Why Do I Mourn the Life I Could Have Had?
The Pattern
You have a good life. You also have a parallel life that lives in your head. The one where you said yes to the other person. The one where you stayed in the other city. The one where you went to the other school, took the other job, did not have the children, did have them. You think about her sometimes, the woman in the parallel life. You wonder if she is happier. You feel guilty for wondering. You wonder anyway. This is not betrayal of your real life. This is the natural cost of choosing. Every life is made of yeses, and every yes is also a no to every other possible yes. The un-lived life is real to your psyche, and the psyche is allowed to mourn what it had to leave behind.
Origins & Context
Carl Jung's work on the un-lived life describes the psychic weight of the choices not made. Jung noted that the un-lived life does not go away. It lives inside us as a shadow, and when ignored, it can drive behavior in ways we do not recognize. The integration of the un-lived life is one of the central tasks of midlife.
James Hollis, expanding on Jung, names this the most important psychological work of the second half of life. Hollis writes that the question is not whether to grieve the un-lived life, but whether to let it be witnessed honestly so that it does not become a hidden saboteur of the lived one. Pauline Boss's work on ambiguous loss applies as well: the un-lived life is a loss that has never been formally mourned, because there was no death and no event, just a path that closed without ceremony.
Every yes is also a no to every other possible yes. The un-lived life is real to your psyche, and the psyche is allowed to mourn what it had to leave behind.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the moments of casual fantasy. You see a couple on the street, in a city you used to want to live in, and you find yourself building a whole story about who you would be if you had stayed. The story is detailed. The body responds to it as if it were memory.
It shows up in the way you look at certain people from your past. The one who got away. The one you almost married. The one who became the version of you that you did not become. You do not want them. You want the proof they offer that the parallel life existed, that it was real enough to be remembered.
It shows up in the small bitternesses you cannot fully account for. You feel mildly resentful of a friend who made the other choice. You feel a strange tenderness for a stranger who is walking the path you did not take. The body is not asking you to switch lives. The body is asking you to acknowledge that switching was once possible and is no longer.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Un-Lived Life (Carl Jung, later James Hollis), the psychic weight of the choices not made. It is also named as Ambiguous Loss of the Counterfactual (Pauline Boss), grief for what never officially existed. The specific midlife arrival of this is sometimes named the Parallel Lives Reckoning.
Related entries in this library: Complex Grief, Adaptive Self vs Original Self, Choosing Yourself Is Direction Not Event.
Nikita's Note
Mourning the un-lived life is not the same as wishing you had chosen differently. You can grieve the parallel life and still be in love with the one you have. The grief is not a verdict. It is a tribute.
The practice is to let the un-lived life have a small designated place in your inner world. Not the center. Not nothing. A side room where she gets to exist. Acknowledge her on certain days. Thank her for the version of you she did not become. Let her be the friend, not the haunting. The current life gets fuller when the parallel one is allowed to be mourned instead of secretly idealized.
From the work
Every yes is also a no to every other possible yes. The un-lived life is real to your psyche, and the psyche is allowed to mourn what it had to leave behind.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.