Reducing regret

In My Humble Opinion
1

I recently purchased an electronic picture frame. It’s really cool - I tossed an 4G SD card into it and I’ve got hundreds of pictures in it with room for thousands more. As a result, I’m sorting though all my old pictures and selecting ones for inclusion in the frame.

As I sift, I’m seeing picture after picture that makes me happy and a lesser amount that make me angry or regretful. In the background of the interior pictures is the piles and piles of crap and filth that my stay-at-home (now-ex-) wife would accumlate & refuse to clean.

I see pictures she took of her scrapbook pages (not sure why) that have family & couple pictures with “True Love” and “Forever” written on them (“Like Hell!”, says the back of my brain.)

I see pictures of the house we built together in various stages of completion, the house we lost because she was hiding the fact that she wasn’t paying her credit cards.

Regrets, anger, feelings of vengeance…

I’m going to archive the pictures with her in them. I’ve deleted the house pictures. I’ve cropped the interior pictures to reduce the backgrounds and still show my children’s birthdays & Christmas scenes.

I kinda feels good to crop her out of a picture but I recognize that mostly as a vengeful feeling.

My life has moved on - things are good - really good now. The could be better, of course: I rankle against the half-custody time & the splitting of kids school expenses (partly because it’s necessary, partly because it 70/30 not 50/50, and partly because it means having to talk with that woman.)

Any trick or techniques to reduce these feelings of regret? It’s always been hard for me to put the past behind me. I’m hoping it’ll easier, of course, when the big picture sort is done-and she’s safely archived in a zip file (for the kids later - she is their mother after all).

EDIT: By the way - the pictures of the dirty house I keep in a file just in case a battle for custody every comes up again. It may yet…

2

I dunno; it sounds like you are feeling really healthy things brought on logically (by reviewing your past). Go through the pictures, get mad, wallow in it, then when you’re done, go back to your much better life with a feeling of gratitude that that mess is just pictures now. (And wow, that was a big mess. Living like that must have been a stress just to open your eyes and see it around you every day.)

3

I’m not a fan of burying the past, pretending it didn’t happen, editing out the warts, etc., though I don’t suggest obsessing on it, either. For better or worse, that’s how you came to be where you are and who you are now.

I agree WRT the zip file. I was making a family photo disc years ago, to be distributed to siblings et al. I asked my sister how she felt about the inclusion of pictures of her ex. She said, “He’s still the father of my children.” I.e. whatever she felt about them, she didn’t think that her kids would necessarily have the same reaction or want them deleted.

I think your reactions are normal and with time, they’ll mellow. However that’s a process that takes place gradually, can’t be fixed in a day or a week or a month. When it feels overwhelming, walk away from it for awhile and busy yourself with other things. 14 years after my divorce, something may set me off about her once in a very blue moon, but for the most part I can assure you that it gets better.

4

I agree emphatically with featherlou. Sounds to me like your feelings are quite normal. When my ex walked out and filed shortly after, I had a miserable year and a half. About six months after the divorce was final, I started feeling the veil lifting and life looked really good. Now six years later, I have never enjoyed my life more or been happier. I think you are wise to do what you are doing with your pictures as well.

I think a little anger or sadness occasionally is highly normal. I do get sad when I realize my kids were ripped off by not having an emotionally healthy father, but, be that as it may, they have turned out pretty well.

5

No matter how much you regret what happened or wish things had turned out differently nothing will change. The past happened and the outcome is the outcome. You are wasting energy by regretting anything. All you can do now is know better next time.

6

Yes, I know of a trick. I’ve used it on myself a couple of times, and a professional used it on me once. It works pretty well, despite it being totally fruity. Give it a shot.

Think of a time before you met her. Maybe just before. Or to a time when you were happy. Was there a particular event when you went from feeling good to feeling miserable? There were probably many of them. Think of the first one. It may even go back to way before you met her. It may be in your childhood. Whatever it is, identify it clearly.

Get comfortable and close your eyes. (Read this first!)

Picture your perfect life. Picture the people you want, the feelings you want, the things you want to do. Make it into a real picture, with vivid colors and smells and sounds and feelings. Imagine that you can hold that picture in your hands. Hold it right now.

Now wrap it up in a really safe blanket and put it into your backpack. We’re going on a journey.

Stretched out before you is your timeline. In one direction is your past, in the other direction is your future. Maybe the past is to your left, maybe it’s behind you, maybe it’s in some other direction. It doesn’t matter, as long as you can picture it. What color is the line? Is it glowing? Notice that if you look far enough in one direction, you can see your birth. In the other, your death. And the line goes beyond that in both directions.

Rise up above your timeline, like you’re in a hot air balloon. Look down at your now. Start drifting backwards. Look at ten minutes ago. Rise higher. Look at an hour ago. Rise even higher. Yesterday, last week, last month, last year…

Drift all the way back to just before the event, and land there. Face forward to your future. Notice how you feel just before the event. It feels great, right? But if you take one step forward into the future, it will feel horrible. Stay where is still feels good.

Turn the event into a picture. Grab it and pull it out of your timeline. Hold it in your hands. Thank it for the lessons it taught you. Now fling it into the Sun and watch it shatter into a million pieces! Take your perfect picture out of your backpack and unwrap it. Snap it into place where the old picture was. Notice how that part of your timeline lights up.

Rise up and backwards and look at it. Float back down. Are the old feelings replaced with the new ones? Is there even a trace of the old ones? Rise up and back twice as far as before. Float back down. Still there? Rise up and back ten times as far. Then a hundred times. A thousand times. A million times. Go as far as you have to until there’s no trace left at all.

Now rise up and travel back to the present. Travel to last year, last month, last week, yesterday, and hour ago…

Right now.

Take a deep breath and open your eyes.

7

Reminds me of wedding photos. You know you always have that one girl who doesn’t want to go alone, so she grabs the first willing fellow that agrees, basically for the free meal (and booze if open bar)

This, in of itself is no problem, till after the wedding and 20 years later you now have pictures of this guy, nobody no longer remembers, in the midst of all your wedding photos.

:slight_smile:

8

It’s been my experience that this kind of bitterness generally only lessens when it’s allowed to grow into empathy. I know it’s hard to imagine, but those are the pictures of the home of a woman who is either extremely exhausted or emotionally ill. Depressed? Miserable? Up all night with a little one? Consumed by an addiction? Feeling, for whatever reason, too vulnerable to deal with other people and building a wall of stuff between her and the fear.

I can’t know what else happened, or what you went through, but I know that healing is found quickest by taking the high road.

9

I’m highly prone to regret. I found that what helps me most is to look at the good things in my life I’m happy about, and realize that however shitty the path was that got me here, I can’t be sure I would have gotten those good things any other way.

For instance, I’m sure you love your kids and are thankful to have them. But if you hadn’t met your wife, then they wouldn’t be here. And that applies to everything you love in your life now. Sure, if things had gone differently, they might be better now, but they might also be much, much worse. What you do know is that they would be different - and the only way to get exactly the really good life you now have is exactly how you got it. It may have been the hard way, but it was the only way here.

And beyond these hard-won good things in your present, you now have a potential wealth of knowledge that will help make for a better future. For instance, I bet that, looking back, you can see signs that you missed at the time that your ex wasn’t trustworthy. You probably also have a much clearer idea of what values are really important to you in a relationship: “I thought x wasn’t a big deal, as long as we had y, but now, I see x is all that really matters.” Regret, for me, is basically asking “Why did I do that?” about everything. If you can find honest, fair answers to these questions (“I was allowing a reckless impulse to overrule my better judgement” and not “I was an idiot”), you’ll be better prepared to handle whatever comes your way.

I know this might sound Pollyanna-ish. But know that I’ve come through several special Hells to get to where I am today, and even today’s not so great, as things go. I frequently look back to moments throughout my life and kick myself. But if I had acted differently then, I’d be somewhere else now, and - especially because I know firsthand how truly awful things can be - I wouldn’t trade my current situation for some great unknown. If that’s what it took to get here, then so be it: I’m here.

10

I haven’t looked at my photos since the divorce.
In fact, the clue that she splitting apart from the family was when she told the kids to take their favorite photos out of the packets and keep them in their rooms. She said it was just so they would feel ownership of their own memories, but it was a cover for her taking her own favorite photos. She left us a couple of months later.