How to deal with life’s disappointments

Disappointment happens to us all. Expectations are not met, you fail to get the job, your new partner proves to be less than ideal, you can’t yet afford your ideal home, your new hairstyle draws suppressed giggles from your workmates: disappointment is a possibility every time you do anything.

But life’s inevitable challenges, failures and let-downs don’t have to be destroyers of your happiness — it’s how you deal with life’s disappointments that will determine your true capacity for happiness. After all, anyone can be euphoric when everything is going well but that’s just a response to circumstances. Your underlying capacity for happiness is revealed when external circumstances are challenging.

Choices

When something bad happens to you your immediate response will be dictated by the questions that you ask and that in turn will be shaped by your mindset. It’s not a matter of thinking in a right or wrong way; it’s about thinking in a way that works.

Perhaps the most productive approach when things go bad is to see your disappointment as a gift. It is an opportunity for many things. It is an opportunity to experience humility and to be aware of a greater plan at work as opposed to focusing on what you want to happen. Disappointment is also an opportunity for learning.

Life coach Yvonne Collier says, “Remind yourself that disappointment is feedback and be prepared to adjust your actions to take on this feedback. Then take advantage of the gap.

“When things go wrong, there is a gap before you act and react. The gap can be filled with an immediate knee-jerk reaction or it can be filled with something else. What story will you tell yourself in the ‘gap’? Are you a victim or a hero? You have a choice.”

The choices that you make in that gap between disappointment and your action will determine the flavour of what happens to you next. Collier points out that you choose the stories that you will tell yourself about what has happened.

Business coach Victor Sultas says that in the gap the best thing you can do is to ask “generative questions”. He explains, “It is important to ask the right kinds of questions when a disappointments or failure occur. Ask yourself, ‘How is running away from what has happened helping you or others?’ Make a mental and verbal stand by asking, ‘What other options do I have? What else is available to me? Who can assist me? What is the opportunity in this situation? What’s right about this that I’m not getting? What’s the gift of this situation? What are the possibilities?’

“Start by focusing on what the options are and possibilities appear. Disappointments contain seeds of success if you are willing to see that you create our own reality.”

The words that keep coming up here are “possibilities” and “choices”. This all implies a requirement for you to be flexible in your thinking.

Yoga practitioner Meggan Brummer has some practical advice for fostering your own flexibility: “What’s important is to remain flexible in your mind — to keep seeing things from a fresh perspective. This is where meditation and breathing come in. When your mind is continually bombarded with thoughts it wears you down and saps your energy: your prana (life force). When your prana is low, the mind automatically clings to the negative and is unable to see the positive.

“Meditation gives you the inner strength to endure situations, no matter how unbearable they may appear at the time. It brings qualities inside you of centeredness, steadfastness, equanimity. One of the many definitions of yoga is samatwam Yoga uchayate. It means ‘remaining equanimous in all situations’.”

When things go well it’s normal to feel happy and when disappointments occur it’s easy to feel sad, angry, or agitated. Looking for the gifts in what has happened, reframing it and using techniques like meditation to focus your mind and transcend your emotions enables you to avoid the devastation that disappointment can bring and maintain your happiness throughout.

Emotional rescue

Having said all of this, it’s hard to consider your options and make good choices if your disappointment has left you a blubbering mess in the corner. So you need to think in advance about the emotions that disappointment will inevitably generate and how you might deal with them. You need an EAP or Emotion Action Plan (never underestimate the power and prestige you add to something by giving it an acronym).

The first thing to be aware of is that emotions can be signposts to what is going on inside you. Equally, they can also be red herrings dragged across your path and distracting you from the true issues at hand.

Victor Sultas says, “Each emotion is filled with information; it is a message or an action signal to alert you. It is asking you to take notice, observe and be aware. Everyone Deals differently with emotions. How you manage emotions is your individual choice. I observe my emotions first and then ask them what they are communicating to me. Sometimes the body needs to release pent-up emotions so I walk, do yoga or move and stretch.”

Meggan Brummer says, “You may have noticed that when you feel sad your exhalation is long and when you are happy your in-breath is longer. When you’re anxious your breathing pattern changes again and becomes shorter, harder. If you want to stabilise your emotions then yogic breathing is the most effective way to do so.

“When you work with your breath you are working with your mind and with your emotions. Sometimes you are in a storm of emotions. Nothing you do seems to help and you feel victimised by your emotions. A regular practice of yogic breathing (pranayamas) and meditation will help to stabilise your emotions.”

Your EAP

When disappointment happens: 

• Watch your emotionsAsk yourself what they reveal to you
• Engage in physical activity
• Use breathing to control your emotions
• Meditate and find awareness of your emotions — this awareness itself can change the emotions
   

To wallow or not to wallow?

When you experience a let-down in life, to adopt a false positivity is as damaging as becoming excessively negative. Research has shown that simply repeating positive “affirmations” that are not genuinely believed simply serves to heighten anxiety.

If you feel pain at some disappointing life event then experiencing that pain is to some degree appropriate and necessary. The question becomes how much of the experience is necessary and when does it cross over into harmful wallowing.

Who could say that they have never wallowed, rolling in the muddy waters of some unproductively murky mood? Even as you do it, you know you shouldn’t, but the pain itself that has initiated the wallowing seems to be somehow soothed by the rich, negative emotions you have immersed yourself in.

A touch of wallowing, or at least the willingness to experience the nature of your disappointment, is a good thing. The key then is being able to recognise the negative state of wallowing as opposed to the positive state of engagement.

Buddhism offers some practical advice on this. Buddhist Nun Robina Courtin notes, “From a Buddhist perspective the mind is a knowable thing; there are laws and fundamentals which you can learn that govern the mind which you can then build upon. These laws will dictate that there are very specific characteristics to the unhappy, neurotic, negative states. There are also characteristics of the positive states. You first have to learn these laws and then start to practise.

“In the Buddhist model of the mind, positive characteristics are feeling spacious, peaceful and connected to others and there is a sense of harmony. Negative states include anger, jealousy, hurt and there is no sense of connectedness.”

To be able to recognise whether your own wallowing is of a negative or positive nature, you need therefore simply look at the qualities that go with it. If you’re feeling angry, jealous, or hurt for a prolonged period then you’re in a negative state and it’s time to move on.

Don’t look back

When it comes to moving on from disappointment, it’s fine and sometimes necessary to look back to to see the event it for what it is. What is not appropriate though is to keep looking back once you’ve made an assessment within yourself of what happened and decided to move on. The folly of looking back once you have made your contract with yourself is epically illustrated in many myths, from the biblical tale of Lot’s wife to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

These stories tell us very clearly that you can engage with an issue but, once you’ve done so and arrived at a resolution and agreement, whether it be with your higher self, your God-self, or an external God, then keep your gaze forward, do not look back, it is in front of you that your destiny and your life lie.

Dealing with disappointment

How to get beyond the emotions and create an honest awareness of what happened:

• Make a list of the things that you did to contribute to the situation. Do not allow yourself to write about others or even consider them; this is about you. Write at least six things that you have done to contribute.
• Look at these points; embrace them, love them, accept them. Do not analyse, question or justify your actions. Now let it go.
• Spend some quiet time saying a thankyou for whatever gifts the disappointment has brought or will bring. In that quiet time, contemplate how you would like to move forward from this point.
   

The meditation factor

We are extolling the virtues of meditation here, or at least of the capacity to enter a meditative state to help you cope with disappointment.  Obviously though, if you have never meditated before or if you don’t have a knowledge of your own mind, you will not be able to suddenly move into a meditative state or develop instantaneous self awareness when disappointment comes along.

Think of it as being like sailing a yacht: you don’t wait until a storm hits you in mid-ocean to learn how to sail. Your mind is your yacht and you need to know everything about it from its rigging, its sails, its hull and its keel to the way it performs in different winds. The degree to which you are prepared and have trained yourself in the working of your yacht will determine how you handle the conditions on any given day and, most especially, when the cold, squally winds of disappointment whip inside your windbreaker and place an icy grip on your nether regions.

If you want to learn to sail a ship you go to people who know ships. Probably your best bet would be a ship’s captain but a sailor would be able to offer some help and a ship-builder might be useful, too. If you want to train your mind, you’ll need to find someone who has done it themselves to guide you on your way.

To do this, according to Robina Courtin, “You need a person who knows how to look at their mind. In the West we have therapists, people who are supposed to be good at introspection. They are supposed to be good at being a sounding board for you to see yourself.

“Buddhism is being your own therapist. In Buddhism you are really training your mind to look inside and see the neurotic states of mind and the positive ones and then to slowly grow the positive and weaken the negative. It’s as simple as that but we so mystify it.”

By using meditation and engaging with your disappointments in an aware and prepared manner, your happiness can remain undiminished by life’s set-backs. This is not about denying reality; it’s about embracing it and acknowledging that happiness is not a transient emotion but an ambient state of being. Through developing coping mechanisms for the disappointing times, you can prevent yourself becoming lost in negative emotion and can stay squarely in the centre of your happiness.

Terry Robson is editor of WellBeing. He is a journalist, broadcaster, and author. His book Failure IS an Option is available through ABC Books.