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One Strategy to Get Over Disappointment
We’ve all had those times when we’ve been extremely disappointed in the outcome of events. Sometimes this is in the form of a relationship that goes bad or ends. Sometimes it’s just because something didn’t quite turn out how we expected it to go. Regardless of the cause this feeling of disappointment often leads, at least temporarily, to anxiety and depression. Depending on the severity of the disappointment this depression can be minor or crippling.
No one wants to be depressed or anxious. Well, at least not for very long. It’s important to understand that depression, anxiety, disappointment, and loss are part of life. I’m not here to tell you to never be depressed, anxious or how to never be disappointed. These feelings are part of life and the fact that you can feel them means you are living. I just want to offer up what I have found to be a way to get through, past and over disappointment of almost any kind.
I think it’s first important to understand what disappointment really is and what causes it. For the most part, I have found that disappointment comes not as much from any actual real loss or any event that happened in the past but from the perceived loss of a planned future. That is, we are disappointed when the future that we had envisioned is no longer possible. This transition from the envisioned-and-possible-future to envisioned-and-not-possible-future we experience as anxiety. We try…
