TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

If Only
by Neal Roese, Ph.D.
ISBN 0-7679-1577-1
243 pages; hardcover; $23.95
Broadway Books, New York, 2005

Most self-help books tell you to eliminate regret. This one tells you to indulge.

Why? The idea is you can use your regrets – those elusive if only’s - to make your life better. The catch: Success depends on how productively you dwell on those regrets.

Author Neal Roese is an Associate Professor of Psychology, so there’s plenty of insight into human behavior between the covers of If Only. You might even find useful techniques for dealing with your own regrets.

But the book’s premise has a drawback that seems less than fully addressed, which is the fact that regret is an emotion, and as such can only be revealed by subjective judgments.

Take, for instance, the statement “we don’t regret the things we do, only the things we didn’t do”. The problem with believing this adage is one of slant; that is, we may frame our response to survey questions by saying we regret what we didn’t do. But perhaps what we really mean is we regret what we did do.

Though If Only presents the conundrum differently, the distinction may not matter. As long as you make decisions you later wish had turned out differently, you’ll suffer regret. And mining that feeling for constructive ways to improve future actions is, regretfully, no simple task.

 

Review originally published September 2005.