By Ox Drover
“The Road Not Taken” is always out there beckoning to us. I should, I could ”¦ Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do that? Regrets!
Having been involved with a psychopath, and reeling from the devastation in the wake of the relationship, leads us to ask ourselves what might have happened if we had made other choices.
I question myself—if I had chosen differently, would the relationship have been a success? If I had dated John or Frank instead of the psychopath, would I now be happily married in a solid relationship? If I had just done things differently, like I started to, would it have been better? If I had just gotten out of the relationship sooner, or later, would I now be better off?
With our regrets, we beat ourselves up for being so stupid to put up with the abuse. We saw the red flags of suspicion early on, felt the sting and pain of his words, his disrespect, yet, now we regret not paying attention to ourselves back then. How much better our lives would have been if we had only listened to our own intuition, to the things we really knew, really saw, but brushed aside, thought we could fix.
We searched for the words, the perfect words, to explain to him how he was hurting us. Why couldn’t we find those perfect words, the ones we were so sure would make him treat us better?
Regret is normal
Regret in the past choices we have made in life: Go to work and get married, or go to college and get an education. Have children, or wait. According to those who study regrets, having regrets as we mature is a normal, natural and a universal human emotion. Neal Roese, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Illinois says, “Regret is a very complicated emotion that involves all these things (pain and fear) coming together—it’s raw feeling plus all the complicated imaginings of future possibility.”
Another psychology professor, Carsten Wrosch, Ph. D., at Concordia University in Montreal, has linked regrets to many physical and social problems, which include sleeping problems, headaches, migraines, panic disorder and even skin conditions.
Henry David Thoreau said, “To regret deeply is to live afresh.”
Letting go
If we continually dwell on our past mistakes and missed opportunities, this consumes our ability to live and enjoy the present. Letting go of regrets though, is not a one-time event; it is a process of disentangling ourselves from them.
One of the ways suggested to start to let go of our regrets over past decisions is to consider it final. I find that when I have a decision to make, once I finally decide that decision is final, anxiety about making that decision seems to go away. Looking at that decision later, whether it turned out to be good or bad, I am more able to accept it.
People who study regrets and decision making also note that if we can “fix” a past mistake or correct it, our regrets tend to hang on longer and be stronger, but if we accept the fact that we made a bad decision that can’t be fixed, we tend to let go of it more easily.
Having regrets for past decisions, and especially regrets related to our relationship with the psychopath(s) in our lives, is normal and natural. As long as we hang on to those regrets and try to second guess ourselves, though, it impedes our healing and moving on.
Letting go of those regrets, the self-recrimination for our part in the relationship, for not finding the perfect solution, for not leaving sooner, or any of a thousand other choices we made, will be an ongoing process. But it will lead us, if we let it, to using those choices to make a better life for ourselves now and in the future.
JAH, I’m with you on the macho strong guy turn-off. Also the guy who’s coming on. Yuck.
Perseph, How does a psychopath say F–k you?
answer: trust me.
Kim,
Thanks – I’ll file that one away for future reference…
Trust me.
I don’t think my P ever said that to me, but when I was 15 I dated a 21 yearold guy who said that to me. He screwed me and screwed me over within a week. Must’ve been a P.
I didn’t know about P’s then, but I did learn that those words mean RUN.
Hi Skylar – Yes…Those are words I live by now and thanks for
the idea. I’m going to put that up on my fridge. We’ve paid dearly for the knowledge we’ve gained about this spectrum
disorder. Some of us don’t even need reminders depending on how far along the spectrum our abusers happened to be.
What being aware does underscore is the need to self-protect
which is something many of us were NOT taught by our primary caregivers. In many instances they were teaching us
that crazy making behavior was normal and that making note
of it or trying to stop it made US crazy. Even worse was the
conveyance of the message that what we were witnessing or
experiencing of this craziness wasn’t happening.
I call it the classic MIND F$%&K. As children, depending on our developmental level and awareness of what we should own and what our abusers did that made it impossible to
disown their dysfunction, really set us up to be attracted to the wrong things in others as adults. We may have incorporated their dysfunction on a subconscious level that
made repetition compulsion unavoidable until we finally saw
the writing on the wall.
Many of us coming out of that are willing to lay our SELVES
on the line to prove that we can “fix it” when it shows up in our
significant others. It’s one of the hallmarks of codependency.
We hang in there, having invested ourselves so deeply with
those all important people, that we just can’t let go. That’s
precisely why we have to and then focus on ourselves.
Kathleen – What you said about the people around you being deep in their own dramas anyway regardless of attempts you made to help them, making it beyond your ability to fix is a sad and very accurate observation. It’s like trying to save someone in deep water who is drowning. You may be a strong swimmer and know that if you can reach them in time,
you could save them. The scary part is the realization that
when you finally get close enough to really help them, they not only don’t want it, they will pull you under with them if you
let them grab hold of you firmly. None of us has any duty or
moral obligation to take on anyone elses “stuff” and no amount of guilt or regret can change someone. You do the best you can and then let go and let God do the rest.
Hi OxDrover – What you said about forgiveness is true. I was praying last night for the ability to forgive those who have harmed me. I don’t want what they’ve done to define who I am in any way other than through a frame of awareness.
Holding on to grief and heartache does bring bitterness.
Becoming embittered would only undo the hard work I’ve done to heal already. I don’t want to make any further investment of myself, time or energy in what is going to hold me back. They are who they are. I am using what they’ve
brought to grow more deeply in self understanding.
Persephone7 – Thank you for your kind comment. I love your
screen name. I don’t know how many of you here are familiar with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. All of us here,
whether male of female, have been Persephone in our relationships with sociopathic significant others. Pluto, Lord
of the UnderWorld, desired Persephone, daughter of Demeter.
Pluto, represents death, decay and all those unconscious, hidden energies in every human being that remind us that
everything is continually changing and being reborn into something else. He is unavoidable in this life. Naturally Demeter wouldn’t have chosen him as mate for her beautiful virgin daughter. So he just abducted her to his underworld realm.
What Persephone really represents is a loss of innocence and
purity. At some point each one of us is abducted into the underworld realm by someone who “forces us” to take a look at the underbelly of things and other people. We may not want to go there, but ultimately knowing about unconscious motives, subtexts, hidden agendas and the like is to our best
benefit. Each one of us here is working on understanding that
which is hidden in others and ourselves, so that we can avoid being abducted and used by others who don’t have our best interests in mind.
keensight, the french writer, Anais Nin, wrote this great analogy. she said,”If you were on a raft, at sea, trying to save a drowning person,-You are trying to pull him onto the raft, but then you realise he is trying to pull you into the water. At some point, for your OWN survival, you have to let go of that hand, and let him drown. Or he will pull you in, and then you will both drown.”
So true, and this is what ps do to us all the time. At some point, we have to let go, and swim for the shore, save our own life.Love, Gem.XX
Ummm… wait, couldn’t we knife the P while he is drowning and then when his body floats use it to keep ourselves floating too?
🙂
That reminds me of the Bon Jovie song, what is it it. I’ll be there for You? Anybody remember?
Kim, I looked up the song and the lyrics are the same things the fricken P said to me when I left him. Icky.
I’d live and I’d die for you
Steal the sun from the sky for you
Words can’t say what a love can do
I’ll be there for you
he said something to that effect about the sun and moon and dying for me. argh.
Sky…what a little happyface you are…! Somehow, I don’t think their bodies
would even float…bona fide dead weight like a two-ton anchor…
I’m off to watch the World Series (OMG, more men – I do like Derek Jeter, though…) Keensight, that’s why I chose Persephone – have always related
to her story, probably why I love pomegranates as well and you told the story and interpreted it so beautifully, thank you. I’ve also related to the story of ‘The Red Shoes’ where the young girl puts on the beautiful red shoes but they’re evil and she must dance, dance, dance until she must cut her feet off to be able to be able to stop the madness – we’ve all been involved in this dance.
Luckily, our feet can regenerate…
Great post! I think one thing we want to do is lay blame- how did this life of mine become such a mess. Well obviously it must be someone else’s fault. I like to do it as much as anybody I guess. But one thing we forget is that at one time we loved or professed to love or illusioned that we were in love perhaps with another person. Well I am not denying the fact that the hurt and damage the other person has done isn’t real or continuing, but when you are laying face down in a hospital bed with bandages about you- you can either get up to live again, or develop bedsores. Can you realize that your love was not a mistake even if the other person turned out to be fake? Sorry I borrowed that line from Simply Red in a song called Fake. I find music very healing. I also have been enjoying a song by Michael McDermott that has a good line which says, “she had love in her eyes, but murder on her lips”. I have a few Bon Jovi songs on my MP3 too. Keep the Faith.