Saturday, February 04, 2006

DR. OMED'S LATE NITE SERMONETTE: REGRET Regret, guilt, shame, negative feelings centered on one's own self in general, seem to be almost hardwired in some, perhaps most people. I think how you are treated by your mother, father, and other primary caregivers as a small child has everything to with it. These kind of feelings are literally written into the neurons of the child's developing brain. Seems to me that it takes a lot of self awareness and really hard work to overwrite--to reset the neuronal pathways--to get rid of this stuff. As a manic depressive raised by a manic depressive, I missed out on all that. My emotions are tidal, and also like the weather--and who knows for sure what butterfly wing whips up my emotions to tornadic force on any particular occasion. This creates in me a certain sometimes discordant detachment from my own and everyone else's feelings. Mr. Flat Affect. It's funny. I think of my emotions as in, but not about me; just as the universe is in us, but not about us. The cosmos envelopes us, but goes on without us, in cycles that we cannot change (except in an extremely local way) and have very little or nothing to do with us. We are neither cause nor effect, we are a byproduct, a second order phenomenon. The weather that passes through our souls but for little eddies we make is larger than us.   I looked regret up in my Webster's and I find I define regret more narrowly than the dictionary does. The root meaning of "gret" is the same as "greet;" you re-greet present or past sorrows. What I mean when I use the word "regret" is to feel sorrow about something you did, or didn't, do, or that you feel personally responsible for something that has happened (whether you are or not), and you re-greet your sorrow over it with contrition, a need to make amends, or a need for forgiveness. My mother referred to this as "shouldawouldacoulda" and was of the opinion that it "never did nothin'." At this point in my life I'm not sure I agree with this principle of Mom's, but my bipolar brain chemistry sure does. Sometimes I think of regret as a kind of hubris, laying claim to what properly belongs to what I shall refer to for the sake of brevity as "God." Not that I'm necessarily against hubris, it's taken the human race a long way. Is regret necessary to care for others or to feel anything at all? I have deep feelings about many things, and I often feel a deep sadness for people, and a sympathetic anguish for the suffering of others, but I rarely feel regret. Or guilt. Or shame. There are things I should regret, and I know, that is to say, I rationally understand, that I have done things I should feel ashamed of or guilty about, but, for the most part, it's just not in me. I understand this as a lack, like being tone deaf or colorblind, and the lack of these feelings, the absence of this aspect of human emotion in me is sometimes hurtful to others, and I don't like to hurt people, even the ones I really don't like. Perhaps regret is the magnetic pole, the true north to which the needle of the moral compass aligns itself. But I sail without that compass and must steer by the stars and dead reckoning. I have learned to worry, a bit, since I got married. Maybe I can learn regret as well.   Note: This sermonette is cobbled together from comments I made at Broken Windows. I miss Kate. 2:53:50 AM    comment []