Suffering Disillusionment Is Difficult, But It Drives Us Away From The Wrong Place

There are times like that, when one person seems to suffer one disappointment after another, living in fits and starts only to open their eyes and discover that they inhabited a strange island surrounded by false affections, people with false backgrounds and wrong feelings. It is then that we pick up the pieces of our heart to move forward without looking back, with gracious dignity and firm determination.

Sports psychology experts say that any athlete should learn to deal with disillusionment early on. In any competitive sport there will always be a winner and a loser. Athletes will always experience moments of greater or lesser performance, as well as injuries and events unrelated to their own preparation or performance that can veto the power to participate in a competition, a test or a match.

In the game of life it is the same. However, most of us learn early on the idea that if someone tries hard, success is guaranteed, and that if you take good care of the people you love, they will respond in kind. Almost no one wanted to reveal to us that  in the real-life quadrangle, two plus two is not always four, that gray days are more common than blue ones, and that people are fallible, contradictory and imperfect.

Digesting everyday disappointments is no easy task. However, and as a curiosity, it should be said that  disillusionment is the third emotion most experienced by human beings after love and regret,  and therefore we must learn to recognize it, accept it and face it. Below we explain to you how .

Is disillusionment a mandatory part of life? No, not always

There is no shortage of paternalistic people to comment that “suffering a disillusionment in life is something necessary. Because feeling disappointed will allow us to obtain the necessary motivation to grow” . Well, these types of phrases look great on our social media walls, however, it is necessary to clarify them and analyze them in detail.

First,  no one is forced to suffer a heartbreaking disillusionment to “know what life is.” We are facing a dimension that we must learn to manage as quickly as possible so that no more happens than necessary. In turn, disappointments will always be better in small doses and manageable sizes. This is how a person really learns to deal with them and to channel them to get a proper learning.

In turn, it is important to reiterate the need to know how to face daily disillusionment in order to prevent, sooner or later, a larger one from happening, so that we are not stuck in the corner of dilemma, in the hole of pain and in the forest of despair. We say this for a very concrete reason:  the little unspoken disappointment becomes the silent killer of every relationship.

Let’s think about it for a moment: there are those who choose to silence that little contempt from their partner that, almost without knowing how, in the end becomes an everyday practice.  We also say that it’s nothing if our friend forgot that today we were going to receive the results of some important medical exams. In turn, we also decided to keep silent when our family jokes out loud about the “absurd” project that we dream of so much.

We avoid expressing aloud many of the disappointments felt for fear of offending others, for fear of breaking this bond that binds us to them… However, we  forget that the main offended ones are us and that whoever keeps one disappointment after another ends up choking. In the end, we got up one day with the awareness that everything that involves us is a mistake. Let’s react first and learn to react in time.

Keys to Overcome Disappointment After Suffering Disappointment

A disappointment is much more than an unfulfilled expectation. It’s the breaking of a certainty, it’s a bond that loses its strength, it’s a gale of cold air that opens our eyes and, at times, even puts a wall in our hearts. However, if there is a reason why a disappointment hurts so much, it is because we experience such responsibility and such annoyance towards ourselves: how could we have taken so much for granted? How could we trust so much and build so many castles when what was underneath was quicksand?

We propose to reflect on these keys to manage these situations much better.

Untying the knot of disappointments

One of the first things we should avoid is practicing what is known as “retrospective bias”. We talk, of course, about this tendency to believe, after knowing the results, that we could have predicted everything. There are things that can’t be predicted, we don’t have a crystal ball that we can see how certain people are going to react. Therefore, the best thing to do is to accept what happened and avoid taking responsibility or projecting all responsibility onto ourselves.

The second important aspect has to do with what we mentioned earlier. We must be able to react to small disappointments before they turn into real torturers, those that leave our self-esteem at rock bottom. Always remember to talk about what bothers you “when it bothers you, not when it’s too late”.

The third and final point that we should apply in our daily lives is the ability to have perspective. We must understand that we are all fallible, including ourselves. We all have the power to deceive and disillusion, therefore, we are all subject to this Ferris wheel where sometimes you win and sometimes you lose,  where the right places are gradually no longer right and it is necessary to recycle, change the road map , people and even goals.

Sometimes, the fact of suffering a disillusionment is little more than a strange mechanism in which life tells us that something much better is in store for us…

Main image courtesy of Claudia Tremblay