wind phones” have been constructed all over the world. There is something in this metaphor that speaks deeply to people no matter what their cultural heritage might be.

Guiding Principles for Processing Regret

As I work with people to help process regret I have been guided by 3 principles:

1. Acknowledge it. Don’t suppress what happened.
2. Practice self-compassion. We all are imperfect and have regrets. As one Zen master quipped, “Life is one mistake after another.”
3. Create a cognitive reframe. We can learn from our mistakes, and as the meditation teachers tell us, we can always start again.

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I don’t believe that regret is forever. More importantly, I think that healing is always possible, but rarely simple.