In this process, you grieve the loss of what you perceive would have been. You see yourself as having lost something, or the idea of something that is profoundly meaningful to you, and the experience is every bit as real as suffering after any kind of traumatic event.
It is a common experience to look back at aspects of your life with regret, but for most people it isn't the only motivation for fantasizing about the past. Instead, many psychologists believe that almost everything you do is meant to be self-preserving, even if it turns out to be self-destructive instead. During challenging times in your past, you undertook certain actions and beliefs in an effort to manage or avoid difficult situations and uncomfortable experiences. When you fantasize about things coming out differently than they have, you are attempting to transform the experience, albeit briefly – to allow yourself a respite from regret and other painful reminders of past “mistakes.” This process lets you briefly have the outcome you want.
Unfortunately, fantasy allows only a brief respite. You made the choices you made and have become the person you are. In the present, reality is reality, loss is loss, and nothing can be shifted by renegotiating your actions in the past. Retroactive bargaining is a band-aid that can make you feel temporarily better, but can leave you feeling worse when you come back to now and are painfully reminded yet again how things actually turned out.
That said, retroactive bargaining yields important information. Noticing a particular time or area of your life that you fixate on may indicate that there is loss in your life that you have not allowed yourself to adequately grieve. The event could even have happened 20 years ago or longer, but at the time you weren't able to give it the attention it needed to heal.
Ultimately, instead of engaging in retroactive bargaining, work on forgiving yourself for the decisions and actions in your past that you wish you could have changed. Yes, hindsight can illuminate how differently you could have handled something. But what gets lost, is context. As you engage in retroactive bargaining, you are doing it with all the knowledge you have now without taking into account what you knew and who you were at the time. There were reasons and forces and more factors than you could possibly have been aware of that compelled your choices and the outcome. (If only I paid attention to my gut feeling and not allowed her to stay the night)
If you find yourself in the cycle of regret, replaying a scene in your head and sculpting a different outcome, try to acknowledge that there are reasons you did what you did at the time. Understand that your past self didn’t have the wealth of knowledge or perspective your current self does. Putting your past in context and acknowledging that there were more forces at play than you may have considered at the time can help you feel more accepting of the person you are now.
Unfortunately, fantasy allows only a brief respite. You made the choices you made and have become the person you are. In the present, reality is reality, loss is loss, and nothing can be shifted by renegotiating your actions in the past. Retroactive bargaining is a band-aid that can make you feel temporarily better, but can leave you feeling worse when you come back to now and are painfully reminded yet again how things actually turned out.
That said, retroactive bargaining yields important information. Noticing a particular time or area of your life that you fixate on may indicate that there is loss in your life that you have not allowed yourself to adequately grieve. The event could even have happened 20 years ago or longer, but at the time you weren't able to give it the attention it needed to heal.
Ultimately, instead of engaging in retroactive bargaining, work on forgiving yourself for the decisions and actions in your past that you wish you could have changed. Yes, hindsight can illuminate how differently you could have handled something. But what gets lost, is context. As you engage in retroactive bargaining, you are doing it with all the knowledge you have now without taking into account what you knew and who you were at the time. There were reasons and forces and more factors than you could possibly have been aware of that compelled your choices and the outcome. (If only I paid attention to my gut feeling and not allowed her to stay the night)
If you find yourself in the cycle of regret, replaying a scene in your head and sculpting a different outcome, try to acknowledge that there are reasons you did what you did at the time. Understand that your past self didn’t have the wealth of knowledge or perspective your current self does. Putting your past in context and acknowledging that there were more forces at play than you may have considered at the time can help you feel more accepting of the person you are now.
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