Why do expectations hurt and how can we deal with them.
Dawn Sinnott writes: “I’m sitting at the party. I planned it so perfectly. I would throw a surprise party for my best friend on my birthday. She’ll be so surprised. She greets everyone, thanking them for coming. She seems to be happy, yet….I know her better than anyone. I don’t feel that she’s excited as I expected her to be. I don’t sense the appreciation that I had expected. I start to feel upset. I started to feel annoyed. What is this other feeling that’s gnawing at me? I start to feel annoyed. All the planning, All the work, giving up my birthday celebration. I quietly acknowledge what I’m feeling and remind myself: Expectations are premeditated resentments”.
Why do expectations hurt?
“Why do expectations hurt”, this is like one of the most common lines in movies, usually the romantic ones. “Robert…it’s my fault(lady Sobbing), I was expecting a lot from you…I should have known earlier that you didn’t love me(Cries profusely)”. Okay, this could easily happen to any of us in our actual life, in fact, it happens “a lot”. I’m not talking about you crying over some dude called “Robert”, but about expectations hurting us.
We can classify expectations into 2 forms, the first one is more of a personal one, these are the expectations that we place on ourselves, an easier example of it could be as simple as someone setting a personal goal. And the second involves expectations that we place on others, it could be your friends, lovers, parents, etc.
Expectations placed on your own self
So how can something as simple and positive as setting a personal goal could be counterproductive? Alright, when you place an expectation on yourself means you have laid out an expected reality in your mind which is expected to be achieved in a set amount of time. So here’s the catch, attaining a certain goal or fulfilling a self-set expectation requires you to behave and act in accordance with that which helps you fulfill the expectation. But, when the reality of your own behavior falls short of your standards, your expectations will not match the reality of the world. For example, you may want to lose 10 pounds in the next 3 months but you slip in a cheat meal, skip the gym here and there and voila, soon you’ll realize that you fell short of your own expectations hence, you become upset, drown ourselves in self-loathing, shame and guilt.
Expectations placed on others
Forget about not being able to fulfill a personal expectation, which is more in our control, a lot of us place unimaginable expectations on others…which is like betting on someone else’s reality to match with our own imagination. The odds of it being turned into our favor is ridiculously low but despite this fact, our stupid human nature hopes that it lands in our favor. Here’s the honest truth about placing expectations on others, when the all too human performance of other people falls short of our own expectations, as will inevitably happen from time to time, we’ll feel bitter and self-righteous. So next time you get upset because someone else’s behavior did not match your expectations, know that you are being played by your own mind because at the end of the day, you cannot control other’s reality and despite this fact, placing your own happiness at the mercy of someone else’s behavior is the quickest way to feel bitter and resentful.
What can we do about it
So now that we know how expectations can affect us and make us feel bad about life, the real question remains to be “ What can we do about it going forward?”.
By now it is clear that for us humans it is tempting to live in a fantasy world of our own making. This fantasy exists in the form of expectations, there are 2 types of expectations :
- Things you expect from yourself.
- Things you expect from others.
“Don’t eliminate expectations, learn to balance them against reality”
Balancing Self Expectations
Suppose let’s say you set a personal goal of losing 10 pounds in 3 months, what happens if at the end of 3 months the milestone is not achieved? Of course, you end up being upset, this could quickly turn into a self-loathing attitude, and then there is the feeling of shame and guilt. The important thing here is to realize that most of the criticism is self-inflicted and the key is not to beat yourself up if your reality failed to live up to the standards you had set yourself to.
So the way to balance an emotional let down is to substitute it with a practical one.
It’s important to understand that when your self-expectations let you down it’s because, either your expectations far exceeded the reality, that it was just impossible at the moment to bridge the gap between the two. Or your own “behaviors” and I put this in double quotes to emphasize the fact that it’s your behavior which is at fault and not you as an individual, the behavior is something which can be changed to get the desired outcome. So it’s completely useless to beat yourself up with self-destructive statements like “I’m a failure”, “I’m no good, I can never do this”, “I don’t know what I was thinking”, “I can’t take this” etc, etc.
Balancing expectations placed on other people
The need for reciprocity is deeply embedded in our nature. This is actually a serious one and right now in this very moment you might have certain expectations from your closed ones, and chances are that you are secretly hoping these to be met. I mean why not? But what if they don’t behave the way you would want them to? Does that mean they don’t love you or care for you anymore? If yes? How sure are you about that? Have you ever considered the fact that they might actually have no idea about your thoughts? So, the best way to deal with such feelings is to communicate with the person you have expectations from and hope that they have the humility to understand what you expect of them and why it means a lot to you. If they really do care about you, then they’ll communicate back and there is a good chance that you’ll have a better understanding of why they did not behave the way you wanted them to behave. The next thing you do is to start negotiating with that person until you both arrive at a solution that works.
The other day I was reading a book which actually talked something on the lines of why having expectations from others can affect your mental health and the author says that it’s an undeniable fact that human relationships including marriages are rarely spontaneously reciprocal. Here the author is talking about people who do something good to others and expect them to do good in return and if they don’t reciprocate back, they get upset and depressed. And the reason he says why these human relationships are not spontaneously reciprocal is because of the fact that human beings are different. This problem can only be solved with continued effort, which involves mutual consensus, communication, compromise, and growth. It requires negotiation and hard work.
Recommended book: Feeling Good by David Burns
