Medical Advice Three
Regret
And now, some thoughts on regret. We live in a society that tends to really ratchet up the idea that regret is an emotion for wienies. “No regrets!” as you plunge into the unknown. Regret is framed as something for people too afraid to live their lives.
Yet regret is a very useful emotion, but one that can turn into bitterness and helplessness on the one hand, or careen to unfettered denial on the other, if it’s not integrated into a broader arc of self-discovery.
It is possible, after carefully attending to all of this effort to maintain your agency and take ownership of your decisions, you end up regretting the path you chose. Can you regret a recovery effort? Absofckinlutely. Odds are you won’t, but odds are not assurances.
I regret not knowing, because no one knew back then, that when I was a kid every single cold, flu and generic virus I got took up permanent residence in my brain and body (as they do with each and every one of us) and they are responsible for pretty much all the deterioration we will experience as we age. Too late now and all I can do is not make it worse, now that I do know.
Regret is meant to trigger reflection and learning. If we all truly went through our lives with no regrets we would essentially be in-the-moment creatures that just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
As with many emotions, we get into trouble when they get stuck.
Emotions that are triggered by errors are painful. The discomfort we experience when we make a mistake (be it guilt, shame, embarrassment and/or regret) is generated from heavy limbic system salience (importance). Our brains are built to generate that emotional salience as it triggers the strength of the neural pathway that records and registers the failure.
Registering the failure in our brains as important helps us survive. If we had brains that just went “meh” when we make a mistake, then we would likely forget and be vulnerable to making the same mistake yet again.
When these emotions get stuck we focus on the discomfort of the emotion and not on how to not make the mistake again in future. Or, when the mistake is truly irrevocable and there will never come a time when we face the chance of making it again, then the ability to accept the ramifications of that mistake and make the best of things moving forward.
When regret is stuck, then it can lead to constant revisiting of what transpired; a rising bitterness that no one stepped in or helped; blaming others; and seeking retribution. Conversely, it can lead to feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness and a deep distrust of one’s own ability to make sound decisions or get things right ever again. In these cases, the pain of regret is either fully externalized or fully internalized in the stuck position with no conscious evaluation of what lessons could be learned.
Regret can be so painful that it is outright denied as an emotion altogether and signs of that include a reckless abandon style of living that does tend to involve repeating the same mistakes over and over.
It’s much easier to integrate regret when you can consciously identify that the discomfort and pain you’re feeling is just the brain’s pay-attention system to have you extract some lessons from the experience. Regret is not the punchline, it’s just the set-up for a more advanced stage of your life.
Choose Reflection Time
Let’s circle back now to our two women visiting their GP with their new borderline blood sugar results. The scenario I laid out of one woman being exceptionally skilled and the other being highly reactive was overly simplistic to make the points about agency, bias and discrimination.
As none of us can have agency over another, the first woman may not get her GP to consider watchful waiting despite her best efforts to generate open-ended and inclusive questions designed to trigger curiosity. The GP could very well respond with a diatribe of fattist statements and list all the scary outcomes (minus any clinical evidence, mind you) of untreated diabetes.
As for the woman who felt attacked and deflected blame elsewhere, while she will absolutely receive a condescending yet supportive response to not believe everything she reads online and that “a bit of” healthy eating and exercise will likely very readily return her blood sugar levels to a normal range; she also fundamentally does not have a healthcare professional who takes her or her eating disorder seriously and this will affect her health outcomes in future. Yet it’s also possible that this is the best that can be realized for her at this time. She may have no support at home, or she may have internalized such a heavy degree of fattism that her own level of self-loathing is impacting her ability to be successful in her career thereby creating a heavy and self-imposed sense of precariousness (“I could lose my job because I’m fat!), etc.…I am not saying she is a write-off at all, it’s just that it may not be her time to pursue recovery in this narrative I’ve concocted.
Your health is not a transaction, but healthcare is transactional. In order to respect the complexity of your living system and its dynamic flow through states of greater and lesser levels of vibrancy and resilience, wherever possible take time to evaluate before you choose to accept or reject (either partially or wholly) the treatment recommendations you receive from healthcare professionals.
There is nothing that requires an immediate decision in healthcare unless you have been shoved in an ambulance code red and rushed to the emergency department. Chances are any healthcare decision that requires a truly immediate response will actually be made by your loved ones and not you (because you are unconscious in that scenario).
Give yourself time to think about deception, self-deception, regret, biases, discrimination, clinical advice, healthcare transactionalism, trauma, re-traumatization, and lessons to be learned. Truly there is value in being a deep thinker on health topics even when it seems as though the choice in front of you is simple and straightforward.
