Nostalgia and Regret
By: Keith R Wilson
Tags: Mental Health, Self, Regret, Psychology, Nostalgia

The Field Guide to Feelings

Nostalgia and Regret

Change is inevitable: Lessons from a whaling ship and relationships.

Image by jaypofromvox, Wikimedia

Near where I grew up in Connecticut, there’s an old whaling ship you can visit, the Charles W. Morgan, and learn what it was like to go to sea to hunt whales. I used to go there a lot for that feeling I get when I imagine living back in history. I was hoping for a good strong shot of nostalgia.

In most cases, nostalgia is a sentiment for a period or place with happy personal associations. The way most use the term, I can’t be nostalgic about anything from the 1840s, since I never lived back then. The sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and oughts are within my living memory, so that’s what I should be nostalgic about. Sometimes I am. But, although I have never hunted whales, my association with whaling is so strong, due to reading Moby Dick fourteen times, that I sometimes feel I might as well have gone to sea on a whaler.

One time I was on the well-oiled quarterdeck of the Charles W. Morgan, nostalgia was just beginning to hit when the tour guide said something that ruined it for me. The guide said the ship had been totally renovated since it was acquired by the museum, not all at once, but bit by bit till it seemed that barely one rope or plank of the original vessel remained.

That being the case, I wondered, was it still the same ship? The answer, to my way of thinking, was no.

I was reckless enough to ask the tour guide that very question. The rest of the people in the group screwed up their faces at me as the guide patiently replied, “Yes, sir. Her appearance has been restored to what it was during most of her active career.”

I understood the tour guide to mean this: if they had not renovated the entire ship, everything would have deteriorated to the point where it would be unrecognizable. We would be standing on the very same dead trees, under the very same sails, and surrounded by the same rigging, but those components would be so changed to render the Charles W. Morgan a different ship, even though no one had altered a thing.

In other words, change is inevitable. It’s impossible to keep things the way they were, so the best we can do is reconstruct them. The Charles W. Morgan could never remain the same ship that sailed in the 1840s. For that matter, I’m not the same person who used to visit that ship, for not only have the cells of my body continuously died off and exchanged with new ones, but my mind and behavior have also changed.

For instance, once, when I was a teenager, my father wanted me to play golf with him. I said I’d rather spend that time with my girlfriend, but he got his way. I played golf, but for the entire eighteen holes, I punished him by not saying a single word. Whenever he would speak, even if all he said was that I made a good shot, I would glare back in a way every teenager perfects.

Remembering this, I’m embarrassed to have been such a moody, petulant teenager. What was wrong with me? What would I give to be able to play golf with my father again? What could I have been thinking?

I remember that round of golf with regret. Regret is nostalgia with a painful feeling. Nostalgia and regret look very different, but they are the same mental operation, arriving at different feeling. I think about whaling with longing and I think about the golf outing with disappointment, but in both cases, I reconstruct an event. I could just as easily regret whaling if I reconstructed it differently. Those whalers did, after all, hunt many species of whales almost to extinction. Could I also be nostalgic of the golf outing, despite glaring at my father when all he wanted was time with his son?

I would need to start by understanding my state of mind during adolescence, I must reconstruct the way it was during that time, much like the restorers did with the Charles W. Morgan. I would activate an historical imagination, the ability to see the world of the past with the information and the sensibilities I had available at that time. To understand, I really must go back to the thoughts I could have had and detach myself from everything I’ve learned since then.

When I was a teenager, I believed my parents were overprotective. I wanted to go on adventures, just as my father had when, at age 17, he joined the Navy to fight World War II. I used to daydream of being born a hundred years ago, running away from home, and shipping out on a whaler. My fantasy had me returning years later, a respected harpooneer, bronzed and muscular, flush with the earnings from my voyage.

Understanding my mind as a teenager takes the same effort as it would to understand the people who hunted whales almost to extinction. It’s easy to be critical of people of the past, but you don’t earn the right until you imagine living the life they genuinely lived.

Diligent scholarship into the realities of the whaling industry reveal I had a romanticized version of life on those ships. Voyages were long, tedious, and dangerous. The crews of those vessels were desperate, marginalized, violent men. Almost all returned poorer than when they left, having been exploited by unscrupulous shipowners and captains. Mine was a dream of an adolescent, facilitated by a well-scrubbed, family-friendly, Disneyized museum piece, sitting in the harbor at Mystic, Connecticut.

It’s one thing to meticulously reconstruct the ropes and planking of a ship like the Charles W. Morgan. To know what it was really like, I would need the tour guide to grab a rope or a marlinspike and beat me till I climbed the rigging in a hurricane. Then I’d be cast adrift in the middle of an ocean, forced to row miles, and throw darts into a beast that could kill me with one swipe of his tail. Then I would need to peel the animal’s skin off, light a fire on a wooden ship, and smell the stench of the boiled blubber. I would conclude the tour with a meal of hardtack and salt pork with weevils and spend not only the night, but the next four years of nights, sleeping on a wooden bunk on a doused and pitching ship. Then, I’d understand the men who hunted magnificent animals to near extinction. Only then could I have earned the right to be critical of their choices.

To get that pleasurable feeling of nostalgia, it’s necessary to practice selective recall. To get the painful feeling of regret, it’s also necessary to be selective of what you remember. Both feelings are dependent on sampling of only the parts that support the resulting value judgement.

Nostalgia and Regret in Therapy

On a single day, I heard similar stories from two different clients. One was told with nostalgia, the other with regret. Both had been sexually abused by their stepfathers before they were eight.

One became a cop, tough as nails, and wasn’t happy about being ordered by her commander to see me. People in therapy are whiney, weak, and looking for excuses, she said. She was fine and would be on her way. I said hold on, now that you’re here, tell me how you became so strong. Maybe then I’d be able to help my other clients be as resilient as you.

She said she had been abused. She regretted being so weak and vulnerable, to allow it to happen. Now, she refuses to take crap from anyone. She can’t get close to anyone either. She couldn’t even get along with any of her partners on patrol.

The second client had been abused, too, but talked about it with longing. She loved her stepfather, and she said, he loved her. She became the kind of person cops are sent to the home to protect from domestic violence, only to end up staying with the one that mistreats them; the kind the first client despised. Far from being tough as nails, the second client consistently made excuses for other people’s bad behavior.

In both cases, the women thought they had the true story of their abuse. I hadn’t been there to witness it, but knowing what I know about the Charles W. Morgan and my own golf outing, it’s safe to say they both made very selective reconstructions of the past. Leave them alone, you might say; they both are at peace with being abused, each in her own way. What’s the point of dredging up old memories and challenging conclusions that wrap things up for them so well? It’ll only make them feel worse.

It is true that, in treating people who have been traumatized, therapists often make them feel worse before they feel better. It’s no fun to look at things you’d rather not look at. I never go there without a full warning that it’s going to hurt. But the reason for doing it with these two women was this: their present-day troubles were based on incomplete and misleading restorations of the past.

I had them both bring me pictures of themselves from a period just before the abuse occurred. We looked at them together. What I saw were sweet, defenseless girls. There was no way the cop at that age could have been strong enough to prevent being abused. There was no way the other woman’s affection could have been perceived as a sexual invitation. They both had been children.

It’s easy, once you are grown, to forget that you were a child and what it had been like. It requires historical imagination. Even when both women handed me their pictures, they had forgotten. They looked at the child they once were and saw adults. They didn’t see what I saw. Eventually, they were both able to reconstruct themselves as children, not by seeing the pictures, but by seeing me see the pictures. They had to see the whole picture before they could see themselves.

The point of seeing yourself is the same as knowing the truth of the whaling industry or understanding the half-baked thoughts of an adolescent. It helps us get in contact with the truth. The past is never as simple as our nostalgia or regret would have us believe.