How to Deal With Disappointment
How to Deal With Disappointment
Though many of us do whatever we can to avoid it, disappointment in life is inescapable. Most of the disappointments we experience are a result of the expectations and projections we put upon the world around us, as well as our illusions and delusions about ourselves. However, once we learn this, disappointment becomes a fertile ground in which to grow.
Steps for Dealing with Disappointment
If you’re dealing with disappointment, here are a few steps you should consider taking:
- Accept that you’re feeling this way and that it’s OK to feel disappointed.
- Analyze which factors that led to your disappointment were under your control and which were not. Accept that not everything is under your control, and that this moment doesn’t define you as a person.
- Recognize what you have learned through this process. Even if you didn’t obtain what you were hoping to, embrace this as a moment of personal growth. Every movie, show, and novel features characters who go through periods of disappointment and failure. How did it shape their journey?
- Re-evaluate your expectations. Were you aiming for an unachievable goal? Or are you setting the bar too low for fear of failure? Adjust accordingly. Plot out a future course that features concrete, realistically achievable objectives and how you will get there.
With that in mind, we would like to share this quote from a poet and philosopher of the corporate world, David Whyte.
An Agency for Transformation
“Disappointment is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground, engine of trust and generosity in a human life. The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak. To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.”
The Greater Pattern of Existence
What we call disappointment may be just the first stage in our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence. To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events places and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; disappointment is the first, fruitful foundation of genuine heartbreak from which we risk ourselves in a marriage, in a work, in a friendship, or with life itself.
The Takeaway
When we try to avoid disappointment, we are only cheating ourselves. In fact, heartbreak in life is a great teacher. These are the moments in which we truly learn who we are.
Embrace Disappointment
The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away, the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the onward way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, and where what initially looks like a betrayal, eventually puts real ground under our feet.
The Takeaway
Disappointment brings reality into focus. Illusions fall away and we come face to face with what truly is. We develop a new relationship with reality. This is the fertile ground for our new life.
A Friend to Transformation
Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, more rewarding.
The Takeaway
We need to be brave enough to meet heartbreak head-on. It’s our philosophy that disappointment is not something to fear – It is something to walk towards.
Depression Treatment Center in Los Angeles, CA
Life is always evolving. Disappointment teaches us to be supple enough to meet it honestly. Without it, resilience does not exist and we do not grow.
It is the mission of Barn Life Recovery to help people love life again through our mental health services. We help people dealing with an assortment of mental illnesses including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and grief. Learn more about our Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) and our Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP).
