80: Why Does Disappointment Hurt So Much? How to Navigate Feeling Disappointed

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Nov 22

In this episode, I discuss why disappointment hurts so much and why it can feel like failure or a punishment. I answer a question from a listener who is having difficulty navigating a disappointing year that has them feeling down and defeated. We will learn how disappointment is often our psyche’s way of telling us that we have unrealistic expectations or that we are attached to a future outcome rather than living in the present. My intention for this episode is to help you in understanding that although disappointment can really hurt, it’s not a punishment or a bad thing and that it is actually an opportunity to get honest with yourself and realign your life to the present moment.

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Timestamps ⏱️

Introduction: 00:00
Listener Question: 1:44
Outro: 26:28

Episode References / Learn more about Disappointment ✨

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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Castmagic. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher00:00:01 - 00:00:29
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started. Hi, beautiful souls. My name is Amanda Durocher, and this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the healing journey. It's not my intention to give you all the answers. I believe if you have all the answers, you just may need a new view and a little help along the way.
Amanda Durocher00:00:29 - 00:01:25
Thank you for joining me for today's episode. Today, we are discussing the feeling of disappointment and why it hurts so much to be appointed. If I'm honest, I feel like disappointment fucking sucks. I have experienced so much disappointment throughout my life, and it hurts to be disappointed. I find it to be physically painful because it often feels like a punishment or a form of failure, and I think that's why disappointment can feel so painful. In this episode, I'll be answering a question from a listener who is having difficulty navigating lots of disappointment in their life externally and internally. We'll learn how disappointment is often our psyche's way of telling us that we have unrealistic expectations for that we are attached to a future outcome rather than living in the present. My intention for this episode is to help you in understanding that although disappointment can really hurt, It's not a punishment or a bad thing, and it's actually an opportunity to get really honest with yourself to see the situation more clearly and to realign your expectations and your action in steps.
Amanda Durocher00:01:25 - 00:02:08
And before we jump into today's episode, I just wanted to mention that if you haven't been to my website, novia advice.com, I invite you to check it out after this episode for more free resources, including journal prompts, meditations, blog posts, and podcast episodes about the healing journey. And as I mentioned, you can check that out at newviewadvice.com. So with that, let's jump on into talking about disappointment. Dear Amanda. I have experienced so much disappointment this year. This year has felt incredibly difficult in so many ways, but the hardest thing for me to move past is the a constant disappointment. I've been disappointed by so much, my work, relationships, family, and even myself. Nothing I expected or hoped for this year panned out, and I have experienced lots of heartache and pain this year.
Amanda Durocher00:02:08 - 00:02:39
I don't mean to sound like a negative person because I really am trying to heal. But, damn, this year has been hard, and I am struggling to move past it. The disappointment hurts so much. Any advice on what to do? Thank you so much for this question. I am so sorry that you've experienced so much disappointment this year. I know I can relate to this question, and I know a lot of other people can relate to this question too. I know that I've had this conversation about disappointment and about 2023 not being what people expected many times this year. I've talked about this with friends, family, and even in my 1 on 1 sessions.
Amanda Durocher00:02:39 - 00:03:25
So I just want you to know that you're not alone, and I think that this year has been difficult for a lot of people. As I mentioned, I know I've been disappointed this year. I found this year to be a really hard one for me as well, so I just wanna honor you because I know how challenging it is to navigate these difficult chapters of our lives. So I wanted to start this question, which is talking about what is disappointment. So disappointment is the feeling of dissatisfaction, and it follows the failure of expectations or hopes that we were hoping to come to be or to manifest. It's when things don't go according to plan. And when we feel disappointed, we can often have other feelings as well such as anger, sadness, and grief. And I read an article on betterup.com that I'll link in the show notes, but I found it interesting that this article explained that disappointment is connected to 3 types of experiences.
So the 1st type of experience is the arrival fallacy. So what the arrival fallacy is is it's the idea that if we reach a certain goal, then that will bring us lasting happiness, contentment, fulfillment. And the fallacy or the false belief is that when we achieve something, then we'll be happy. So some examples include, once I get married, I'll be happy, or once I get that promotion, my life will have meaning. Once I get engaged, my relationship will improve. Once I find a partner, I'll feel content with myself. Once I get a certain amount of followers on social media, I'll feel good about myself. It's the idea of once I do blank, I will be happy.
And this can cause disappointment for a few reasons because one is that when we achieve that goal, very often, we realize that we're still unhappy or we still don't have that thing we were searching for because that external thing was not gonna bring us happiness or it was not gonna bring us contentment. Right? For example, in my own life, I remember believing that once I got engaged, my relationship would be better. And I was so angry. This was in my twenties, and my partner would not propose. We both had our own childhood wounds we were working through, but my partner, he has a belief that if we got married, our relationship would end. So he preferred us not getting married, where I had a belief that if we got married, our relationship would improve. So we were kind of battling these 2 beliefs. Right? And I remember going to therapy at the time and being like, I can't believe you won't proposed and all these things.
I used to talk about all the time, and my therapist kept reflecting back to me that I had so many expectations on what this engagement, what this wedding, and what this marriage would bring to me. Why don't I just start working on my relationship now in the present? And it took me a while to accept this because I was so focused on the engagement. But once I let go of having to be engaged and I just started to be with my partner and to see if we could improve our relationship. I actually found that our relationship improved so much. And that by letting that go, letting go of that expectation that that would bring me happiness, I was actually much happier in the moment. I was able to see that my partner had so many gifts that our relationship brought me so much joy because I let go of that expectation. But when I was holding on to that expectation, I was just constantly being disappointed because it wasn't happening. But it was releasing that that allowed me to not be disappointed anymore.
Amanda Durocher00:05:45 - 00:06:47
And now I'm at a point where I'm the one who would prefer not to be married in our relationship, so it's kinda funny how things have flipped there. But I mentioned that example because I think that we believe that things outside of us will bring us happiness, and oftentimes, it's the expectation or the pressure we put on that that actually keeps us from our own happiness. So I find that with the arrival fallacy, when we get to the goal that we've been striving for, we often end up being disappointed, or we just are disappointed because we're never reaching that goal. So, like, with my example with the engagement, I never reached that goal, so I was just constantly disappointed rather than relaxing and seeing what my relationship needed in the moment. And my what my relationship needed in the moment was my partner and I needed to learn healthy communication. My partner and I needed to learn each other's love languages. My partner and I needed to learn how to show up for each other in a more mutually beneficial way rather than fighting based off of childhood wounds. We needed to really dive deep into some of our patterns, so that was what brought happiness within in my relationship.
It wasn't a ring on my finger. That wasn't going to solve anything because the ring could have brought me an engagement, but it wouldn't have brought me the healthy relationship because a healthy relationship required a lot of work within the relationship. Right? A wedding can be a fun thing in the moment, but it's not going to fix some deeply rooted issues such as bad communication or not understanding each other's love languages or not understanding each other's childhood wounds. A wedding isn't gonna fix that, like, I had hoped it would. And what I realized through working with my partner, working with therapists, was that that is of the engagement was causing me more pain than was necessary. Because what we're gonna talk about with the healing from disappointment and allowing process disappointment is when I got really honest with myself. It wasn't that I needed to be engaged. It was all the expectations I put on what a wedding and what an engagement it would mean for my relationship and what it would mean for the people in my life.
Right? I felt a lot of pressure to get married. I felt like everybody would leave my relationship alone if I got married. So so many reasons I wanted to get engaged weren't just because I love my partner so deeply. They were deep rooted in other beliefs I had. And by beginning to be honest with myself, I was able to begin to see that. So the second cause of disappointment is unrealistic expectations or having expectations of other people and places and things that we cannot control. So when an unrealistic expectation doesn't match the actual circumstance, oftentimes, we can end up being disappointed. And if we have high expectations around a situation or an outcome, we can experience this disappointment.
I have another episode called Episode 48, 4 steps to letting go of expectations of yourself and others, that if setting expectations that you keep being disappointed with is something you've found in your life. I recommend listening to that episode as well because I break down a process for letting go of these expectations. But I think it's important to acknowledge that these these unrealistic expectations, or these expectations of things we cannot control often lead to disappointment. Because what happens when we set these expectations is is that we create attachment to the outcome. And when we create attachment to an outcome, we're trying to control the event, the person, or the experience, and this is often a way for us to feel safe or a way that we're trying to bring ourselves good feelings. But as we all know, we cannot control other people, and we cannot control events or situations. So attachment is when we attach what we want to that future situation. Right? So say you were going on vacation, and you're like, this vacation needs to save my marriage, or this vacation needs to make me relaxed or this vacation needs to be everything I ever wanted it to be.
And you go on that vacation and a bunch of stuff happens since that you did not plan for, and you end up being disappointment because you had attached to that vacation that it was going to fix something in your life. Right? That's what we oftentimes due is when we don't wanna do the inner work because it's hard and it's painful and it's uncomfortable, we will attach an outcome or an expectation to something outside of us. When I get this, I will be happier. When this happens or when I have this conversation with this person, that'll bring me peace inside, and sometimes it doesn't work like that. And so these expectations we put on even on ourselves. Right? Like, when I lose 10 pounds, I'll feel good about myself, And then you lose £10, and maybe you still don't feel good about yourself. It's these expectations that lead to disappointment because of that attachment, because we are trying to control life, and we're trying to fix ourselves with something oftentimes outside of ourselves. So when we start doing this, it creates the cycle of disappointment.
Amanda Durocher00:10:27 - 00:11:14
I know this happened over and over again in my own life. A lot of times I set expectations on my career or on my work. Right? So I want things to work out a certain way because I feel like if they work out that way, then it will mean something about me. It'll mean something about my work. And the truth is when they don't work out, it feels so disappointing because is is it I have in the past internalized it, like, I did something wrong or, like, my work isn't good or, like, I'm unworthy when the truth is none of that is true. What is true is that something didn't work out, and it's the universe's way of telling me to pivot. Right? It's a reminder that everything is working out for us. Right? So as the person who asked this question and I have said as well, this has been a really difficult year.
Right? So another thing I like to remind myself is that 2023 wasn't what I wanted, but it was what I needed. Right? So even though it's been really difficult, I like to remember that I have grown so much this year through the disappointment and through the pain. And so So I think it's important to remember that when we set expectations and we don't meet those expectations, they're just opportunities for us to learn and to grow. The 3rd experience that can lead to disappointment comes from childhood experiences. So you may have experienced a traumatic event around loss or disappointment during your childhood, or maybe disappointment was a real theme in your childhood. And so if you experience disappointment a lot in your childhood, oftentimes when you grow up. You'll continue to experience this disappointment because your mind automatically connects the current situation with the past situation if they're similar. So the discouragement you experience can quickly turn into the self fulfilling prophecy unless we learn how to process disappointment.
If this is unclear, an example in my own life is that I've been disappointed in female friendships for a long time throughout my life. So I first experienced this disappointment in my youth, just constantly being disappointed by girls I was friends with. And so this childhood experience of being disappointed by female friendships carried into my adult life where I kept feeling disappointed in female friendships even if the situations weren't the same as my childhood. I kept replaying that pattern because there was a part of my mind. There was a part of me that wanted to look at that pattern to see where it came from and to heal that wound I had within female friendships. So if you find that disappointment has been a theme throughout your life, I invite you to see if this is a pattern from your childhood. Because oftentimes, if we continue to experience disappointment around the same topic or the same event or the same situation, it can oftentimes be linked to a childhood experience. So now that we understand where disappointment can come from, I wanna talk about how do we process and move forward after disappointment.
So I have 4 pieces of advice for moving forward after disappointment. And they are, 1, allow yourself to feel it. Feel the disappointment and all the other feelings arising. 2, to be honest with yourself to practice self awareness and self honesty. 3 is to practice self compassion, and 4 is to realign in the present moment. So I'm going to dive a bit deeper into each one. So number 1 is to allow yourself to feel everything that is arising. So by feeling the disappointment and all the other emotions arising, You are processing this emotion, and that allows it to pass and allows you to instead of ruminating and festering on it and sitting in it, it allows it to move, and then you can see what else is there.
Amanda Durocher00:13:49 - 00:14:44
So we have to allow ourselves to feel the disappointment. And oftentimes, when we feel the disappointment will find that there's other feelings under there as well. I know that I experienced some disappointment just last week, and it was so hard for me to allow myself to feel that disappointment because as I mentioned earlier, disappointment to me feels physically painful, but I allowed myself to just cry and feel like my heart was broken. And when I did that, under the disappointment was some truce I had been denying, which leads me into my 2nd piece of advice, which is to be honest with yourself and practice self awareness and self honesty. So I feel like when we experience disappointment, there's often that moment where we need to be honest with ourselves. So I find for me, disappointment and being in denial can go hand in hand. Right? So that example I gave about the engagement. I was in denial that my relationship needed me to change within it.
So I kept saying that it would be fixed by something outside of me when the truth was the honest moment I had to have with myself was that I wasn't being a great partner either. Not all the problems in my relationship were because my partner wouldn't propose to me. There were a lot other problems, including bad communication. I was yelling at my partner a lot at the time. I was really angry, and I was taking that anger out on my partner. That's not healthy. Right? That's not creating a safe environment for him. That's not helping him feel loved.
And I had to be honest with myself that I was playing a part in why our relationship wasn't thriving at the time. I had to be really honest with myself, and that hurts, which is the reason why I think we put those false expectations out there is that we can be in a bit of denial about the inner work we need to do or about the changes we need to make. I mentioned last week I experienced this appointment. And when I allowed myself to feel I had to be honest that I was doing things out of alignment, that I had been doing things for the wrong purpose. There were some things in my life that were just out of alignment for me. They weren't coming from a good place. They were coming from fear. That also comes up a lot of times when we experience disappointment is that we are chasing something or expecting something because there's a fear that needs to be witnessed inside, and we're running away from that fear.
And oftentimes, when denial is involved, there's a fear we're running from or an honest truth we're running from about ourselves or a situation because we're afraid of what that truth will mean. And so Something that helps me with this being honest with myself and to practice self awareness around the disappointment is that I like to remind myself that rejection is God's protection and redirection. In. And so what this means is that when we experience disappointment and rejection, it's not a punishment from the universe. It is God's way of redirecting us. Right? Every closed door leads to another open door. You know, I have a few more quotes if quotes help you in these moments. I find for me, these quotes could be like mantras that when I experience disappointment.
Amanda Durocher00:16:39 - 00:17:03
I just can remind myself of these over and over again. So a few other quotes I wanted to mention in case you find these helpful is one is by by Nelson Mandela, and it's do not judge me by my successes. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. This one's by Oprah Winfrey. There's no such thing as failure. It is just life trying to move us in another direction. And this third one's by Albert Einstein. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
And I leave these here because, one, I think it's so helpful to remember that really successful people experience failure. Really successful people experience disappointment disappointment, and rejection, and that how they've continued to remain successful isn't by never failing. It's by reframing that failure and what it means. The more I show up in the world, the more I realize failure is just a way for us to learn. Right? Failure often teaches me the most lessons. Success doesn't always teach me as much as failure does. And so it's just a reminder that if we feel like we're failing or that we've been rejected, that everybody experiences this and that it's really not a punishment. And that that's our ego mind using it to punish ourselves, but, really, when we can just allow ourselves to let that feeling of disappointment pass and maybe any sadness or anger that goes with it.
The disappointment is just trying to teach us something. My 3rd piece of advice for healing from disappointment is to practice self compassion. As I've mentioned many times, Disappointment can be so painful. Right? You mentioned how you have experienced so much disappointment this year, and it's not even the events themselves that are the hardest thing for you to move past, but it's this feeling of disappointment. Right? I've experienced that as well that when we put ourselves out there again and again and again and we keep being disappointed or we keep being rejected, it can be really hard to continue to put ourselves out there. So I invite you to be kind to yourself. Right? You have experienced disappointment. You have experienced forms of rejection.
And when we experience these emotions, it's important for us to take a step back and just do something that feels good. You know, for me, I oftentimes will dance in a room by myself self because that feels good for me and allows me to move energy, move the emotions. And a lot of times, it starts off as a little sad dance. And then by the end, it turns into a joyful dance, which is why I like to dance. But do something that feels good. Maybe go out in nature. Maybe allow yourself to do something nice for yourself. A spa day, a night out with friends, but allow yourself to connect back to life feeling good.
Amanda Durocher00:19:07 - 00:19:49
What goes along with disappointment oftentimes is negative self talk. So When we practice self compassion, we wanna practice being kind to ourselves, using kind language with ourselves. Right? Treating ourselves like a young child oftentimes. And what that means is that be that parent that you wish was there for you throughout your whole life or just be that parent you need in the moment. Last week, when I experienced disappointment, I just sat with it, and I was like, I know you're disappointed, Amanda. I am so sorry things didn't work out the way you wanted. I am so sorry that this hurts so much, and I just reassured myself that it was okay for me to have all my feelings and that I was okay. Right? I think that's so important when navigating disappointment and also when we are practicing that self awareness.
Being honest with ourselves can be extremely difficult, especially if we come up against that denial or we come up against a lie maybe we've been telling ourselves. I know for me that I was telling myself a few lies because I didn't wanna look at the truth of a situation. And when I was honest with myself, that hurt 2, it hurt for me to see how long I had been living in denial, and that happens all the times throughout the healing journey that we realize maybe we were in denial about something. And so it's important for us to be really kind with ourselves. I have another episode, episode 59, why self compassion is important and how to start being self compassionate that you can check out as well if you're looking for more guidance and help on how to be self compassionate. Snipped. And so my 4th piece of advice for processing disappointment is to realign to the present. And what this means is coming back to the present after you've allowed yourself to feel the disappointment, to process the feelings.
Maybe there's more feelings, sadness, anger, devastation, whatever it may be. It's coming back to the present and looking at this as a learning opportunity and seeing what this disappointment was trying to tell you. I believe that disappointment is a messenger. It is telling us we are out of alignment. It is not punishing us. It is not a bad thing even though it hurts. It is a messenger. Right? To go back to that expression, rejection is a form of God's protection and redirection.
If If we're living an intentional life or we're living a life aligned with our values, when things aren't aligned with those values or that intention, oftentimes, we'll experience disappointment. And, again, that's just a way of our hearts realigning us with what our intention is for our lives. Right? I think after we are honest with ourselves, we're able to reflect on the situation from a bigger perspective. Right? We're able to zoom out of this disappointment, see the situation from a bigger lens, and say, like, what was this trying to teach me? What is the message of this disappointment? And through that experience, we're able to realign to the present moment to right here. Right? Oftentimes, when we set expectations out in the future, We're not living in the present moment, and it can feel like we're running in a hamster wheel when we're living for an expectation outside of us or chasing a carrot. You know, I'm seeing it as like a carrot hanging in front of you, and you're chasing the carrot, but you're never able to get the carrot because you're not living in the present moment. And disappointment often reminds us through that arrival fallacy and through unrealistic expectations that we weren't living in the present moment. And it's so important to remember that all we have is the present moment.
Amanda Durocher00:22:22 - 00:22:51
This is what we have right now. We are not guaranteed anything in the future. We cannot control life. So disappointment often reminds us like, oops. You weren't living in the present moment. Time to come back to myself, to my body, to right here, right now with what I have right here and to figure out what steps I can take to realign my life now, what steps I can take to live in alignment now, what steps I can take to be intentional now, what steps I can take to be happy now. Right? I I think so many of us put that happiness in the future. We think when this happens, I can be happy.
When this happens, I can take a break. And it's so important to remember that it's important to rest now. It's important to be happy now, it's important to figure out how to enjoy each and every day. And in the world we live in, I find that to be a lifelong task. You know? There's a lot of pain in the world. There's a lot of suffering. A lot of us have experienced pain and suffering. A lot of us are still processing traumas from youth, so it can be really hard to learn how to enjoy right here, right now.
I know learning to be happy has been one of the most challenging things for me because, for me, I was a lot more comfortable being depressed. I expected disappointment at every turn. I wasn't comfortable just allowing myself to be happy because I was terrified it would be taken away. So So I'd often put that happiness outside of me in the future, and then I was disappointed again. So then I didn't experience happiness. And it's been an inside job, and it's been my job to prioritize my happiness. And I would say that's the exact same for allowing myself to rest and relax is that it's been a practice to understand how important that is for my health, how important that is for my creativity, and that it's important to prioritize that now. And the only one who's gonna tell me that my happiness and my rest and my relaxation are important for me is me.
We live in a world that go go go and is always telling you that there's something wrong with you. There's something you need to be doing. It's going to take you and me to remember that The things we want oftentimes are emotions like happiness, joy, contentment. Those things that we desire, we have to cultivate within ourselves and prioritize now, not in the future. So I believe that many times that is the message of disappointment is that we have been living out of alignment. And so the message of disappointment is oftentimes that maybe we need more self care. Maybe we need more self love. Maybe we need to reevaluate our lives and reprioritize what is actually important to us.
Amanda Durocher00:24:42 - 00:25:13
So those are the 4 things I recommend for healing and processing disappointment. Thank you so much for this question. Again, I am so sorry that you have experienced so much disappointment this year. I relate to that. As I mentioned earlier, 2023 was nothing that I wanted, but it was everything that I needed. And that can be a very humbling experience for the human. I know that it has been very humbling for me to admit that to myself that Even though the goals I set for myself, none of them came to be. I learned so freaking much this year, and I wish that for you too.
And I bet you have. You're listening to a self help turning to a self help podcast. You have learned more than you probably give yourself credit for, so I invite you to just explore everything you have learned this year, to honor yourself, to be kind to yourself, and to ask yourself, what is the message of this year? Okay. It wasn't anything you expected. You were disappointed. What is the message that has been trying to get across to you? And I know in my life, the message that was trying to get across to me was Stop living how other people want you to and just embrace yourself, Amanda. That has been my message of the year, and it has been incredibly humbling time and time again to see how many times I changed myself and try to fit in a mold to make other people happy. Recovering from people pleasing is incredibly difficult.
It is a lifelong journey, but my message this year was Embrace yourself, Amanda. You're fucking awesome. And I believe that for you. You are fucking awesome. You're amazing. You are incredible. You're beautiful. You are worthy of love.
You're worthy of everything your heart desires. It just may not happen the way you think it will. But the second you surrender and allow that bigger presence, that god presence, that loving presence will come in and surprise you in ways that will blow your mind. Sent. So thank you so much for this question. I am sending you so much love. Thank you for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. Thank you for having this conversation about disappointment with me today.
Amanda Durocher00:26:37 - 00:27:16
We discussed what disappointment is, what causes disappointment, and 4 steps for healing from disappointment, which include allowing yourself to feel the feelings, being honest with yourself and practicing self awareness, self compassion, is and realigning to the present moment. If you haven't already, I invite you to follow the podcast. The more people who follow the podcast, the more that the podcast apps share my podcast to new listeners. So If you are looking for a way to support the podcast, following the podcast is a great way to support me and my work. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for supporting me. And if you have any questions, please reach out. You can email me at newviewadvice@gmail.com or go to my website and ask a question at newviewadvice.com/question.
Thanks again for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. As always, I hope I was able to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love.