Let's Check-in with Our Expectations
By Phylissa Newland, M.S.Ed, LPC
Mental Health Counselor at Family Resource Center
Things are hard. Life is especially difficult at present. The world doesn’t seem to look right or work right or act right at all.
We are in the middle of a pandemic. A PANDEMIC. Who saw that coming? It’s so unlike anything we have collectively experienced in so many generations, it’s hard to know what to do. There’s no guidebook for this. No How to Cope with Novel Viruses, Homeschooling Your Children, Unemployment, Food & Supply Shortages, Political Unrest, and Other Life Problems at the local library. Probably the local library is closed anyway.
It feels bad. We feel bad. And do you know what? That’s OK.
You see, every day of this pandemic, every day before it and every day after, we go about our daily lives full of thoughts about how things should be. These thoughts are called expectations, and we have expectations about literally everything. We have expectations about how music should sound, food should taste, and how flowers should smell. We have expectations about ourselves; how we should feel, how we should look, how we should perform at work and school and hobbies and home.
We have expectations about others; how they should treat us, how they should look and act, how they should speak to us. We also have expectations about the world at large; how society should function, what role each of us should play, what should be considered important and what is less so.
These expectations are involved in every thought we have and every action we take. They also have a lot to do with how we feel. They’re sort of a big deal.
Sometimes, though, they can be problematic, like when we find ourselves harboring expectations that really don’t help us.
Maybe we’re too hard on ourselves and forget to give ourselves some grace. Maybe we expect more of someone else than they can give and forget to be gentle with them. Maybe we expect others to agree with us when they have other expectations that inform their views. All of these can be problematic.
But one of the more harmful expectations I’ve encountered as a therapist is that if we are healthy, we should never have negative emotions and should always feel OK; and that’s a problem. When we harbor this sort of expectation, it means that those super-normal tough emotions are met with other negative experiences like self-judgement, feelings of failure and frustration, hopelessness, helplessness, and anger that we are experiencing what we are experiencing. When we layer those on top of already difficult emotions, it’s a surefire way to feel pretty awful pretty quick.
So what do we do about it?
We allow our feelings to exist.
When we fight our feelings, suppress or repress them, judge ourselves or others for having the feelings we all have, it only causes more difficulty. Sadness turns to hopelessness and defeat. Anger turns to rage. But when we allow our feelings to just exist, when we allow ourselves to just feel them, to not “be OK” for a while, it frees us up to cope, and to eventually move on.
So let your feelings have their due, experience them for what they are, take care of yourself when things are tough, and move on. You can expect to feel better if you do.
The collective trauma of COVID-19 is uncharted territory for all of us. In the Thriving Families blog, we aim to share messages of hope and tools to cope. Featured authors are local experts and community partners.
In March, our Hancock County System of Care grant project launched the inaugural Thriving Families Week. This week was dedicated to bringing local families and professionals together to talk about healing trauma, addiction, and mental illness.