What a lovely find I had today at the local library after dropping my new car off for its first service.. This comes from a lovely book on gratitude and healing the knots we get tied into through being hurt, frustrated, betrayed, disappointed or let down in life.. It is helping me alot today with the anger I woke up processing last night over recent hurts and failures.. The title of the book is Untangling You : How Can I Be Grateful When I Feel So Resentful. The author is gratitude coach Dr Kerry Howells.
Some respond to their resentment by declaring they just won’t have expectations anymore. Then no one gets hurt, and there’s no disappointment. This is often touted as a sign of wisdom. You’re probably come across sayings like: “If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed,” or “Peace begins where expectations end.”
Others say that if we lower our expectations, it’s easier to be grateful, because we are pleasantly surprised when someone exceeds them. The argument also goes that because we’re less likely to be disappointed if we have lower expectations, we are less likely to become resentful. As author Isaac Asimov put it, “People who don’t expect injustice don’t have to suffer disappointment.”
Perhaps this could be sage advice with regard to life events that are out of our control, but I believe that we can seek a deeper wisdom when we apply it to our relationships with others. In some sense, giving up or lowering our expectations might give us a kind of peace, but in another, it can lead to numbness, indifference and a reduced opportunity for healthy and nourishing connections with others. Without high expectations, we may lose our bearings. It’s expectations (and our values) that help define us and help us make decision about what we believe to be right and wrong in the world.
Could we apply a wiser lens here? The problem doesn’t necessarily lie in the expectations. It lies in what we do with them, especially if they’re uspoken, particularly rigid or if w lack the skills or confidence to talk about them with others and negotiate mutual agreements. A wiser approach would be to hold high expectations and not be attached to the outcome. We keep our standards regarding how we want to be treated, for example, but we don’t have the emotional attachment to things turning out exactly as we expect. This takes a a good deal of maturity. However, the more we can practice acceptance by being detached from particular outcomes, the less resentful we will be.
Gratitude can help with this acceptance process, and indeed acceptance is one of the pillars of gratitude. Gratitude orients us to look for the learning in adversity and to therefore take disappointment as an opportunity to grow and change. It helps us to remember the good, so that we are able to focus on what we have, rather than what we don’t have, or in this case, where others or life let us down. A grateful state also gives us the resilience or buoyancy we need to be able to accept disappointment.
Choosing to cultivate gratitude as a way of working through our resentments doesn’t mean that we accept the status quo if our expectations are not met. It just means that we are more conscious of what we value in the other person and are able to remember all that we received in the relationship. We are less likely to cast the other person aside if they disappoint us, because gratitude helps remind uss of the good ad gives us another way of looking at the situation.
Emerging From The Dark Night 