How to Talk to People - How to Start Over: Forgive Ourselves for What We Can’t Change

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

When we regret our past, it can feel like we’re incapable of changing our future. But it may be our past “mistakes” that help us realize there is room to evolve.  In the finale episode of How to Start Over, we explore how regret can be a catalyst of change, what holds us back from self-forgiveness, and how to reconcile our past mistakes—and move forward for good. Conversations with Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School, and forgiveness expert Everett Worthington help us identify whether regret hinders our growth or serves as a catalyst of change. This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.  Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), JADED (“Blue Steel”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), and Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. we jump into our finale episode in this series, a note. Our conversation contains graphic discussions of violence, including assault, discussion of PTSD, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at the Atlantic. This is How to Start Over. Today, we talk about the origins of regret, what it means, how to get over it, and how we can maybe even learn something from it.

We're going to talk about how regrets can actually be a catalyst of change, rather than the thing that holds us back. I wanted to better understand why we can learn to live with certain choices, but others come back to haunt us. We'll hear from two experts about how to start over in life by learning from our past decisions. And when regret just won't release its grip, how we can forgive ourselves and move on. So one thing I regret is not majoring in journalism in college. So when I went to college, I was actually very interested in journalism. I was editor of my high school paper. Anyway, so I didn't major in journalism.

And I graduated and I graduated into the recession. I really realized I really wanted to give journalism a shot right as I was graduating college. So I did. I went to journalism grad school and I spent like two adjournism. years, basically learning stuff I could have learned in college in grad school. I do know of people who went to my same college and majored in journalism and they're now slightly further along in their careers. First of all, there is like silver linings to that regret. So in grad school is where I

have my partner, who I'm still with. I sometimes feel like I'm attributing too much to this, this one decision that I made in college. For me, some of those regrets are more I prioritized my career at every point. And when I had romantic partners or personal relationships that could have progressed in a certain direction, I always went in favor of a new opportunity or living somewhere else. And even the person who spontaneously kind of takes every opportunity as it comes, it's interesting how I even find myself regretting not taking the more mundane path. I have no regrets in the sense that anytime opportunity kind of knocked at my door, I would like leave everything behind, but also leaving everything behind over and over again, even if you become

who you kind of wanted to be, you still entertain the prospect of the life that you could have lived. And I think that's just such a universal feeling. I did solve the problem of not ever having to choose between a relationship and career by getting dumped by everyone that I ever dated. Oh, my God. Those never, never came up for me. I was like, I'm going to go follow my career. And they were like, you should do that. Do you need a ride to the airport?

An important thing to remember with psychologists think about. Regret is, in a way, an emotion that is a time machine. Regret is something about the past that we feel in the present that is there to guide our future. That's the function of that emotion. That's why it evolved. Shai Davidae is an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School. His studies of regret helped me understand which regrets seem to go away quickly versus which ones can live on in our minds for years. And what you can do if you find yourself feeling regret over your past choices.

There's two types of regrets. Sometimes we regret the things we have done, the things we have said. And other times we regret the things we have failed to do or failed to have said. So you can regret saying something offensive or you may regret not saying something positive, right? The most enduring regrets that people have are those regrets of inaction. These two types of regrets lead to different kinds of emotions. When people have these regrets of action, when they regret doing something, they're more likely to feel the heart's emotions, anxiety and guilt. And those emotions are a call to action.

They lead us to do something. Whereas the other kind of regrets of inaction, when we regret not doing something, well, we feel depressed or we feel sad. But that doesn't really give us that prompt to step up and do and change the situation. Huh. Okay. Interesting. In one of your studies, you looked at the difference between the ideal self and the ought self.

Can you kind of define what those things mean? Think about all of your goals, all your aspirations. And that is your ideal self. Now, that ideal self can change for time. but we all have some sense of what are our goals what is the kind of ideal person that I could be but we also have our ought self right that's the collection of all of the things we feel like we should be doing the norms we should be following the rules we should be abiding by so we have these tensions right we have the person that I feel that I would like to be or that I could be and then we have the person that I feel like that I ought to be, that my should self. Discrepancies from those two kind of selves lead to feelings of regret. So let's say my ideal self is that I'm on TV every night. Everyone in America knows my name and I'm like a household name journalist, right? Right.

And then my ought self is like, I should really call my mom more like I really don't call her very often because I get busy. I feel a little bit bad that I put it on the back burner so much. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Right. Your ideal self, the things that people tend to regret, missed educational opportunities. I could have gone to school and I didn't. Or I could have followed my passion at school, but I took the safer route. It could be missed traveling opportunities.

Some people mention this special someone that they could have married or they could have bonded with and they did it. And then your odds off, like you said, it's they. We tend to be family-related, so I should call my mom more often, and probably both of us, when we end this conversation, we should. But it's also things that are a bit of a bigger nature, so not having gone to visit the dying relative before they passed away in my surveys, drug addiction in the past. It could be irresponsible financial behavior. When we think about regret, we have to think in the short term and the long term. In the short term, the art regrets, they are the ones that lead to more intense regret. So if I feel like I should have stepped up and said something in a meeting when someone said something offensive and I didn't, I feel that that's a strong regret. But what typically happens with these strong regrets is,

is because they feel so intense, we end up dealing with them quite quickly. And dealing with them, what I mean is we either take it as a learning opportunity and say, well, next time when I'm in that kind of meeting, I'll step up. It could be minimizing. I didn't say anything because it wasn't such a big deal. It's not an optimal way of solving this, but in our minds, sometimes we solve it that way. It could be so difficult that we seek help from friends, from therapy, whereas our ideal regrets, because they are not as strongly felt in the beginning, we just kind of put them on the back burner. They simmer and they simmer and they simmer.

And then after 20 years, we're still there. Wow. Okay. So knowing this, so knowing that you kind of tend to deal with these ought regrets, more quickly when they come up, but you kind of let those ideal regrets simmer. Should we just always be doing whatever our biggest, grandest dream is? It becomes hard to kind of differentiate, like, where you should draw the line as far as, like, I'll regret this later if I don't, you know, take action.

The first point is that we need to remember. And this is something that it's almost so obvious. And yet, because it's obvious, we forget it. Regret is a natural emotion that everyone experiences. just knowing that helps me deal with my regrets in a way that's more healthy. Because it's not something about me. It's not something about my mentality being wrong. It's that I am going to experience regret.

So your question is like, should I just go and follow my dreams? Well, part of me wants to say yes. But another part of me wants to say for other ways to deal with your regret. So for example, if you wake up and you feel, oh, I just want to be on TV every day. I want to be famous. But in one way is, okay, I'm going to go and follow that dream. But another way is asking yourself, okay, so what have I learned from this regret? What am I regretting that I didn't do in the past?

What can I learn from that moving forward? So whenever the opportunity arises, a big opportunity or a small opportunity, I'll be there to accept it and embrace it. Hmm. Without, you know, saying Sionar to Becca and like shutting off the mic and running off to go beg at HBO Max or something, instead to just try to do something small that can help move this ideal self closer to reality. Right. Exactly. So, for example, my partner, she feels like she hasn't traveled enough. And she's planning to travel more in the future. But right now, we have, you know, a six-year-old and a nine-month-old, that makes traveling harder. There's two things that she could do. She could pack up her bags and go traveling. The way we both deal with that regret is asking herself, well, how can we incorporate more adventure in our life that doesn't require packing up and leaving? For example, you regret

that 15 years ago someone said, hey, let's, you know, let's be spontaneous and fly somewhere. You're like, no, I don't know if that's responsible. Well, what if someone now comes up to you and says, let's be spontaneous over the weekend and drive somewhere? Well, that's more feasible. But if we remember, okay, that is the regret that I had. Well, I can't change what I did, but I can change how I'll react in the future. An important thing to remember with psychologists think about is that regret is in a way,

an emotion that is a time machine. Regret is something about the past that we feel in the present that is there to guide our future. That's the function of that emotion. That's why it evolved. It's, oh, I don't feel good now about what happened. How do I make sure it doesn't happen again? So when we stop thinking about regret as a negative and dysfunctional emotion, and we start thinking about it as a positive,

a light uncomfortable, but very functional emotion helps starting to do something with it. So if someone passed away, we just can't reach out anymore. But that doesn't mean all is lost. Because first of all, we can now, feeling that regret and feeling the intensity of it, we can now take stock of everyone else who we care deeply about, that is still around. And how do we make sure that that doesn't happen with them? Hmm. Okay.

So the key is not to eliminate regret. It's to process your regrets in a healthy way. Not to come off as polyanish. Regret is great. You know, an example that keeps coming up is people regretting, having married, an abusive partner. That and having stayed with him for so long. They say, I shouldn't have been there. That's a big ought regret.

But what they also say, but I feel okay about it, because because of them, I have my beautiful children. Right. So they are dealing with their regrets by seeing the silver lining. I'm not here to judge and say, your regret is not real. But rather, the content of your regret is different, but the process is the same. and we can learn from the process. This ascent isn't for everyone.

You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. donate at lovescarborough.ca. Ready to take on Canada's worst invasive plant?

The call for proposals for the invasive Fragmites Control Fund is open. These funds support collaborative projects led by municipalities, conservation authorities, indigenous communities, and nonprofits that focus on Fragmites mapping, monitoring, planning, control, and innovation. Applications must be submitted electronically by January 23, 2026 at 1159 p.m. For more information, and to apply, visit our website. But what happens if we just can't get past our regrets? We keep going over and over something in our heads,

but there's no particular change we can make. Maybe it's too late, the moment is past, and there's nothing you can do about it. This is where self-forgiveness might come into play. We might just have to accept the things we cannot change. In thinking about self-forgiveness, I was reminded of something I came across a long time ago while researching forgiveness in general.

It's called the REACH method. I want to get some emotional self-forgiveness. So, you know, I apply this five-step reach, a forgiveness model. It's a system that can help you forgive others, but it could also be applied to yourself, too. Here's what the reach acronym stands for. R stands for recall the event. E stands for empathize with the other person,

in this case, yourself. A stands for altruistic gift. Give yourself the gift of forgiveness, even if you don't feel like you necessarily deserve it. C stands for commit to forgiveness. And H stands for hold on. Remind yourself that you did in fact forgive yourself and that you're capable of forgiving. Part of wisdom really is being able to hold things that are in tension at the same time

and have perspective enough to make a decision of which one is most important right now. So I'm not negating that I'm having negative feelings. What I'm trying to do is to shift the balance and how much importance I'm going to give the negative feelings versus a more generous, compassionate approach to myself. This is Dr. Everett Worthington, a clinical psychologist and an expert on forgiveness. Ev was a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University for nearly four decades, retiring in 2017. Ev and his students actually created the Reach Forgiveness Method and other resources to help people forgive themselves. I first interviewed him for a piece in 2015.

And though he didn't remember me, his story was one I'll never forget. I met you back in 2015. You mentioned that you had your own experience, a very intense and actually trying to. tragic experience from your, from your life where you ended up having to forgive yourself for something. I was wondering if you would be comfortable talking about that story today and about how you actually went through the process of forgiving yourself. What happened was in the 1996, my mother was murdered. It was a very brutal murder.

It was a home invasion. Apparently a young man thinking no one was home, broke into her house and thinking, you know, she wasn't. there, but she woke up and he had a crowbar and ended up bludgeoning her to death. You know, I was able to forgive the young man for doing that, but my brother was the one who discovered my mother's body. So he was really traumatized, and I think he took a kind of emotional suppression response to that. He said, you know, I am still just having a terrible time with this. I just have these, you know, intrusive thoughts, these images that come back of seeing her body there and, you know, and I get so depressed and anxious about this. And I, you know,

I said, well, Mike, you know, this sounds like a post-traumatic stress problem. I think if I were you, I would try to get some kind of counseling for this. You know, when I said, Mike, I'd get some counseling if I were you. He, you know, says, I'm not going to any shrink. I said, well, whatever. And I didn't bring it up again. well of course within three months it turned out Mike committed suicide he was so upset with the depression and couldn't get past this PTSD and so I felt really a lot of self-condemnation because I could easily look at myself and regret that I did not respond the way that I knew I could respond the

The Oak Ridge police who found Mike's body, you know, found that he had left a suicide note. What he said is he said, you know, this is going to be a time of chaos, I'm sure. And I know, you know, that I have left our finances in really a state of disarray. I know you'll keep your head in the midst of all this. I wonder if you would take care of our finances and straighten them out. All of a sudden, it was like, oh, I have something that I can do that helped me really move on and finish dealing with the self-forgiveness. Wow. And so I worked through that model and had trouble more with the responsibility into things.

things. You know, how do I make this right? I can't, I mean, Mike's dead. I've confessed this to God. You know, I feel that God's forgiven me for my, you know, failures. But, but how do I make this right with interpersonally? A lot of your work does deal with spirituality and you mentioned God a couple times. I'm wondering for people who aren't religious, I think it can be harder to move through some of these steps because you don't you don't have like a interlocutor and I'm wondering what advice you might have for people who aren't religious for working through some of these same steps. The only one of those steps that really that makes any difference on is that first one about you know making things right as much as you're able with what you hold to be sacred.

And we call these religious spirituality. but then there's a kind of a nature spirituality where people feel like I've gotten out of sorts with nature. Or there's a kind of humanistic spirituality where they feel like, well, I've done a crime against humanity. I have disappointed my view of what humans ought to be. And then for some people, there's just a sense of transcendence that comes with that feeling of awe. We feel like, well, there's just things that are just bigger than I am. You know, I've got to have some perspective on things here because I'm not at the center of the universe. So I think we are spiritual people.

We're not always religious. And whatever people source of spirituality is, I think they can kind of try to make this right as much as possible. For those people, that's not a very important part. of their life, then that's not really going to cause many problems either if they bypass that step and look at responsibility to, you know, people and also to themselves psychologically. So something that I'm often upset with myself about is yelling at my partner. I think a lot of people, maybe they don't yell at their partner, but they might yell at their kids or, you know, they might yell at someone who they love and don't think they should have

blown up at that they did because we're all stressed out in human. How would you use the reach steps to actually forgive yourself for doing something like that? Suppose now that I've yelled at my kid and I feel really bad about this and I've gone through those steps to take responsible action. You know, I've said, well, God, forgive me for doing this. Whatever I feel is sacred. And then I try to make this right with my kid. You know, I apologize. I try to make a good confession to the kid about why I did the things that I did, not making excuses, but, you know, helping the kid know that, you know, I think that I did something that I am very sorry that I did, and I want to make things right.

And then I kind of search my own heart and realize I do lose my temper way too often. But now, once I've done that, I want to get. some emotional self-forgiveness. So, you know, I apply this five-step reach a forgiveness model where R is recall the hurt, recall it so that I empathize with the person who did the hurt. Well, that would be empathizing with myself. But the way that I can do that is to say, well, what if somebody else had done this? Could I empathize with them? And if I'm willing to see things from a different perspective for somebody else, can't I also see things from my perspective too?

And then A is to give an altruistic gift of forgiveness. So an altruistic gift is an unselfish gift, a gift that the person doesn't deserve. So if I've done something wrong, I don't deserve to be let off the hook for this or to forgive myself, but I can give myself a gift of that self-forgiveness. Then C is commit to the forgiveness of myself that I have experienced.

That is to do something, maybe write it down. I forgave myself for this. On June 8th, 2022, you know, today was the magic day. And then the reason that I do that is so that I can age, hold on to that self-forgiveness. Whenever I get down on myself, it gets late at night, and I start ruminating about this again. I go, no, no, no, I did forgive myself for this. Hmm. I feel like that H is where I really fall apart. You know, there's like this common prompt in therapy to just feel your feelings.

And I'm wondering kind of whether this suggests that forgiveness of others or ourselves almost suggests that you shouldn't always be feeling your feelings because you're trying to remind yourself that you're being forgiving, that like you're actually, you know, you've committed to this forgiveness mindset. Yeah, I would say it's more a recognition that all of my experiences are very common. complex and that I often have very mixed feelings. Part of wisdom really is being able to hold things that are in tension at the same time and have perspective enough to make a decision of which one is most important right now.

So I'm not negating that I'm having negative feelings, but what I'm trying to do is to shift. the balance and how much importance I'm going to give the negative feelings versus a more generous, compassionate approach to myself. I don't know if this is like common in Russia or like common among all immigrant parents, but they're like a foolish person like learns from their own mistakes. A smart person learns from the mistakes of others. So basically being like, no, actually like you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

and you're going to learn from them and that doesn't make you stupid has been like a big breakthrough for me. Yeah. But according to our experts, regret is normal and you shouldn't feel bad about having regret and you should figure out what you can learn from your regrets. Have you learned anything from your regrets? I think everything that has happened to me until this point was meant to happen this way. And I don't think that there's another, there's no other path I could have taken, you know? Like, I wanted the things I wanted at the times that I wanted them and I made decisions accordingly. And from that point, I got to where I am and that's where I'll go, you know. I'm trying to get there.

It took a long time and a lot of struggle to get to that point. And I think it's to accept that the terrible things were also, quote unquote, meant to happen to you. Yeah. And I think, like, those terrible things can be the source of a lot of regret. if you had a role to play in them? Like, I think... Yes. I was going to say I also definitely regret to your first question.

There are so many things I've said that I regret and things that I said to people when I was not in the best state of mind. I think the whole concept of forgiving yourself for doing those things can be really hard in practice because it almost feels like hard to reconcile that you were in the real. wrong, but you deserve to feel okay about that. Yeah, or just like, hey, everyone says the wrong thing sometimes and like everyone loses their cool. I mean, I regret yelling at my boyfriend about the floss, as I said in the previous episode. I regret that a lot. That was like so out of line and just like I was just in a really exhausted, like tired, crazy place. There's something too just being like, look, I apologize. Like that was that was. That was. That was.

insane. I'm sorry. When he says it's okay, also being like, it's okay to yourself, you know, because that can sometimes be the hardest part, I think. If you or anyone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Helpline at 800273-8255. Thanks for listening to the show. This series was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan, editing by A.C. Valdez, Claudine Bade, Adrian LaFrance, and Andrea Valdez. Fact check by Anna Alvarado and engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to the Atlantic's art, product, audience, and experimental storytelling teams for their help on all things, how to start over.