Disappointment is a Spiritual Experience

Once, I was in a situation where my lease was ending in one city, and I’d be moving to another city a few months later, but I needed a few more months before I was ready to move. One of my relatives lived nearby, and I called to ask if I could stay with him a few months. He declined, explaining why he felt his space wouldn’t work for me, but out of my mouth spilled an acidic, “That’s disappointing.”

Later, another relative called to make sure I was okay and not mad, sharing that my words had unsettled the relative who wouldn’t house me. That was when I realized that saying I was disappointed was one of the sharpest arrows I could have pointed at my relative, and that I’d always known this on some unconscious level. Now I tell myself a story that on that side of my family, to disappoint another is one of those unspoken things one does not do. 

Which, simultaneously, made the threat of being disappointed a highly successful piece of leverage for manipulation. I remember one year there was an event my grandparents and the rest of our family was attending that I’d decided wasn’t interesting to me. I received a birthday card in which my grandmother wrote, “So disappointing to hear you won’t be joining us.” Almost immediately I bought my plane tickets to go home for the event. That weekend, at dinner with my grandparents, I mentioned this to her. “You knew exactly what you were doing,” I said, and she smiled at me with all the gracious humor of an elderly Irish woman who had won.

While I began to notice the foundational role disappointment played in my personality, it wasn’t until years later that I saw how deeply afflicted I was by the fear of it. I was sitting in my spiritual community as we dealt with the aftermath of our founder retiring from teaching and leading us. We were engaging in a conflict, and I realized I felt both resentment and body-shaking fear. 

I could sense a scared part of me, saying, “It’s all going to fall apart!” 

I could sense a guilty part of me that felt, “I have to do something to keep us from falling apart.” That part of me truly felt if I did nothing I would be a disappointment to others, and blamed for the community’s collapse.

I could sense an obligated part of me wanting to volunteer to take on more tasks and make it work.

And I could sense the part of me that felt deeply resentful of the whole group and burnt-out. That part said, “Why isn’t anyone else stepping up? Why is it always me?”

In that moment I saw a pattern of movement from Fear > Guilt > Obligation > Resentment. They nested within each other like Russian dolls, with Fear at the core and Resentment as the most recent layer. Everything in my life had begun to feel like an obligation, and thus sapped of joy. Whenever someone wanted something of me, I felt afraid of hurting or disappointing them, and either felt obligated to do it or tried to find a passive aggressive way of avoiding it. This relation extended even to my own desires, which quickly became tedious “to-do” items as soon as they were recognized. 

With no reprieve, no inner permission to take a break, no sense of safety and trust in others to hold things together, my life had become permeated with resentment. Going home, I realized I even resented my dogs for wanting attention and care.

And the threat of disappointment was the unnamed ruler of this state of affairs. As long as I kept pushing and holding things together, I imagined no one could be disappointed in me. As long as I was too busy to know what I really wanted, I would not feel disappointment.

Yet seeing resentment appear told me this pattern had become a death sentence to my soul. It was telling me I was way past my limits and not doing what brought my life meaning. Because I was terrified to say no, resentment was stepping in to alienate me from my perceived sources of obligation.

The cycle failed myself and the people I loved. When I thought that sense of obligation was righteous, it deprived my community from the opportunity to take responsibility for itself. And without considering, I kept pushing what I believed the community needed and resenting them for not stepping up, instead of seeing the flow of energy as a sign that the community did not need what I pushed.

Though it terrified me, I started practicing saying no to obligation and stepping out of responsibilities. I started to decide it was okay if things fell apart when I stopped holding them together. If it depended solely upon me, then it was not sustainable. If it truly needed to exist, others would help. Over time, my relationships have grown stronger, I have witnessed my community rising to take on the work, and I have learned that I am still lovable even when I have boundaries. I feel calmer, happier, and more loving because I have permission to take the time I want to nurture myself and my interests. My boundaries are stronger and clearer as I become more familiar with my limits and needs.

And I find myself disappointed from time to time.

——

Disappointment is a co-walker on the spiritual journey. Those of us who come alive with visions of the beauty and potential of humanity, of the richness of nature, of the joys of the body or the exaltation of the soul, of the transcendent experience of loving and being loved, eventually have an experience in which our experience falls far short of what we’d expected.

The spiritual vision is always in tension with material reality. Yet our practices call upon us to accept this world as it is, the soil in which we plant our beautiful, inspiring dreams and visions.

Perhaps the worst disappointment is when we do experience exactly what we dreamed of, and then it falls apart. The dream job turns out to be filled with backstabbing, busy work, and leadership who undermines every constructive effort. The time wasn’t right for love to blossom. Seemingly random forces ate away the foundations of joy. The person we thought was the love of our lives turns out not to be who they said they were. Or they were exactly who they said they were and we weren’t listening. We experience betrayal and manipulation by our revered spiritual leaders. We discover our best was not enough, or learned too late we took for granted something that needed more loving care.

Disappointment occurs when we become conscious that our experiences do not match our expectations. When we cannot tolerate the feelings of disappointment, we’ll engage in our favorite avoidance strategies to stave it off as much as possible. In part, we sense that disappointment could crush us and spiral us into depressive meaninglessness and nihilism. If this experience was so crushing, then why try again? Why open ourselves up to more hurt? 

Yet both avoiding and being crushed by disappointment begins to make us inflexible. If we tend to blame ourselves for our suffering, then avoiding disappointment results in routinized action, sticking with the known, avoiding risks, and detachment. In a sense, we live lives of perpetual low-grade disappointment because we never consider or pursue what we want. 

If we tend to blame others for our suffering, then avoiding disappointment results in blame, anger, cut-off, refusing responsibility for our expectations or behaviors, and looking for a new object of desire without having done any self-reflection. In a sense, we live lives of sporadic, intense disappointments because we keep thinking we have what we want in this new object but not learning how to discern whether it’s an appropriate object.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven core emotional systems that exist across species. One that he called SEEKING is one of the most primary, and it is the experience of excitement and anticipation that drives us to pursue what we want or need. This system is, in a sense, without specific object, and in another sense attaches to several objects. SEEKING arises when we need to look for food, or a partner to mate with, and may be implicated in our experiences of longing for more abstract desires around family, career, and spiritual enlightenment. 

One suspicion I take away from learning about Panksepp’s work is that SEEKING is a pleasurable sensation that drives us toward what we imagine will make us happy, but in a sense it can never be satisfied. Once we get what we want, we are no longer engaged in the pleasures of anticipating it, hoping for it, imagining how it will be to experience. We are instead dealing with reality, and reality is never as exciting as the fantasy. It was the experience of SEEKING itself that infused the desire with feeling.

This understanding of SEEKING reminds me of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, that all existence is suffering and the cause of suffering is craving. SEEKING may be a construct describing the fundamental nature of craving that informs our animal psychologies. Even when I am fully satisfied and have manifested everything I want, that part of me will become dissatisfied from disuse and cause me to desire something new. Yet if I were to shut down that SEEKING altogether, I would become depressed.

When we allow ourselves to experience disappointment and grieve the expectations we had, I believe we refresh and refine our SEEKING system. We gain more clarity on what it is we truly want and need. Our expectations become more workable. We may stop seeking a spiritual community of perfect harmony and freedom from human flaws, and start appreciating how our spiritual frameworks help us make sense and work through the experience of simply being flawed humans. We may stop seeking a partner who knows our every desire before we do and start appreciating a partner who simply washes the dishes before being asked.

To disappoint is not always a sign of having done something wrong. There are times when others appear to have expectations we didn’t want or don’t agree to and there is no way to set a clean boundary without disappointment. It was not wrong, for example, for my relative to tell me I couldn’t stay at his place, and might have been better for our relationship in the long run rather than taking me in with resentment. Neither was it wrong of me to admit that I felt disappointed, though I suspect I could have been less bratty about it.

Telling the truth of our feelings and experience brings adjustments in our relationship. If you need me to be a certain kind of partner and I am unable or unwilling to do so, it is wise to move away from me. If you value the relationship more than the expectation, working through our expectations will likely let us come closer together. Whether the expectation or the relationship is more important tells us a lot about ourselves and each other.

Some of us will go ahead and do our best to meet those expectations even if we don’t really like them—we may not even know we’re able to question or disagree with the expectations. Authoritarian leaders expect, and expect their expectations followed, often when they’ve failed to even articulate the expectation. Those who experience authoritarian parents or leaders learn to intuit and uphold expectations and, depending on how deeply ingrained they are, may even think the leaders are always right and trustworthy in their expectations.

Permissive parents and leaders, in contrast, may have few expectations or avoid conflict by not acknowledging when they have expectations. Yet those who experience this style of leadership may find expectations communicated in oblique, confusing ways that cannot be clearly named and discussed. A child may realize they’ve disappointed their parent somehow, sensing frustration or distance, but not have any language to understand and discuss it.

An authoritative style of parenting and leadership would identify and name clear expectations and, if those are disappointed, talk through what happened that got in the way of the expectation being met. Perhaps there was a failure of communication and understanding, a circumstance, or perhaps the expectation was not correct for the situation. Authoritative leadership negotiates accountability and disappointment to make expectations fairer and more workable. 

Remember that at the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope. When we avoid opening up our box of expectations and airing all that shit out, we lose the possibility of hoping for an experience that is more aligned with what we want. We open up more space for a different, fiercer, more enduring, earthier truth to emerge.