Conscience and Remorse
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
"Good-bye," I
said to my conscience —
"Good-bye for aye and aye,"
And
I put her hands off harshly,
And turned my face away;
And
conscience smitten sorely
Returned not from that day.
But a time came when my
spirit
Grew weary of its pace;
And I cried: "Come back, my
conscience;
I long to see thy face."
But conscience cried:
"I cannot;
Remorse sits in my place."
From Lyrics of Lowly Life (1913)
In Dunbar's poem, anthropomorphous is used to give an inanimate object or idea the behavior of a human. As Dunbar gives conscience and remorse human behaviors, the poem emphasizes the after-effect of when we forcibly liberate our conscience's opinions.
When people choose to ignore their conscience (believing it's the right thing to do), they soon realize that remorse will “take its place.”
Do you understand the difference between regret and remorse? If you, like me, deal with these emotions on a regular basis, you may find the difference to be life-changing.
Margalis Fjelstad Ph.D., LMFT in Psychology Today explains …
“Regret has to do with wishing you hadn’t taken a particular action. You may regret an action because it hurt someone else, but you may also regret it because it hurt you, it cost you something emotionally or financially, or led to a punishment or undesirable result …
“Remorse involves admitting one’s own mistakes and taking responsibility for one's actions. It creates a sense of guilt and sorrow for hurting someone else and leads to confession and true apology. It also moves the remorseful person to avoid doing the hurtful action again. Regret leads a person to avoid punishment in the future, while remorse leads to avoiding hurtful actions towards others in the future.”
(Margalis Fjelstad. “Regret vs. Remorse.” Psychology Today. July 01, 2015.)
At age 70, I face that fact that I am living a life involving remorse. I have a sense of guilt for my many wrongdoings, and whenever possible, I try to make amends and vow to avoid making the same mistakes again.
I do not live a life of regret because I accept my past and move on. I often tell others it is important to “keep on keeping on” – a phrase attributed to folksinger Len Chandler in his song “Keep on Keepin’ On” and later used in a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Freedom doesn't come on a silver platter. With every great movement toward freedom there will inevitably be trials. Somebody will have to have the courage to sacrifice. You don't get to the Promised Land without going through the Wilderness. You don't get there without crossing over hills and mountains, but if you keep on keeping on, you can't help but reach it. We won't all see it, but it's coming and it's because God is for it.”
(Martin Luther King, Jr. Fisk University March 22, 1956. Montgomery, Alabama.)
I do not regret my life. I have a loving family and wonderful friends who treat me well. However, as I look back on my life – and I do a lot of that lately – I sometimes dwell on the wrongs I have committed. In doing so, I feel disempowered as I realize there is nothing I can do to rectify my sins. My contrition often overwhelms me and threatens to stifle joy in my life.
During these times when regret rears its head, I have felt anxiety, sadness, and even deep depression. Self-flagellation for past sins has made me feel stuck and unable to move forward. I absolutely understand this regret can be all-consuming. It can be very damaging to my mental health, and it can even destroy my life.
During these awful times of feeling worthless, I must realize that remorse can provide insight to a better future. I must accept my past, learn from it, and move on. It helps to understand that I am not complete, but rather a work in progress.
A study performed at Cornell University in 2018 by Thomas Gilovich and Shai Davidai found our most enduring regrets stem from the discrepancies between our actual selves, our “ought” selves, and our ideal selves.
The actual self is our real, present self. The ought self, on the other hand, includes the duties, obligations, and achievements we believe we should perform. For example, I ought to go to college, or I ought to workout more.
The ideal self is entirely different. As Dr. Hooper explains, the ideal self says, “What is my bliss that helps me be my most authentic self, that helps me feel truly alive, that helps me be the fullest version of myself while I’m in this world?” In other words, the ideal self is comprised of the attributes we would ideally like to possess, such as hopes, goals, aspirations or wishes.
Our most enduring regrets
are the ones that stem from our failure to live up to our ideal
selves, according to the Cornell research. The research buids on the
idea that people tend to regret the things they hadn’t done rather
than the things they had.
“In the short term, people regret
their actions more than inactions,” Gilovich said. “But in the
long term, the inaction regrets stick around longer.”
(S. Davidai & T. Gilovich. “The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people’s most enduring regrets.” Emotion, 18(3), 439–452. 2018.)
If a person places a premium on his ought self, he “would be wise to minimize (his) regrets by thinking twice before forging ahead (and seizing the moment)” the researchers suggest.
On the other hand, “if one is an adventurous soul guided by his ideal self, he might indeed end up happier by seizing the day and not looking back. As we have shown in this research, a person focused on his ideal self is more likely to lose sleep over his ‘wouldas’ and ‘couldas’ than her ‘shouldas’.”
Palliative nurse Bronnie Ware wrote in 2013: “When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices that they had made, or not made.”
(Bronnie Ware, palliative nurse, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. 2013.)
My insight to remorse is this:
Regret, to some extent, is an inevitable reality. If I cannot completely avoid regret, I should at least listen to the advice it gives: I need to prioritize the work of my ought self above the dreams of my ideal self. I should act instead of refrain and follow my own goals rather than all the conventional expectations. Change – no matter my age – is worth the effort. My tomorrow is today.
And, feeling a little pain is part of the process of attaining remorse. As I become mindful, I learn to hold my pain gently, with kindness and curiosity, rather than dwelling on it or denying it.
Joseph Goldstein, American meditation teacher and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, explains, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Hope can be something I learn from the struggle.
Psychiatrist and Clinical Assistant Professor Joanna Cheek speaks of the Buddha …
“Our natural reaction to difficult feelings is to push them away, and fast. Or we cling to them, ruminating, convinced that we will be able to problem-solve our way out of them, fueling the fire.
“In this way, the Buddha described our pain and suffering as being hit by two arrows.
“The first arrow, the inevitable pain of life, whether a difficult event, thought or feeling, is shot at us; we have little control over this.
“But then we shoot a second arrow at ourselves with our own reaction to the pain, amplifying and prolonging it. The suffering from the refusal or pushing away of this pain, the "it shouldn’t be here," the "I can’t stand this," but also the blaming, the ruminating, the "why me?" the "it’s always been this way and always going to be this way" stories: these are the parts we add. To put it simply: pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
(Joanna Cheek. “Sometimes Embracing Emotional Distress Is the Best Medicine.” Scientific American. June 07, 2016.)
“The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.”
– Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet
Do you want a parallel with a group of people who are callous and detached?
Science tells us psychopaths do experience regret, particularly when their bad decisions affect them directly.
But, here's the kicker – they don’t use that experience to inform their future choices, according to a new study published the week of Nov. 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Arielle Baskin-Sommers, Allison M. Stuppy-Sullivan, and Joshua W. Buckholtz. “Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. November 28, 2016.)
Baskin-Sommers and co-author Joshua Buckholtz of Harvard University evaluated the responses of 62 men, some of whom scored high on psychopathy measures, to different situations. They found that psychopathic subjects did experience regret, for instance, when they discovered that they would have made money if they had made a different decision in a gambling scenario. But, they did not use that experience to inform later decisions. This inability to learn from their mistakes predicted the number of times the subjects had been incarcerated.
Baskin-Sommers said this form of regret does not imply remorse for actions that harmed other people – an absence that is a hallmark of psychopaths.
Here are some suggestions for finding remorse and learning to “keep on keeping on”:
Accept that we all make mistakes: stop beating yourself up for not being an ideal self.
Focus on gratitude – the things you value and appreciate and spend more time and energy thinking about the positive than the negative.
Embrace your personal strengths. (If you don't know what they are, take an accounting of your best qualities.)
Apologize, and forgive yourself.
Think of all the times where you fell short but later came up large, redeemed yourself, and moved on.
I'll end this entry with a relatively new study on rats and regret. That's right, rats, not the human kind like psychopaths discussed above. The 2014 study shows for the first time that rats regret bad decisions and learn from them.
In addition to existentialist suggestions of a rat’s regret – and what that takes away from, or adds to, being “human” – the study is highly relevant to basic brain research.
Researchers demonstrated that we can tap into complex internal states of rodents if we hone in on the right behavior and the right neurons. There is a significant literature on what brain regions are representative of certain states, like reward predictions and value calculations, but the study, powered by a novel behavioral test, is able to put together such discrete behavioral correlates into a “rat” definition of regret.
(Adam P. Steiner and A. David Redish. “Behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of regret in rat decision-making on a neuroeconomic task.” Nat Neurosci. July 17, 2014.)
The conclusion about this lowly animal? Rats certainly show they can recognize the “what-might-have-been." They regret what they didn't do, and the signs point to learning from that emotion. This emotion had never previously been found in any other mammals apart from humans.
Am I saying this rodent is capable of feeling remorse? I'm no scientist. And, I'm pretty sure even the experts don't know the answer to that one. But, the very fact that rats can regret – with a psychological definition of a "negative emotion predicated on an upward, self-focused, counterfactual inference" – should make us understand the need for us humans to learn to deal with inescapable losses of missed opportunities.
We must be smarter than a rat. After all, we have known for a long time that even “the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.” Keep on keeping on, my friend.
To a Mouse
By Robert Burns (1759 – 1796)
On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss ’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
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