Let’s talk about how managing expectations can change your life.
I get it. You’re feeling disappointed, hurt, and angry. You relied on other people, and they let you down. You are left to figure it out yourself, leaving you frustrated, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Why couldn’t they keep their word? Why didn’t they show up for you the way you needed?
These are relatable questions. But what if they are the wrong questions?
When someone lets us down, it shows up in our bodies as disappointment, hurt, and anger. These emotions appear during the most challenging times in our lives, and are often brought on by those we love the most because they are struggling as well. When our hard feelings are not processed in a healthy way, we end up passing bitterness and resentment back and forth, creating a relational shame cycle that will just keep spinning until someone actively chooses to stop it.
We don’t get to choose our emotions. Sometimes we are going to feel disappointed, hurt, or angry. But we can choose how we respond. Getting bitter and resentful towards other people when they are equally frustrated, overwhelmed, exhausted is a choice. And at the center of that choice is a line between victimhood and grace.
It all comes down to expectations.
It is rare that anyone wants to let us down. Most of the time, hurt, disappointment, and anger are shared between two well-meaning people. When we project our own capacity, abilities, and priorities onto others, it’s because our expectations didn’t match the reality of the situation.
Maybe their capacity is more limited than yours.
Maybe their abilities are different than yours.
Maybe their priorities differ.
Even if someone sets out to do harm, and we are justifiably angry, it is still our expectations that need to be adjusted.
We expected them to be trustworthy.
We expected them to share our values about how to treat people.
It’s wonderful that we live in a world of diverse people, with their own unique gifts and talents. It’s also infuriating sometimes, because that also means that people are going to do things their own way, even when our way feels to us more efficient and effective.
The vast majority of disappointment, hurt, and anger that we feel towards other people is due to projection of our own capacities, abilities, and priorities onto the other person. We expect them to respond to life the same way we do. Instead of seeing the other person for who they are, we expect them to mirror ourselves.
This is a recipe for disappointment. We can’t control the behavior of other people. As convenient as it would be if everyone shared our capacity, abilities, and priorities, it would also be the death of ingenuity and innovation. The diversity of thought and the inability to control others is exactly why the human race has been able to accomplish all that it has.
If everyone thought exactly like Mozart, there would be no jazz.
If everyone thought like Monet there would be no Picasso.
If everyone thought like the architects of Notre Dame, there would be no art deco.
You see where I’m headed here. And it still doesn’t help when we are feeling disappointed, hurt, or angry because someone let us down.
So how do we resolve this?
When we begin to feel disappointed, hurt, or angry at someone else, instead of looking outward towards the other person, wishing they would show up for us the way we’d like them to, we must look inward.
What were your expectations? Were they based on your own capacity, abilities, and priorities? Were you hoping, praying, and assuming they shared your mission? Did they share your mission once, but for any number of reasons their capacity, abilities, and priorities shifted?
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with feeling hurt, disappointed, and angry. These are valid feelings that deserve to be honored and respected. They are also signals from our nervous system that something isn’t lining up in your environment.
When we receive those signals, if we focus our attention outward rather than inward, we project our shame outward, harming relationships. We also waste our precious, limited energy on trying to change someone else, when that is impossible.
On the other hand, when we use the signals of hurt, disappointment, and anger to look inward to shine a light on a shift in alignment, we can adjust our expectations to match the external environment. This releases the hard feelings, freeing up your nervous system to respond to things as they are, rather than as we wish they were.
Here’s an example drawn from my own life.
This example involves my relationship with my parents, but this same approach can work for any relationship – marriage, adult children, close friends, even the workplace. I chose to talk about parents specifically to cover the full spectrum of relationships over a lifetime.
I reached adulthood with a profound sense of hurt, disappointment, and anger towards my parents. It doesn’t matter why, because I can’t control other people. And it doesn’t matter whether those feelings were justified, because whether they meant to let me down or not, the wounds exist and are my responsibility to heal.
I spent the first 20 years of my adulthood trying to parse out what was mine and what was my parents’. This is the intricate dance of accountability and boundaries.
Accountability is the inward inventory of our own capacity, abilities, and priorities. Our values, integrity, and personhood is found at the bottom of that inventory.
Boundaries is the external expression of that inventory, when we claim our rightful space in our interactions with others.
The closer we are to someone, the more complex the relationship. The more complex the relationship, the harder it’s going to be to determine where you end and the other person begins. There is no more intimate relationship than the one we hold with our parents. Which is why it took me 20 years to sift through all of it.
To complicate things further, people change. We contract and expand based on experience and current circumstances. Our external environment is constantly changing, and so we must change with it, for better or worse.
This is why lifelong relationships like parent/child, siblings, enduring friendships, and marriage are so challenging. You’ve got two wildly complex individuals who are ever-changing ecosystems unto themselves, trying to synchronize their own ebb and flow with an entirely separate, equally complex moving target.
Yikes!
With my parents, the first crucial discovery was that they were each their own unique ecosystem, something we often forget with our parents since they are kind of a package deal. I had to realize that my internal work with my mom and my internal work with my dad had to be done separately.
Once I had them filed in separate folders inside my brain, I had to begin the painful process of extracting my own identity from theirs. This is a particularly arduous task in dysfunctional relational systems, because there are little to no Boundaries. There is no delineation between what’s yours and what’s theirs.
This was particularly difficult with my mom, in part because culture crams everyone of the same gender into one very crowded box, and partly because I was raised from birth with the express purpose of living out the glory she felt she was denied.
(Ironically, once I’d finally parsed myself from my mother’s identity, I realized that my personality more closely takes after my dad than my mom. This was something I hadn’t considered for the first 40 years of my life. No wonder I’d felt so lost!)
After I had my own identity dialed in – that is, I felt secure in my own capacity, abilities, and priorities – it was time to inventory my expectations. This is the Accountability stage.
Let’s pause here to center Grace for Self.
At this stage if you don’t have your Grace for Self firmly in place, you’re going to slip into one of two traps…
Too much Accountability without enough Grace for Self, and you’re going to slip into self-blame. This shows up as insecurity, co-dependency, and enabling of the other person’s bad behaviors.
Too little Accountability for Self, and you’re going to become bitter, resentful, and distrusting of others. When you go to set Boundariesv, you’ll end up mean, lonely, and possibly even abusive. This shows up as victimhood.
When we’re talking about parent/child relationships, Grace for Self is pretty easy (at least for your conscious brain; the subconscious brain is a whole other blog post). We rely on our parents to provide for our basic needs until we can do so for ourselves. When a parent doesn’t meet those needs, we are left justifiably hurt, disappointed, and angry.
The Accountability for Self in parent/child relationships is a bit trickier. Unlike other relationships, we don’t get to choose our parents. How can we be accountable in a relationship we didn’t have a say in starting in the first place? The answer is actually in the paragraph above.
Until we can do so for ourselves…
When we become an adult, the power dynamic of all our relationships shifts. Where once we didn’t have a choice, we now get to rewrite the rules of our relationship with our significant adults. Parents, caregivers, and other impactful adults are sometimes uncomfortable with this reality. Some of that is neuroscience. Our brains like routine. After 18 years of caring for someone’s every need, a parent’s brain needs time to adjust to this new way of doing things.
Other animal species part with their young by instinct. Studies indicate (Newberry and Swanson, 2008) that animals do feel emotion, so it’s likely that parents in other species grieve when a baby leaves the nest, herd, or burrow. But their instinct is stronger than their grief.
Humans are the only known species with free will. While other animals tearfully wave their young adults off from the doorway, humans think, “This is uncomfortable, so I’m just not going to do it.” This problem is exacerbated further by thousands of years of culture telling women that their sole purpose in life is to be a mother.
What we end up with is generations of women with free will who have to choose between letting their entire life’s purpose walk out the door and ignoring that pesky instinct thing to cling to the only thing they’ve been allowed to nurture their own identity around.
Again, YIKES!
We joke about the difficult, controlling mother-in-law. It’s so relatable to so many people that a romantic comedy called Monster-In-Law was made around the concept (Luketic, 2005). But if we look at it through the long lens of history, it’s more a tragedy than a comedy (something Shakespeare understood far better than Hollywood).
This explains why it was so hard for my mom to let me go, and for me to separate out my own sense of self. This does not, however, make either of us any less accountable to do the hard work of individuation.
Which brings me back to my own Accountability for Self…
I can’t control other people. Whether my parents choose to unravel their identities from mine or not is not my business or concern. My own identity, however, is entirely my job. Only I can inventory my own capacity, abilities, and priorities. This was, by far, the most arduous and time-consuming process in my journey towards healthy boundaries with my parents.
Once my personal inventory was completed, it was time to set boundaries. Accountabilityv and Boundaries are both deeply challenging, but in entirely different ways. The accountability inventory is mentally and emotionally exhausting, as you try to unlearn what may be a lifetime of habits. In dysfunctional relationships, this requires rewriting established neuropathways, which is no small task. This can take years even with the support of a skilled mental health professional.
(This is why I like to work with parents… It’s so much easier to just raise kids with healthy Boundaries, Accountability, and Grace to begin with than try to relearn your ways of being as an adult!)
Setting healthy boundaries that reflect and respect our values is hard because our nervous system thinks we are going to battle. And, depending on the relationship, that may be the reality! But even when setting boundaries with healthy individuals, our nervous system still views it as conflict, and conflict feels like a threat. (We can once again thank generations of human culture for this fun little adaptation.)
This is where emotional regulation skills come in, which is a different blog post as well. For the purposes of this post, suffice it to say that once you know who you are and what space you take up in the world, you can more clearly identify where Boundaries are needed.
Any time you’re feeling uncertain about whether you have a right to take up more space in a relationship, that’s an indication that you need to do more internal inventory. Often, this shows up in your body as hurt, disappointment, and anger.
And just like that, we’ve come full circle.
We are back where we started – the choice to become bitter and resentful towards other people or to look inward for areas where we could adjust our expectations.
Using the example of my parents, it may not be fair that they didn’t meet my very reasonable expectations. My hurt, disappointment, and anger may be entirely justified. I can choose to be bitter and resentful about that – and let that show up sideways in all my other relationships – or I can choose to adjust my expectations based on an inventory of my capacities, abilities, and priorities.
My old expectations were that they would be like the moms and dads that culture tells us they should be – ever loving, ever cheerful, ever wise, ever patient, ever aware of all the unique gifts I have to share with the world. My expectations were external, directed towards their behavior. When they didn’t show up as I expected, I felt like a victim in a situation over which I had no control.
My new expectations are that they are separate, flawed human beings, with their own struggles and hang ups, who did the best they could with the limited tools they had. My expectations are directed internally, towards my own personhood. I am not a victim. I am a fully individuated adult with my own values and integrity.
Based on these revised expectations, I can set Boundaries around each unique relationship with my mom and my dad that honor my capacities, abilities, and priorities. Whether or not they like this new dynamic is not mine to carry.
I cannot control how other people feel or how they choose to respond. All I can control is my own approach to life. I choose Boundaries, Accountability, and Grace over victimhood. How about you?
Related Sources
What is Redefining Love?
Boundaries
Accountability
Grace
Compassion in Conflict
Understanding Emotions
Exploring the Reality of Choice
Dealing with Anger
Speak the Language
When Adult Children Walk Away
What Does Integrity Mean?
The Family Connection
The Friend Connection
The Romance Connection
Naming, Blaming, and the Uncluttered Subconscious
Toxic Relationships
SOURCES
Luketic, R. (Director). (2005). Monster-in-Law [Film]. New Line Cinema.
Newberry, R. C., & Swanson, J. C. (2008). Implications of breaking mother–young social bonds. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 110(1–2), 3–23.
Wald, S. B. (2023). Redefining love: Change the way you love. Change your life. Change the world. Content Empowered.