disappointment

Disappointment: a blessing in disguise?

disappointment
Blessing in disguise?

The disappointing terrorist attack of 9/11 was clearly not a blessing in disguise. Evil got its way and many people were very badly physically and emotionally hurt. Nor in any conceivable way can many a disappointing setback be described as a piece of good fortune even if tiny morsels of something positive might be salvaged from such events. On the other hand sometimes a personal trouble can have a unexpected opportunity for a helpful outcome. For example occasionally a bout of illness can help a patient re-appraise an unhealthy lifestyle. The difficulty is in recognising what might possibly be a blessing when your expectations are so severely dashed against the painful rocks of reality. Here are 5 questions that will help you look for any blessing in disguise after you suffer a disappointment.

Was the disappointment due to your unrealistic expectations?

Sometimes when you think life is predictable, the universe has other plans. You may be taken by surprise, if for some reason you complacently suppose calamity will always affect somebody else and not yourself. Yet people do get injured on the roads in large numbers. Nobody can tell what is around the corner. Who can say one won’t get run over by a bus tomorrow?

You may assume you always get your just deserts. Don’t we reap what we deserve? But actually this is may not be the case. A drunken driver or a badly maintained aircraft can be the sole cause of mayhem to innocent passengers.

Was the disappointment something of your own making?

Not everyone learns from their own mistakes. The painful inflamed tendon in my arm was frustrating as it forced me to rest and ration my work of splitting logs instead of overdoing it everyday. It was my wife, who rightly pointed out, that I needed to learn to pace myself in re-using muscles and tendons which have grown tight and weak due to under-use. Apparently it is a common problem for gardeners to rush out in the spring and strain their backs after a winter of inactivity.

Did the disappointment show greater effort was needed?

I got excessively cross with my young grandson who was refusing to abide by the rules of the board game we were playing. Sometimes adults forget just how noisy, untidy and demanding they themselves were when children. My emotionality spoiled what should have been a leisurely family occasion. I have now resolved to try harder to be more patient with the boy whilst still remaining firm about the rules.

“What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I’ve already done.” (Robert Wyatt, rock musician)

If we see a setback as a challenge then it can be a stimulant for bigger effort.

Did the disappointment broaden your horizons?

Say you were to suffer a major misfortune such as losing your job through redundancy, or your spouse through marital breakdown or death. Then you would be faced with a huge challenge. Perhaps having to find a livelihood doing a different kind of work. Or having to cope as a single person with no partner to intimately support you face life. In either case you will probably be obliged to get out of your comfort zone: deal with new kinds of situation: learn new skills: meet new people.

“Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives.” (William Throsby Bridges, senior military officer)

If you happened to have a tendency towards self-pity here is an opportunity to stop adopting the victim role. This role seeks to focus on blaming something or someone else for one’s troubles. If you are such a person you will have a chance to learn instead the role of the survivor and adopt the courage that is required to tackle the unknown and experience the new confidence that comes from success.

Did the disappointment mean you need to put your hope in something beyond yourself?

When you feel like you don’t have the physical, mental, or emotional strength to pull through, you are challenged to possibly put trust in something more than yourself – whatever that may be.

” As someone who has faced as much disappointment as most people, I’ve come to trust not that events will always unfold exactly as I want, but that I will be fine either way.” (Marianne Williamson, spiritual teacher)

This reminds me of the biblical story of Jonah. His conscience told him to go to do a job of work but he didn’t want to do it and so he journeyed in the opposite direction only to end up in the sea and swallowed by a whale. In his distress he called to his God for help, vowing to make amends for his disobedience. The whale vomited him safely on to dry land.

Conclusion on disappointment

I would suggest there is no such thing as bad luck. Facing and dealing with setbacks is a part of life for all of us.

If you will, you can choose to find only the negative in your disappointment.

“When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.” (Joyce Meyer, Christian speaker)

Or you can look for possible blessings in disguise.

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.” (Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist poet)

Emanuel Swedenborg, spiritual philosopher, claimed there is a loving Divine Providence, under whose rule, bad things are allowed to happen, if some lessons of life can result. According to this view, your time here on earth can teach you how to be more spiritually mature and thus experience a deeper long-lasting happiness.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., Christian activist)

Copyright 2015 Stephen Russell-Lacy
Author of  Heart, Head & Hands  Swedenborg’s perspective on emotional problems

Posted on26th February 2015AuthorEditorCategoriesConsciousness, Latest post, Meaning and inspiration, Meaning of life, SufferingTags, ,, , ,

How can I swallow the bitter pills of life?

Bitter pills of lifePeople who moan about the bitter pills of life can get you down.

For instance I don’t like Lawrence. He is the sort of individual who you may also know. Someone who comes across as a bit of a moaner and much to my embarrassment is not slow to criticise even his own children behind their backs. He once said, “I’ll always be disappointed”. Yes, he feels hard done by about the bitter pills of life.

How different from his sister Janet who is a delight to be around — sweet-natured and full of fun. Talk about chalk and cheese.

When they were youngsters their parents’ fortunes changed and the family was obliged to move home from quite a nice town to a poor area many miles away. They both lost everything they had known — familiar haunts, places where they were known, and long-standing friends and instead ended up in a derelict neighbourhood, with locations they was unaccustomed to. Lawrence was obliged to attend a rough boys school where he was picked on as different and he never settled. He ended up in a low paid dead end job. He would never have admitted it but his negative attitude of mind is reflected in this quote:

“Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.” (Nicole Krauss, The History of Love)

Later, he was faced with the bitter pills of life including having to depend financially on his wife — who earned more than him. His frustration of failure on which he blamed a disrupted education stayed with him and the marriage eventually ended when she decided she had had enough of his embittered resentment.

His sister, Janet was a different kettle of fish. She had accepted her unpleasant situation and tried to make the best of it. She worked hard and got by okay.  Not that she had an easier ride. Desperate to get away from socially disadvantaged circumstances she left home early but found loneliness and vulnerability in the big city. But she battled on. To my mind she is living proof that it is not events that harm us but the way we respond to them. She swallowed the bitter pills of life and got on with it. This viewpoint is well expressed by Martin Luther King.

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”

And so life wasn’t easy for Janet. But she didn’t become corrosively scornful like Lawrence, despite her having one or two personal crises when going through difficult times of anxiety and loss. Like with her brother, her personal path in life was a rocky road. But unlike his storing up of anger, hurt and disillusionment with each new disappointment, she learned from her mistakes and tried again so that at each time of trouble she responded by moving on rather than staying stuck. She never became self-focused in her thinking but was always ready to empathise with the feelings of those around her never giving in to resentment and self-pity.

 “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” (Nelson Mandela)

How can you find forgiveness to replace resentment? How might you swallow the bitter pills of life without becoming embittered?

The best answer I have found is a spiritual one. I have tried to deal with part of the answer in my post How to feel less resentment.  In his book Personal Revelation, Michael Stanley offers us the view that bitter experience is often a crucial part of spiritual growth. This despite the fact that usually we read about spiritual illumination as an uplifting experience; a common view being that there is an initial sweetness of an elevated state of mind as you experience new-found hope of personal healing and meaning.

However, Stanley suggests that inner awareness can also stir up some vaguely disturbing inner feelings. He gives as a reason the way you start to see yourself in the light of a deeper ethos; more clearly recognising some previously out-of-sight individual failings. Janet was ready to admit some unflattering truths about herself — her fear of being let down, and her tendency to put off doing things. But she was prepared to look honestly at herself. She found that when getting deeper into the nitty-gritty of self-examination, things can get a bit upsetting.

In other words, the book is suggesting the deciding factor is when you realise the need to forgo complacent self-satisfaction in your good outward actions in favour of a humbler alertness to the true nature of your inner life. This is the bitter experience of appreciating to what extent your inward self-centred justifications and manoeuvrings have been actually distorting the new higher ideas and principles.

The book Heart, Head & Hands is an interpretation of Emanuel Swedenborg’s spiritual philosophy. The secret is learning how to rely on your spiritual source rather than continuing with the mistaken notion that you can live in isolation from the force and energy of love and light that created your life. According to this view you need to give up the illusion that you have the ability, of yourself, apart from this higher divine power, to become wise and do good.

Copyright 2013 Stephen Russell-Lacy
Author of Heart, Head & Hands Swedenborg’s perspective on emotional problems

Disappointment — How to get over it?

disappointment
Michael Phelps

Michael Phelps was the most decorated Olympian swimmer of all time. To most people for someone with his ability anything less than several gold medals would have been a disappointment. But  do they not need to learn a lesson about life?

“If I bring back only one gold, people are going to say it’s a disappointment. But not too many of them own an Olympic gold medal, so if I get one I’m going to be happy.”
(Michael Phelps)

Yet many people suffer the tears of disappointment. A lot of things can go wrong for you: a setback in your career: loss of money in a business venture: feeling let down by a friend or professional colleague: the heartbreak of being disappointed in love: even the disappointment of a favourite football team losing an important match.

When you least feel like it, you desperately need the, not-so-simple, act of picking yourself up, pulling yourself together, and going constructively forward. But where do you find this resilience? How can you move on from the tears of disappointment?

A Taoist story about disappointment

According to one spiritual perspective, disappointing events, despite appearances to the contrary, aren’t always as bad as you first assume. There is an ancient Taoist parable that tells of an old man and his son who lived alone in poor conditions. Their only possession of value was a horse. One day, the horse ran away. The neighbours came by to offer sympathy, telling the old man how unlucky he was.

`How do you know?’ asked the old man.

The following day the horse returned, bringing with it several wild horses, which the old man and his son locked inside their gate. This time the neighbours hurried over to congratulate the old man on his good fortune.

`How do you know?’ asked the old man.

The next thing that happened was that his son tried to ride one of the wild horses but fell off and broke his leg. The neighbours were quick to tell the old man that this was a disastrous turn of events.

`How do you know?’ asked the old man.

Soon after, the army came through, press-ganging young men into service to fight a battle far away. All the local young men were taken – except the old man’s son, because his leg was broken!

In other words appearance can be deceptive. Maybe there is a hidden benefit or at least a  lesson in something going wrong if only you could see it.

Disappointment due to an unreasonable attitude

One possible hidden lesson can be to do with what is unreasonable in your attitude towards others. Disappointed in your adult child’s choice of career or your best friend’s choice of sexual partner? You might ask yourself whether this possibly indicates you are expecting someone to be the way you want them to be and not being what they want to be? If so why not try letting events to simply take their course accepting people as they are? Why not allow them freedom to do what they feel is right for them, without trying to control them, without trying to impose your own ideas and beliefs, without trying to fight against them? You might then feel less disappointed in what they do.

Exaggerating the importance of something

Perhaps you need to ask whether a feeling of disappointment might be due to your exaggerating the significance of something? If so, you could try thinking of all the bad things that could have happened but didn’t. Would it really be the end of the world if you lose your social standing, your job, or even your spouse?

It may be too late to recover the situation. But is it too late to apply what you have learned to what happens next? That is if you have learned anything of value about where you might have been going wrong. New opportunities arise in a changed situation. ‘When one door closes, another opens’. You could let go of the old circumstance and grasp the new one. Don’t give up on your dream — you never know what is waiting for you behind a certain door.

Not all that happens is connected with you

If you are upset about failing in something you might ask whether there is a lesson here to do with your attitude towards yourself. Perhaps you have the attitude that life owes you a triumph which you deserve? Or perhaps you see yourself as worthless and undeserving of any accomplishment and what happened just proves this.

But surely failure doesn’t necessarily mean there is always something good or bad about you? Okay, some of what happened could have been prevented. But other things were facets of every day life that you have to contend with and over which you have little or no control. Some days the sun comes out and shines persistently, on other days it rains with a ferocity that is hard to comprehend.

Not all is at it appears

No one can clearly see what will happen in the next hour, never mind in future months and years. But if you sense in any way, an all-knowing divine force within the workings of the universe, then you might wonder whether there is a higher benevolence, concerned for your inner happiness: and that despite your outward disappointments there might be unforeseen eventualities helpful to you.

One such potential benefit of disappointment is the chance it offers for us to learn a  lesson of life conducive to personal development.

“Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.”(Unknown author)

Copyright 2013 Stephen Russell-Lacy
Author of Heart, Head & Hands Swedenborg’s perspective on emotional problems