Life can be disappointing sometimes, right ?! Here you can find out how we can manage to retain courage and hope.
Life is an incredible gift and miracle, and we should be happy every second that this incredible coincidence has occurred to which we owe our existence. But sometimes it’s just hard to feel. For example, when the one person who you believe is made for you suddenly doesn’t want to know anything more about you. Or someone you love who is ruining himself and there is nothing you can do for him. Or you don’t even get an interview invitation after 50 applications. Or when you get this unique opportunity that you’ve been waiting for years – and then can’t take advantage of it at that very moment …
It’s incredibly frustrating for all of us, sometimes downright emotional torment, when things don’t go the way we want them to – or when things really, really need them. That is why it can be incredibly difficult to come to terms with the disappointments in life and then still regain courage, hope and trust: Because we are afraid of having to go through this frustration and this agony again. But what would life be without courage, hope and trust? In any case, significantly poorer than it can be.
That’s why we need strategies to cope with disappointment – and according to US psychologist Jennice Vilhauer, the following four are particularly helpful.
4 Ways To Cope With Life’s Disappointments
1. Remain specific instead of generalizing
As a rule, we tend to generalize our experiences and infer the future from past experiences. That’s not stupid or anything, but the normal way our brain works: Based on our experiences, it creates patterns that it can apply to new situations. This is easier and more energy-saving than always looking at everything in isolation. But the truth is also: Every situation is different and independent of what we have experienced in the past (apart from the variable “I”).
Just because we failed once in a pressure situation and couldn’t take our chance doesn’t mean we always fail. Just because a relationship didn’t work doesn’t mean that none of our relationships will work. The 51st employer who decides to invite us for an interview does not know that we have unsuccessfully applied to 50 others and already believed that it would never work – because this generalization only takes place in our head, but not in “reality” .
It’s hard for safe to resist this natural urge to think patterns. But if we don’t want to let disappointment guide us, we should at least try.
2. See it as bad luck instead of a targeted attack
Another typically human impulse in the event of setbacks and disappointments is to take them personally and experience them as an attack or devaluation of oneself. That is not stupid either, it is natural for us. We’re basically self-centered. From our point of view, we are at the center of everything that happens around us, so we automatically perceive ourselves as the most important person, around whom everything else revolves. In truth, the aaa absolute majority of humanity doesn’t even know that we exist.
For example, if my application is rejected, it feels as if I have been rejected, but the HR manager in charge doesn’t even know me – and that’s probably why they addressed other applications that had something positive about them. And when someone breaks my heart, they don’t do it to make me unhappy – they make themselves happy.
So it means: When life disappoints us, it happens by chance because we were accidentally in the line of fire, not because we are a bad person and deserve it. Not all individual wishes can always flow into the lowest common denominator of a harmonious world. But why should that even scratch our self-worth a millimeter?
3. Question the classification of the situation
Disappointments are frustrating and feel awful, so we automatically classify what happened to us as “bad” and negative. This increases our frustration because we feel like a victim to whom something bad has just happened. And once again: Typically human! We can’t help but evaluate, and we always proceed in a very simple and binary manner, ie we use pairs of opposites such as “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, “easy” and “difficult”. But the world is actually so much more complex than we could grasp and depict with our petty thinking!
Just because something feels awful to us at a certain moment or stage doesn’t have to be bad. Viewed neutrally, i.e. without our assessment, it is simply an event that has certain consequences and which are followed by other events. Maybe it hurts right now – but even better at a later point in time ?! Or have we not all had the experience that we have experienced something as a huge disappointment and rated it as a catastrophe, and then at some point in retrospect saw: “Wow, if that had not happened to me at the time, I would never have … and would have been today not in the happy position that … “?
Of course we can feel bad after a disappointment in life, but at the same time we should consider the possibility that maybe nothing bad has happened to us – something good has happened to us.
4. Learn from it
A tragic truth of our life and being human is: We can grow much more from failures and disappointments than from successes – at least if we do not allow our courage and hope to be stolen from us. The Beatles were turned down by three labels before they got a record deal. If they had given up after the first rejection and had come to the conclusion that “nothing will be done anyway”, nobody would know them today. Countless success stories begin with defeat and failure, hardly any person becomes strong and self-confident because everything in their life always runs like clockwork. Disappointments may pull the rug from under our feet for a moment. But in the long run they can strengthen us, give us stability and even make us bolder. We just can’t stop trying.
Source used: Psychologytoday.com