By: Panicha McGuire, PsyD, RPT-S™, LMFT
Lately, I’ve been watching the Apple TV series Dark Matter. As both a therapist and a person who has spent plenty of time wondering about the roads not taken, I find that it can be a good think piece for the conversations that frequently show up in the therapy room. Dark Matter follows Jason Dessen, a physicist, professor, husband, and father who suddenly finds himself in an alternate version of his own life. Instead of the family life he knows, he visits a reality shaped by the choices he did not make. The series becomes an exploration of the different lives he could have lived and, perhaps more importantly, what actually makes one of those lives his. Underneath the science fiction is a question that feels incredibly human…what if I had chosen differently?
I am a therapist, not a physicist, so I will leave the equations to people who know what they are doing. But the basic idea behind Dark Matter draws from concepts in quantum mechanics, particularly superposition and the idea of “the multiverse”. It proposes that different possible outcomes of quantum events can correspond to different branches or worlds. For those that are Marvel fans, think Loki and the different timeline branches. Dark Matter takes that concept and makes it more personal for the viewers. What if somewhere there is a version of you who took the other job? Married the other person? Moved to another city? Had children? Didn’t have children? Stayed? Left? Spoke up? Took the risk? What would that person’s life look like now? And who would that person be?
The Excruciating Game of “What If?”
In my more hopeless moments, I sometimes play the excruciating game of “What if?” As I think most people do. What would my life have looked like if I had explored one of the other career paths I considered in young adulthood? At different points, I thought about a career in acting, or becoming a veterinarian. And sometimes, when I am particularly overwhelmed, I fantasize about how deeply satisfying it might be to sort mail as a postal worker for the rest of my life. There is something alluring about imagining these other lives. Our imaginary lives have a tendency to receive very favorable editing.
Psychologists actually have a term for this type of thinking, counterfactual thinking. It is the process of imagining how something that already happened could have happened differently. “If only I had…” and “What if I had…” are classic examples. Counterfactual thinking can involve regret and disappointment, although it can also help us learn from previous experiences and make different decisions in the future. So asking “What if?” isn’t necessarily unhealthy. Sometimes it can contain useful information, but, the problem is when that reflection gets in the way of our present day lives.
One of the traps of regret is that the alternative life exists entirely in our imagination. And imagination gets to skip a lot of details. Maybe I would have loved another career, or I would have hated it. Maybe another decision would have prevented one painful experience, but created an entirely different one. Maybe in that alternate reality I would have been happier or I would have simply been unhappy in ways that aren’t apparent to me at this moment. When we compare our real lives to an imagined alternative, reality is at a disadvantage. My actual present life contains grief, bills, disappointments, mistakes, difficult conversations, exhaustion, hopelessness, uncertainty, and every inconvenient consequence of being a human being. But “alternate reality me” gets a highlight reel of the best parts of life.
As humans, it’s entirely normal to wish that we had made different choices in our lives. Sometimes the current circumstances limit our choices in ways we only understand later on in life. Oftentimes, we did the best we could with the information, resources, safety, support, and emotional capacity we had at the time. And sometimes the reality is that we didn’t make the best choice, and we continue to live with regret. Therapy does not require us to turn every painful decision into “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe healing requires that. We can regret something and still recognize that the life that followed became ours.
Would I Still Be Me?
This is where Dark Matter becomes especially interesting to me. If I had taken those other paths, would I actually be the same person living a different life or would I be a different version of myself? This brings us to personality and identity. Older theories of personality sometimes created the impression that we develop a relatively fixed collection of characteristics and then carry them around for the rest of our lives. Modern personality research gives us a more complicated picture. We now understand that while personality traits can show some stability (e.g., temperament, genetics, etc), its development can continue to change across our lifespan. Our environments, culture, and relationships are continuous and changing. I am still the same person I was years ago, in most aspects yet I am also not the same person due the life experiences that came my way.
Our identities are an evolving internal story that we construct about who we are, where we came from, and where our lives are going. We create meaning by connecting experiences into a story about ourselves. In Dark Matter, changing one decision doesn’t simply change what happens next. It potentially changes the experiences that shape the person experiencing what happens next. The career I chose affected people I met, and those relationships affected decisions I made. Those decisions then created other relationships. Failures changed how I understood myself and losses changed what I valued. Successes that gave me confidence to attempt something else. People whose lives intersected with mine for a few moments and somehow altered my direction. So, when we ask, “Who would I have been if I had chosen differently?”… the uncomfortable answer is genuinely, we don’t know. Because that person never got the chance to exist.
This is one of the places where therapy can be useful. When someone says, “I wish I had…” our instinct is sometimes to reassure them. “But look at everything you have now!” Maybe. But sometimes people need to grieve first. Grief for the versions of our lives that we will never get to experience (unless these sci-fi shows become our reality in the future). We need room to grieve the relationships that we may have lost, the careers we didn’t pursue, the places we didn’t move, and the opportunities we weren’t ready for. Regret isn’t always proof that you chose incorrectly. Regret could be an indicator of what actually matters to us. Research on life regrets has found that regrets often cluster around important areas involving relationships, work, education, identity, and personal growth. In other words, our regrets can reveal something about our priorities and values. (PubMed Central (PMC)). A question I might ask a client is, “What is this ‘what if?’ trying to tell you?”
Therapy Tip #1: From “What If?” to “What Now?”
If your brain says, “You would have been happier if you had chosen differently,” we could spend hours trying to prove whether that thought is true. The problem is that we can’t. There is no control group, or an option to step into the multiverse to see what other versions of us are doing. We only have this one life. That does not necessarily mean we have to love every part of it. Acceptance isn’t the same as approval. Acceptance means recognizing the reality that is here so we can decide what we want to do with it. So perhaps the more useful question is, “What does the life I imagine tell me that I want more of in this one?”.
If I fantasize about a quieter career, maybe I don’t actually need to quit everything to sort mail at the postal office. Maybe I just need more rest and a few mundane tasks to calm my mind. If I imagine the creative life I could have had in acting, maybe creativity needs more room in my current life. If I continue to wonder about relationships or experiences I passed up, perhaps there is something about connection, adventure, intimacy, autonomy, or curiosity that is asking for my attention. Our alternate lives can become less like evidence against the life we chose and more like information about the life we still want to create.
Therapy Tip #2: Build Self-Compassion
There is another piece of this that speaks to me as a therapist. We can easily talk about choices as though everyone has had the same menu of options. The reality is that people make decisions within families, cultures, economic systems, relationships, bodies, communities, histories, and circumstances. There are choices that are made from freedom, while some are made from fear. Oftentimes, choices are made because we are surviving. People are constrained by money, racism, ableism, immigration status, family expectations, discrimination, caregiving responsibilities, trauma, disability, gender roles, or simply not having the information we wish we had possessed at the time. So when we look backward at an earlier version of ourselves, I think compassion requires context. Of course present-moment you would make some decisions differently now. You know things now that you didn’t know then. You can’t evaluate your younger self with information they did not have access to.
Lastly, Maybe There Is No Perfect Timeline
One of the most compelling things about Dark Matter is the fantasy that somewhere there might be a version of life where we got everything right. The concept of the grass being greener on the other side. The perfect career, relationship, and sequence of decisions. The alternate reality where we never lost anything important. But I wonder whether the desire for that timeline says more about the discomfort of being human than it does about our actual choices. Every choice we make closes something. When we choose one life, it also means not living thousands of others. Adulthood involves learning to tolerate that. Not because the paths we didn’t take were meaningless, but because meaning does not only exist in the road that might have been. We continue to create meaning as we travel along this current timeline, this current reality. It exists in the relationships we formed and continue to form along the way. We constantly discover things about ourselves, and make new decisions that change the course of our future. Part of the lesson here is learning that there will never be a perfect decision. We may not get to revisit the roads not taken, but the work is learning how to inhabit the life that is actually ours, grieve what isn’t, notice what our regrets have to teach us, and continue making choices about who we want to become.
If this hits home for you, and you find yourself wrestling with regret, identity, or the question of who you might have been, Living Lotus Therapy is here to help you make sense of your story and move toward the life you want to keep creating.
