I Wanted Something Different...

How to Process Unmet Expectations

Hello ♡,

I’m thinking a lot about unmet expectations. I sit with a lot of those in my work. It didn’t go like we’d hoped…Maybe you can relate?

You know the feeling. The drop in your stomach. The feeling of the bottom falling out. It is like riding on a rollercoaster down the big hill—except there is no fun involved, just fear and dread. It is not supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, at least not in the storyline you wrote.

Photo by S. Tsuchiya on Unsplash

I felt this recently. I told a friend, “I just don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want this to be the story.”

I hear stories often like, “I just can’t believe they did this.” I agree with them, I can’t either.

It can feel like the bottom has dropped out when we are counting on an expectation, or hope, to be met. When we have oriented our lives—and ourselves—around something going a certain way, it can feel personally catastrophic when it doesn’t.

Maybe you’ve found yourself there before with a relationship ending, a job rejection, a diagnosis, a hope dashed or a dream turned down. Maybe you are facing a looming, unmet expectation. Maybe someone isn’t who you thought they were. This hurts.

You see the disappointment coming in the distance, and you want to close your eyes, hold your breath and hope it just passes you by. 

But this is the hard guarantee of life—we can’t close our eyes and not experience things. We can’t get off the ride.

We are buckled in, and, for better or worse, we will experience the highs and also the lows of unmet expectations—the fear, sadness and hopes dashed. 

How do we more than tolerate the ride—perhaps weathering it, or even growing through the disappointment? I’m not going to promise you that “when God closes a door God opens a window.” Sure that can happen. I am not going to promise you when you look back it will all make sense, or “everything happens for a reason.” We are often only taught to comfort ourselves with some happy ending. But there is another way - being with ourselves (and each other) on the ride.

1. Don’t cancel hard emotions.

One of the first and most important steps is to understand that your emotions cannot be selectively chosen and shut off. If you try to shut off the parts of you that are sad, disappointed or heartbroken, you will inadvertently mute all the good ones like hope, joy and happiness.

You can think of your emotions like a circuit board. You can’t shut off just one switch on the circuit board without shutting down the entire board. We often want to limit the negative emotions, but unfortunately, this causes us to then live in what is akin to a two-dimensional world. In order to not shut down the good and live in a full, colorful, three-dimensional world, we have to feel all the bad stuff, too.

Take a deep breath and allow yourself to ride through the feelings. Be present to the ups and the downs.

2. Separate your pain from your interpretation.

Separate your pain from your interpretation of it, or of you. Whether you realize it or not, you are always interpreting everything you experience.

I like to think of this like looking through binoculars at something up close. You can’t see anything correctly right? It is totally disorienting, you won’t even know what you are looking at.

It is very much the same with how we interpret the meaning of something when we are disappointed. We see a distorted view of it. We are not looking at the whole picture when we do this, just a fun house version of our pain.

Is it a loss… or are you not good enough? Is it disappointing… or another indicator that you’ll never be enough? Are you sad and hurt… or are you not worthy?

When we add one of these false and shaming narratives, to our already valid pain we double our problems. Now we are hurting and believing the worst about ourselves.

The pain and disappointment are hard enough without us layering on top of it our shameful narratives about why we experienced this let down, rejection or heartbreak.

Sift the pain from the narratives about who you are.

Invite a loving friend or therapist into that process if helpful. You may be hurting, but that doesn’t change the inherent worth of who you are.

3. Don’t get stuck in the disappointment.

Finally, as we head into, are in the middle of, or recovering slowly from an unmet expectation, remember you are on a ride that doesn’t end here.

Our brains often get stuck in the hardest part of the story, but that is just one chapter, just one drop down on the ride.

Hold on to who you are, name your pain as what it is—disappointment, loss, rejection, betrayal, sadness—and feel the wind on your face as you ride down.

It's scary to sit in your feelings because sometimes it feels like they will never end; we fear we'll be stuck in them forever, like the top of the scariest part of a roller coaster. But here is what I do know for sure from my work as a therapist: Feelings always move, and we'll always move through them. Feelings are not a permanent state, and when we begin to understand that, our emotions feel less overwhelming.

I sit with so many people as they move through their scary feelings. At times it's almost like you can feel the intensity of the feeling fill the room, and we stay with the discomfort together. They bravely face, feel, and name what they have perhaps not named or felt before. And what I find is that the intensity of the feelings eventually and always lessens. There is also often great relief at having allowed these feelings. And usually, there is new insight about themselves, their interior world, or their next steps that they couldn't have learned by avoiding their feelings.

I don't like sitting in my feelings either, but I find I usually like the decisions I make after doing that much more than the rushed decisions I make avoiding my feelings. We often meet ourselves there, hearing the stories we have been avoiding as we feel what we've been trying not to feel. And God is big enough to meet us there, to hold it all, and to hold us as we move through it.

Feeling the wind on my face with you as we move through our feelings,

Monica