How to take advantage of disappointment to improve

How not to be disappointed when everything in life is expected, when we not only want to achieve what we want, but to the extent that we had imagined it? Being disappointed is almost a commonplace that is born from our own expectations.

The problem arises when we are not able to digest those feelings and channel them towards improvements. Unintentionally, we can become emotionally blocked and, trapped in suffering, open the door to depression.

We all have expectations that are not always met. The way in which we value the success or failure of our lives and what our relationships with others bring us or satisfy depends on its degree of fulfillment. Therefore, if the expectations do not match our real possibilities, we run a serious risk of feeling frustrated and disappointedliving it as if the others or ourselves had been damaged.

By Victor Amat and Bet Font

Disappointment: an anguish that partly depends on one

Our society, unlike that of our parents or grandparents, is not based on values ​​such as effort, work or dedication. Today the need to consume prevails and the prevailing belief leads us to think that we are practically based on what we consume. We can force ourselves to keep an unsatisfactory job to maintain a certain economic level without considering whether it will make us happy.

We pretend to reach everything and have everything, with which we bear frustrations and setbacks badly. In our search for security, we fear making mistakes or losing something in every decision.

The lack of guarantees in an uncertain world is one of the reasons why pathologies associated with anxiety and nostalgia abound in our culture. It is utopian, but we believe that it is possible to foresee everything and eliminate difficulties, be it with your partner, work, children or your own goals.

In our search for security, we fear making mistakes or losing something in every decision.

Meanwhile, experience shows us that there are imbalances, crises and disagreements that force us to live with a certain degree of uncertainty. We are more vulnerable to disappointments to the extent that we tolerate suffering less, which leads us to anesthetize it by supplying –for example with pills– what previously alleviated the group and the feeling of belonging.

Social networks, in times of lean times, are not valued as a support: a person can feel immensely lonely even though they have 500 friends on Facebook. We live, then, the hypermodernity of fear, because paradoxically we want the highest levels of security as well as freedom and individualism.

3 Common Ways to Feel Disappointed

Simplifying a lot we can recognize basic disappointment profiles:

Who feels disappointed with oneself

Some authors call it the deluded disillusioned. That person thought he was capable but the evidence insists on reminding him that he is not who he thought he was, or that he is not where he wanted to be. Faced with this situation, the individual can surrender or mobilize. What is it that really does not satisfy you here and now?

You may have gained weight while being able to lose weight, or you may have to accept that you have aged, with all that that entails. A disillusioned delusional tends to forget that plans are used to guide oneself, that fears are human and that unforeseen events arise in life. Instead, it makes exacting balance sheets in which obvious that he or she is not only what did not reach.

who is disappointed in others

The basic thought is here a positive utopia respect to othersin which there is no possibility of mishap or misfortune.

When something goes wrong, the individual feel that others have betrayed you, despite the fact that he has offered them the best of himself. The person tends to expect others to act according to his needs and to feel like a victim of ungrateful people who do not correspond to him as he deserves. The closer such people are, the more painful the disappointments will be.

This person often forgets that she is not the only one who suffers and, above all, that others do not have the power to guess their wishes. The writer Émile Cioran expressed it this way: “Our grudges derive from the fact that, by remaining below ourselves, we have not been able to reach the goal. We never forgive others for this.”

The disappointed in the world or the total disappointment

His original truth is that he is right and that the rest is wrong, with which everything would have to be different from how it is. Faced with adversity, not only does he not react or activate his resources, but he increases and reinforces his primary belief, until disappointment exhausts or depresses him.

Even from the paralysis caused by resignation, he can continue trying to dominate the world with his thinking and moralism, as in this example: One rainy afternoon a passenger is stuck for a long time in a taxi, while the driver listens to the news on the radio, complaining that: “Everything they say is bought lies. I haven’t heard anything salvageable in recent years. It’s desperate.” Then the passenger asks him: “Did you try turning off the radio for a while and chatting, or putting on music?” To which the taxi driver determinedly replies: “In the taxi there is no choice but to listen to those lies.”

Feeling disappointment, an opportunity to improve

We all make mistakes when we try to predict. how we will face the events of life or how others will.

It is true that our society increases expectations to the point of utopianism and that life sometimes offers us very difficult moments that we did not anticipate going through. Even so, heExperience can teach us to be more realistic and take into account our own circumstances..

That does not mean that we should do without goals and even less dreams. But if we aspire to achieve them, in addition to realism and experience, we will need to develop other capacities: that of connect with others, resolve conflicts and learn from mistakesassuming that in part we contribute to generating our own disappointments.

It must be assumed that in part we contribute to generating our own disappointments.

why does it hurt so much

Disappointment often comes when we make a critical reading of what has happened to us. We blame ourselves or blame othersleaving only the negative.

Anger or suffering prevents us from realizing that if we decided to act in a certain way it was probably because that was the best option what we had at that time.

The same is true in the field of relationships. when it is the other that disappoints us. When a friend questions us about something, does he do it to annoy? When a 17-year-old boy doesn’t work, does he do it to reject the values ​​of effort and work that his father has? When a preteen doesn’t eat, is he eating to reject his mother’s food (for whom nurturing may be a way of giving love)?

All these questions reflect the reading that someone makes and that gives meaning to the behavior of the other, a meaning that also hurts. And in that erroneous reading, thoughts, feelings and behaviors are generated that will give rise to a sum of misunderstandings.

We are responsible for giving a more constructive reading to the critical issue if we do not want to get caught up in it. With a lot of frequency we get stuck in anger, helplessness or victimhood.

Faced with the experience of a critical episode, we can choose to give it a tragic and definitive reading that leads us to emptiness and frustration, or to experience it as one more adversity, a kind of “false take” that gives us the opportunity to review our way of life. to do to advance in the future.

It would be good to ask what our expectations are, what we want to achieve and what we lack or what we must change to be better. Only then can we give our failures a proper place in the gallery of our existence.

How to act when something or someone disappoints you

Moments of disappointment – ​​mild or intense – provide a wonderful opportunity to better relate to life. Here are some strategies you can keep in mind to deal with disappointment:

Describe what causes you disappointment. Focus on what happens or what X does, to whom and in what situation. Do it without trying to find explanations, put labels or judge it. It simply describes the facts without qualification.Acknowledge what hurts you. What feelings does that experience or behavior arouse in you? If you accept them without pretending that you should feel otherwise, it is easier for you to learn to live in peace with your losses and frustrations. You can write it down or share it with someone; if you want, read it and destroy it later.look for exceptions that contradict the story of disappointment you’ve been telling yourself. If you have trouble identifying contrasting examples, you can ask for help from someone you think has resources for it.Realize that you are much more than your disappointment and that your story of disappointment. Change or challenge the limitation of your labels (whether you put them on or helped you), add a sense of humor and broaden your perspective with other qualities of yourself.Remember what resources helped you in similar situations that can provide you with possibilities to go beyond the complaint.Instead of thinking that you “should” have acted differently, be more understanding of yourself and your disappointment, building a more useful story around it. If it doesn’t occur to you, act as if you were an unconditional friend willing to make sense of your experience, because if you acted like that, surely, at that moment, you had your reasons.Try to do something different next time. Churchill said: “Success is learning to go from failure to failure without despair.”

Other keys to overcome disappointment

Disappointment is useful until it is no longer useful.: until it eats us up, mortifies or tarnishes our relationships. Although it is an indicator that we are emotionally connected and that we know how to set goals, it is also a sign that we are not on the right track and that there is discomfort.

An old Chinese art of warfare stratagem says that “in order to make something straight, you must first learn to twist it further.” In our case we would say that To overcome our own disappointment, we must first accept it.. There is no one way to deal with pain.

There are those who need to speak, those who choose to write, those who seek to give meaning or the company of someone to help them. In any case, putting words to pain helps to accept itto distance themselves from him and, as appropriate, to banish him.

There are therapeutic rituals whose purpose is objectify or concretize feelings –like the one who invites them to write, read and burn them–, giving them enough space and time for the disturbances to dissipate like smoke.

If the disappointment is with another person, it is useful to distinguish the positive intention –what the author intended to be good– from the meaning we gave it and from the harm it could cause us. That is, to look for a less illusory or limiting meaning.

It is useful to distinguish the positive intention of the person who has disappointed us from the meaning we gave to what they did or did not do.

Sometimes the sense of…