Member-only story
Regret
A Power for Good or Evil
All humans feel regret. We regret things we did and things we did not do. We also dread the future. This article will focus on regret and how people who have survived severe childhood trauma and now have dissociative identity disorder are affected by it.
What is Regret?
The term regret involves a negative cognitive or emotional state, including blaming yourself for bad outcomes and feeling loss or sorrow over what could have been or wishing you could undo a choice you made.
For children, regret can help them focus and take corrective actions or pursue a different way to handle a situation. But if a child is in a situation where they have little or no chance to change the situation, they find themselves in regret turns into rumination and triggers stress damaging their psyche and their bodies.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of people who feel regret, researchers have found that participants performed specific computer tasks that asked them to choose between several options for investing money.
When the participants were shown that they could have done better using alternative options, the researchers found a decreased activity in the ventral striatum, which is associated with processing rewards. Interestingly, there…
