Dealing with Life's Disappointments

Years ago, I read a compilation of six-word memoirs for which the editors Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith asked writers and others to summarize their life story in six words. What would your six-word memoir be? Mine would be lifted from the book’s pithy title: Not Quite What I Was Planning. 

Life can be described in many ways but rarely is it predictable. If we are fortunate enough to take a good number of tours around the sun, we will see life unfold in ways we could never have foreseen. Yet so many suffer when life doesn’t turn out as they had planned, expected, or hoped. So often people in my office find themselves stuck with this discrepancy, arguing with the givens, trying to change the past, and bargaining with the way life has unfolded so far. 

This is where I find that perfect six-word memoir serves as a helpful reminder. In youth, if all goes well (and even when it does not), it’s possible to imagine a limitless fabulous life for our future selves. Once a person reaches middle age, if not earlier, life has knocked us around some and invariably has handed us disappointments along the way.  If we manage the developmental task of digesting life’s disappointments, we are free to now make the most of the life we have rather than the life we once dreamed of. If not, you may find yourself in an existential crisis asking “is this all there is?”

How then, do we manage life’s disappointments?

• Don’t take the unpredictability of life personally. Realize that most people don’t live the life they planned for, hoped for, or expected.

• Mourn your disappointments fully so they are integrated into your being and life story.

• Find ways to adjust to the new normal. Try not to get drawn into thinking how your life “should” have been, based on the dreams of your younger self or a comparison to other lives that seem more attractive. Instead, fully embrace the life you have and endeavor to make it more satisfying in attainable ways. 

• Realize that just because you have suffered disappointments, or life isn’t quiet what you’d thought it would be, doesn’t mean that life can’t be grand. 

If we adjust our expectations to come to terms with the fact that yes, this is life, even if not quite what I was planning, then we are more free to enjoy the life we in fact have. 

Image by Jake Heckey from Pixabay 

How to not Resent Your Partner

Bravo to Michelle Obama for destigmatizing couples counseling by sharing her experiences with Barak in her memoir Becoming.  She describes a process in which the therapist posed questions that made them “think hard about why we felt the way we felt” and helped them to separate “our weapons from our wounds.” Needless to say, it sounds like they had a good couple’s therapist because that describes how good couple’s therapy should go!

In her memoir she gives a lovely example of how she dealt with her resentment when Barak became more involved in politics and had less time to be home with the family. She shares how she grew resentful when he would be able to have time for his workouts when she didn’t, and how she would resent having the family eat dinner late when he came home late from work. As she describes it, “I began to see how I’d been stoking the most negative parts of myself caught up in the notion that everything was unfair and then assiduously, like a Harvard-trained lawyer, collecting evidence to feed that hypothesis.” 

I share this example because it illustrates such a common dynamic in couples counseling. One is injured and can double-down in self-righteousness and resentment because the evidence of injury does in fact exist if we look for it. But as I shared in my last post on wrestling with resentment, what good does this do other than to give us justification for not having to take responsibility for our own feelings? It is even trickier to take responsibility when there is someone there (your partner) so conveniently available to blame. 

But let’s see what Michelle learned to do in couple’s therapy. She goes on to share, “I now tried out a new hypothesis. It was possible that I was more in charge of my own happiness than I was allowing myself to be.” Mic drop. Instead of continuing to stew in resentment, she chose to take responsibility for her own happiness rather than make Barak responsible for it. From this realization, she was able to take action on her own behalf and also to communicate that to her husband. So, instead of spending energy resenting Barak’s workouts, she started planning her own workouts by asking her mother to watch the kids while she worked out. Instead of wondering if he’d make it home for dinner, she kept a regular dinnertime for the family- and let him know that if he came home late, he would miss dinner with the family. 

To sum up, what does this example show about how not to resent your partner?   

1)   Notice the wound vs the weapon (wound= feeling unfair, weapon= gathering evidence and stewing in resentment)

2)   Take responsibility for your own feelings (realizing she had more control over her happiness than she thought)

3)   Shift from resentment to self-care (arranging time for herself by finding solutions for childcare; setting boundaries around dinner time).

Photo by Aaron Kittredge from Pexels