By Ashley McIlwain

There you are feeling hurt, frustrated, confused, and most of all disappointed. Once again, you’ve been let down by someone, and the sting of the disappointment leaves you stunned. What now? How do you move forward? How do you trust? Questions whirl as you retreat inwardly to a safer place where you can’t be hurt.

I would be lying if I said I haven’t struggled with these despairing feelings of disappointment in my lifetime. The truth is people disappoint you. They let you down. They fail to meet expectations. And each time it hurts a little more and causes you to want to withdraw from relationships that much more.

Before I met my husband, I was in a long-term relationship with my college boyfriend. Disappointment was a word I knew all too well. The most hurtful part was that when I tried to reach out to him and grasp for understanding, he just blamed me. “My expectations were unrealistic.” “I set the bar way too high for him to ever possibly reach apparently.” So not only was I hurting, but I was stuck blaming myself for it all. It was like I was drowning in confusion, and instead of lending a helping hand, I was being held under until it felt as though my very life were slipping away from me.

What I came to discover many years later after getting out of that unhealthy relationship was that disappointment is inevitable, expectations are necessary, and personal responsibility is key. Granted, expectations must be kept in check. It’s important to have realistic expectations in a relationship, but an absence of them is not realistic of healthy either. What I also learned is that someone else cannot control you. You are part of the equation, and you can either allow or prevent someone from hurting you to a certain extent.

Many times we act like we’re aimlessly moving about without real control over our emotions or life. An example of this is, “We just fell in love,” or “We just fell out of love.” Apparently we have no control over who we love, when, or why. The same goes for happiness. People say things like, “I’m just not happy anymore.”

The thing is we do have control. To suggest or believe otherwise leads to misery, unhappiness, and a whole mess. Love is a choice. It’s not an emotion that comes and goes. It’s a decision we make more often than we realize. It’s something we do, and it’s not aimless or beyond our control. We are completely in control of who we love. And as for happiness, well that’s not someone else’s responsibility either. If we’re looking for someone to “complete” us and constantly make us happy, we’re setting them and ourselves up for failure. We are more in control that we’d like to think. And for the things that are out of our control; we need to trust Almighty God to orchestrate and intervene.

The same is true in dealing with disappointment. It really stinks when someone lets you down. When they hurt you or even shatter your hopes and dreams. But, we are not helpless victims. We have a choice what we do with that damage and disappointment. As my mom always said, “You can become bitter or better.”

Grieve

I believe that it’s important to grieve the losses and hurts we face in life. All too often we just plow through the pain without embracing or acknowledging it. I for one am notorious for this. Just suck it up and move forward. When we approach pain this way, we most likely are not dealing with it. We’re just covering up the damage and internalizing it. Most likely it will rear its ugly head again though forcing us to deal with it at some point whether we like it or not.

When we pretend that we aren’t hurt, we’re building walls that lock us in and others out. It’s better to take the time to grieve the disappointments. There’s a season for that. You can’t camp out in self-loathing, but do make sure to process and grieve the situation. The only thing worse than being hurt is allowing that hurt to continue to affect us for years to come.

Evaluate

Once you’ve given yourself an opportunity to process the disappointment, it’s time to evaluate the situation. What happened? What can you learn from the situation? What can you learn about yourself? What degree of damage has actually been done? Begin to digest what went wrong and why.

If it’s a friend that has hurt you, depending on the severity of the situation, you might want to reevaluate the friendship. There are many times I have had to step back from a friendship because it was a one-way street that was leaving me wounded, disappointed, and drained. Friendships should be a reciprocal relationship where you build one another up and provide support for each another. Not that you will never have issues or problems to overcome, but they should be the exception, not the rule.

If you’re dating someone or engaged, and you find yourself in this low place often, again, it’s time to reevaluate the relationship. Is this healthy? Is this what you want for your life for the rest of your life? Or maybe it’s just a normal bump in the road that you’ve got to work on together to overcome.

For those of you who are married, it can be tough when you’ve perhaps been in this place one too many times. Married people often have a “build up” of damage that seems insurmountable. While there may be years of damage, there’s still always hope. Oftentimes, it takes digging deep and having difficult, candid conversations with your spouse where you both can speak honestly about what’s going on and how you’re feeling. Sometimes you might need to go see a professional who can help get you started and on the right path. It’s always worth the effort to keep trying and moving forward because disappointment is not unique to your marriage or situation; it’s in every relationship.

Move Forward

After you’ve dealt with your emotions and taken time to evaluate the situation, it’s time to move forward. Whether you’re working on the friendship or letting it go, sticking it out with your significant other or calling it quits, conversing with your spouse or getting help for your marriage, you have a responsibility to do your part. The tendency is to want to pass blame, shut down, or get even when we’re hurt and disappointed, but you can’t do any of these if you want to recover.

One of the most difficult parts of dealing with disappointment for me is overcoming the feeling that I’m helpless. It’s as if suddenly I can find no good in myself or the person who hurt me, and I just feel like I’m helpless to change the situation. That’s a lie though.

We all can choose to forgive, heal, and move forward. Sometimes that’s excruciating and a much higher mountain to climb than other times, but there’s no moving forward if you’re always looking back. You’ve got to make the decision to grieve, evaluate, and move forward.

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