The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(42)

In a sense, self-compassion delivers the benefits of self-esteem without its drawbacks. It can insulate us from the debilitating consequences of self-criticism, while short-circuiting self-esteem’s need to feel good through vanity and comparison.

Its powers are especially evident with regret. In 2016, psychologists Jia Wei Zhang, now at the University of Memphis, and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley, explored the effect that self-compassion has in helping people overcome and learn from their regrets. The researchers recruited several hundred participants and asked each of them to list their biggest regret.

Then they randomly divided participants into three groups. One group wrote a letter to themselves about their regret “from a compassionate and understanding perspective.” The second group wrote a letter to themselves about the regret “from a perspective of validating your positive (rather than negative) qualities.” The third group, which served as the control, wrote about a hobby they enjoyed.

The people who addressed their regret with self-compassion were more likely to change their behavior than those who approached their regret with self-esteem. Even this modest writing intervention led people to plan ways to avoid the behavior in the future—regardless of whether the regret involved action or inaction. “Self-compassion appears to orient people to embrace their regret,” Zhang and Chen write, “and this willingness to remain in contact with their regret may afford people the opportunity to discover avenues for personal improvement.”[26]

For a regret like Cheryl’s, self-compassion doesn’t mean exonerating herself for not making more of an effort to maintain her friendship. It means treating herself with the same graciousness she’d treat someone else who regretted a splintered friendship. It means “remaining in contact” with the regret, as Zhang and Chen put it, but not making the dissolved friendship the defining feature of her character. And it means moving past language like “I really screwed up,” which Cheryl told me several times, and instead recognizing how normal, universal, and human her regret is.

A self-compassionate approach does not foster complacency, as some might fear.[27] While self-flagellation seems motivating—especially to Americans, whose mental models of motivation often begin with howling, red-faced, vein-popping football coaches—it often produces helplessness. Self-compassion, by contrast, prompts people to confront their difficulties head-on and take responsibility for them, researchers have found. As Neff writes, “Far from being an excuse for self-indulgence, therefore, self-compassion pushes us forward—and for the right reasons.”[28]

So, drawing on the science of self-compassion, the second step in transforming our regrets is to ask ourselves three questions:

         If a friend or relative came to you with the same regret as yours, would you treat that person with kindness or contempt? If your answer is kindness, use that approach on yourself. If your answer is contempt, try a different answer.





         Is this type of regret something that other people might have endured, or are you the only person ever to have experienced it? If you believe your stumble is part of our common humanity, reflect on that belief, as it’s almost always true. If you believe the world has it out for you alone, please reread Chapters 7–10.



     Does this regret represent an unpleasant moment in your life, or does it define your life? Again, if you believe it’s worth being aware of the regret but not overidentifying with it, you’re on your way. If you believe this regret fully constitutes who you are, ask someone else what they think.





These three questions, which form the heart of self-compassion, bring us to the last step of the process.





STEP 3. SELF-DISTANCING: ANALYZE AND STRATEGIZE


On the surface at least, Julius Caesar and Elmo make an unlikely pair. One was a Roman statesman, general, and historian who was immortalized in a Shakespeare play and who lived more than two thousand years ago. The other is a slightly manic Muppet with mangy red fur and an orange nose, whose exact citizenship is unclear but whose last forwarding address was Sesame Street.

Yet both of these figures are expert practitioners of the same rhetorical maneuver: “illeism,” a fancy word for talking about oneself in the third person. When Julius Caesar describes his Gallic Wars exploits in his book Commentarii de Bello Gallico, he never uses “I” or other first-person pronouns. Instead, he crafts sentences like, “Caesar learned through spies that the mountain was in possession of his own men.” Likewise, when Elmo explains his commitment to the life of the mind, he, too, disdains the first person. He favors constructions like “Elmo loves to learn!”

Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesn’t bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.”

When we’re beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite direction—not to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera.