EXPECTATION

Expectation

 

 

I was once again in group this past week and got something from something a patient was saying.  Don’t tell them, but I often feel I get just as much from the experience than I am giving!

            We were talking about character defects and naming ones that stood in our way.  Once patient brought up that he has expectations of others that are unrealistic.  He was talking about how he harbors a resentment toward a family member because they don’t offer to help him in a way that he wants them to.  The group countered and asked if he had ever nicely confronted this family member and asked them for the help that he felt he needed and or deserved.  He stated that he had not and that he felt they should know to offer without him telling them.

            This led me to think not only about expectations but also about communication.  People don’t read minds, they never have and they never will.  If you have a need, want or require help, then ask.  You might be amazed at how people with respond in the positive.  Relationships almost always run more smoothly when you are straight and frank with others about what you need and want.  People want to know how to please others.

            I think back to how I expected life to be and how I used to be disappointed when it didn’t magically settle into a Disney version of reality.  I remember being frustrated with poor Frank when he did not intrinsically know what I wanted all the time, when I had in fact never told him.  I think we do our partners a disservice when we fall back on some “Twilight” version of what relationships are supposed to look like, where partners inherently know us and cater to our whims without a thought.

            The fact is that today, my life looks NOTHING like I thought it was going to.  NOTHING.  I was never going to lose a child.  I was never going to have a husband suffer through cancer.  I was never going to be divorced.  I was never going to have bought a house alone.  I was never going to go to grad school.  I was never going to write.  I was never going to write a book (its coming I promise).  I was never going to go to grad school and change careers and I was never going to be in recovery.  But here I am and I am happier than I would have imagined as well.

            What changed?  I let go of expectations.  I started telling people what I needed when I needed it and stopped thinking they could read my distorted mind.  I stopped thinking ahead and placing my life into boxes of fantasy.  I stopped looking at my life through anyone else’s lens but my own.  I started to embrace the here and now and accepting the perfectly flawed reality of my situation.

            In recovery speak there are two quotes I love that I believe are anonymous (they are attributed to too many people to be anything but):

            “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”

            “Hanging onto resentment is like taking rat poison and expecting the other person to die.”

            I think it is important to accept the divine reality of any given moment, not placing any undue weight on outcomes beyond our control.  What is in our control is to tell people what we want and need and let them take it from there.  If they respond in the positive, then great, if they don’t, they are a dry well.  But to create expectations is to set ourselves up for future resentments which take us down a dangerous path in recovery.

Pain is Pain

Pain is Pain

 

 

I was in a group session a while ago with some patients and one patient had finished sharing something somewhat heavy about his past.  Another patient started to speak but prefaced his comment with something like, “I know this doesn’t compare to what you went through…” to the other patient.  The first patient wisely said, “Hey man, pain is pain.”

I was thinking about that as I was driving on this last leg of my vacation road trip as both kids were asleep in the back of the car.  You get a lot of thinking done when the kids are asleep in the back of the car!  Frank and I learned about honoring someone else’s pain and meeting it where they are from Dermot.

After Liam died and while Frank was re-gaining his strength from cancer treatments, we got two Australian Shepard rescue puppies.  Two brothers from the same litter that we named King Henry and King Arthur.  They gave us something to love at a time when we had a lot left over and desperately needed somewhere to direct it.  They were great dogs that Dermot knew from birth.  We, unfortunately, had to put Arthur down when he was still rather young but Henry was with us for many years.

Henry was good with our kids but not as patient with other children.  But with and Wren and Dermot, he was protective and tolerant.  He and Dermot particularly had a bond.  To Dermot, Henry was his best friend.  There were times we would wake up in the middle of the night and find Dermot had brought his blanket into our room and curled up next Henry on his dog bed and was fast asleep.  When Dermot was having a bad day and getting into lots of trouble, sometimes snuggling with Henry was the only answer.  Dermot found it easier to read if he could read out loud to Henry and Henry would start his nightly rounds by sleeping on Dermot’s bed until Dermot fell asleep.

So when Frank and I had to put Henry down a couple of years ago, both kids were devastated, but Dermot took it particularly hard.  For weeks after he would burst into tears at the mere thought or mention of Henry and would be hard to console.  Frank and I were supportive but we would often follow up our consoling with some phrase like, “Yes, this is sad, Dermot, but this isn’t like losing a person.”  I don’t even think we realized we were doing it.

One day I think one of us said this to Dermot again after he had become upset about Henry and some memory and he stood at the top of the stairs in tears and said, “I hate it when you guys say that!  I’ve never lost a person so to me this feels like everything!”

We had been comparing our loss of a son to his loss of his best friend, the dog.  We had automatically compared and judged his pain less.  I was horrified by what I had been saying to him and glad he had said something.  How could he possibly know how we had felt?  He is a child, he has no children and I hope he never knows the loss of a child.  He lost his best friend and in his world that was everything and I had been giving him the message that his pain wasn’t justifiable.

Now, thanks to Dermot, I know not to compare pains, losses, trials and despairs.  People feel what they feel and their pain should be honored for what it is and where they are.

Pain is pain.