Disappointment and beyond. The feeling of disappointment is like a color consisting of a mixture of several colors… Undoubtedly, the most dominant color in this palette is sadness; This is the most intense emotion we feel when we experience disappointment. However, if we were to describe disappointment only with sadness, it would be incomplete. We need to name the other emotions that accompany sadness so that we can better determine what we need to find a solution for and what we can do about it.
First of all, we can start by examining the situation that caused us this sadness. Disappointment, as the name suggests, means the breaking of a dream, that is, not coming true. Our key word here is “dream”… We can start by examining the solid state of our broken dream.
When you think of dreams, do not think of very fantastic fictions that are unlikely to come true. Our dreams are actually our very intense desires… These intense desires may be about being the richest person in the world, or about being able to vacation for a few days in a quiet seaside resort this summer… As we can see in this example, the probability of our dreams coming true is more or less certain depending on their nature.
Therefore, the intense desire we feel can sometimes cause us to estimate the possibility of this realization in an unhealthy way and to hope beyond a mathematical possibility. In other words, we need to be on good terms with “reality” in order to prevent our dreams from being broken later. Being able to perceive the truth as it is and accept it with the consequences it will impose on us will prevent us from dreaming too ambitiously and insistently saying Amen to prayers that will not happen.
The intensity of sadness in disappointment is directly linked to the “level of realistic desire” I mentioned above. The more reliable the probability of the desired outcome is estimated, the healthier the sadness experienced when it does not happen, that is, we feel sad, but our world does not collapse around us…
In parallel, the feeling of surprise that precedes sadness and is a part of disappointment also depends on the level of connection with reality. The more firmly our feet are on the ground while living with our dreams, the less affected we will be when we stumble and fall. We do not experience a big shock, and we immediately realize that we have fallen, pick ourselves up, get up, and perhaps continue on our way with other dreams.
This state of having a healthy connection with both dreams and reality protects us from the feeling of hopelessness/helplessness when a possible disappointment occurs. When the dreams we hold on to with great hope are destroyed, we feel both sadness and insidious despair… Why have dreams if they won’t come true anyway, life like this is impossible, etc.
As I wrote at the beginning, if we keep our feet on the ground while our dreams are being formed and we do everything we can over time to make our dreams come true, we have the right to wait with hope. However, we also know that not everything depends only on us, and we always take into account the possibility that it may not happen. This healthy stance alleviates the severity of the sadness of disappointment and the accompanying feeling of confusion and prevents it from evolving into despair.
No matter how good our mental health is, disappointment is a difficult experience. I hope none of us encounter this feeling very often in our lives…
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