Slings and Arrows
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
It’s normal to experience disappointments in the course of your daily life. These can stop you short many times each day, if we’re talking about small disappointments such as just missing a green light, finding that your grocery store is out of one of your favorite items, or having a friend cancel an outing you had planned together. Now, while they might be jarring, most of these don’t make much of an impact on your overall picture—but larger disappointments certainly can. In fact, they can be the genesis of negative beliefs that don’t serve you at all, and that may run your behavior for decades after they’re created. An event that may have seemed insignificant to others can start you down a path of fear and limited thinking, whittling the cornucopia of possible choices you have in any given moment down to a handful of uninspiring options.
Let’s look at a few ways in which this can play out:
· Most of us have a memory of a parent, even the most excellent one, overreacting to something we did when we were relatively small. Perhaps we were playing happily and decided to add a work of art to the wall of the family home. There was a sense of excitement in the idea of making something beautiful (at least to us) and sharing that with a parent. When it came time for the big reveal, we displayed the opus proudly only to be faced with the fury of someone who now had to find a way to clean it up, and thought we should have known better. That feels like a slap in the face when our intentions are innocent and happy. An unfortunate memory like this can impress us in ways that last a lifetime. We may come away from it with beliefs such as, “I can’t do anything right,” “No one wants what I have to give,” or “My family doesn’t understand or appreciate me.” And such beliefs can corrode one’s enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence in subconscious ways that are powerful, but can remain mysterious, because you may not even remember the event as you get older.
· The first few years of school usually hold some difficult social situations. Kids start relating to each other in more complex ways, and experience the results of others learning through trial and error. Most of us experience at least a betrayal or two, fights, resentments, and competitions for attention. While everyone learns, so many disappointments and hurt feelings proceed from these social experiments. If patterns emerge, we may come away with beliefs like, “No one likes me,” “Everyone is mean and it’s not even worth trying,” or even just “I hate school.” There’s often little formal instruction at educational institutions on general communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, sharing, and other essential skills, and these beliefs can remain ingrained if we don’t figure out better ways of relating and coping on our own.
· In high school, most kids experience life with a high degree of angst in the areas of identity, social acceptance, and achievement, whether academic, athletic, or artistic. Popularity is often the coin of the realm, so everyone jostles for position both through both attempting to prove their own worth and attempting to disprove others’ worth in order to seem more important. It’s normal for kids to play with dominance tactics, including those designed to provoke or humiliate others. Less competitive, more naturally cooperative kids can have a hard time dealing with these status games, and end up feeling stung and embittered by confrontations. Most of us rack up more experiences of betrayal, embarrassment, and disappointment during these years; these memories can remain particularly painful because we’re experiencing many things for the first time. We may assume that this is how all such situations will go in the future. We don’t realize that our peers will continue to grow and mature, as well as gain experience, confidence and clarity, and so will we. A humiliation experienced at this time of heightened hormones and emotions can seem like death and destruction on a scale that adults find hard to understand. We may begin to believe that, “I’ll never get what I want,” “I’m not attractive,” or something general like “People are horrible.”
· As we enter adulthood, we understand that we are now more responsible for our own choices. We start having to sink or swim, making decisions independently about relationships and leisure time, life direction, health, diet and fitness, and financial matters, and bear the consequences. Mistakes made here can quickly color our faith in our own abilities, since we’re “supposed” to be able to handle ourselves by now, but in reality may still have many gaps in understanding of basic mechanics, and a lack of supportive habits, which must be built over time. Beliefs like, “I can’t keep up with everything I need to do,” “I’ll never be able to support myself financially,” or “I’ll never be able to get where I want to go in life” may result from early failures.
· At any time, we can experience life-changing disappointments such as the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or the sudden loss of a job. Unfortunate beliefs like, “I’ll never recover,” “I’ll never find love again,” or “I’m a loser” may spring into being.
Did any of those beliefs sound familiar to you? Disappointments affect all of us, and yet there isn’t much help available for actually processing the often overwhelming emotions and the negative beliefs that result from them in everyday life. Most people either talk things through with family or friends, or see a psychological professional to gain perspective on the situation, but usually neither of these addresses the trauma we may be holding in the physical body or the emotional patterns that keep us limited. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know what I’m going to say here—techniques with a somatic (meaning involving the body) element seem to be the most helpful for supporting rapid change in these areas. In my world, there’s just nothing like EFT/Tapping for shaking limitations loose and helping us to shift our understanding of past events and their role in shaping who we are. Using it helps us to gently but effectively let go of the adverse effects of painful events that are now part of the distant past. Once you have a chance to lighten the emotional load you’ve been carrying from past disappointments, a new world of possibility opens, and that, to me, is one of the most exhilarating experiences there is.