You didn’t get the job, or lost it. Your partner left you or you decided to break up. Or you realized that the degree you were pursuing is not for you. Having big plans go up in flames is a painful experience most would like to avoid in their lives. Most, however, will make the experience at least a couple of times. This means that having a strategy to deal with the emotional turmoil is key. Below you will find 5 steps to deal with big disappointment and move on.
Let yourself Feel
Disappointment hurts. It is normal that the first instinct is to distract yourself and move away from this incredibly uncomfortable experience. To help you move on, you need to allow yourself to grief for a bit. In this phase it is ok to seek out solitude. To cry and scream and curse and feel like a victim. Let it out. As long as you are not harming yourself or anyone else, you are free to express your feelings however you like.
Coping without Harm
What are the coping strategies that you usually fall back onto when you are experiencing a difficult time? Commonly, strategies include shopping, indulgent food, scrolling mindlessly on social media and having alcoholic beverages. Neither of these will necessarily hurt you now or in the future, but they might. Especially if you are consistently relying on the same strategies. Over time their negative impact can compound and even cause more harm than relief. Instead, I recommend that you include a variety of distinctly harmless strategies that help you cope. Examples are talking with a friend, writing or expressing your pain creatively, exercise or connecting with nature.
What is the pain telling you?
I get it, your first impulse to negative emotions is probably to do anything but focus on the pain. And if you need a moment (or day) to self-soothe with distraction, that is completely fine! However, I believe that in order to move on, you could look at your experience and see if you notice a pattern in your own behaviour that has led to this experience. Some questions you can ask yourself are: Could this outcome be tied to my identity? What were my expectations before I went in, and were they realistic? What are some future opportunities that I haven’t considered yet looking forward to from here?
Adjust your Perspective
My previous point already started addressing this next and crucial step to moving forward. It is about adjusting your perspective. For example, if your goal as a free-time athlete was to make it into the olympics you probably failed to achieve this goal if you didn’t make it in. If you adjusted your perspective and your goal to a growth-goal you’d probably stay motivated more easily. A growth–focused goal is a goal that focuses on improvement, rather than an outcome. For example, changing the outcome-based goal of making it to the Olympics, one could change it to a growth-based goal such as improving your performance in a measurable way. Put it into perspective, what does this really mean?
Your goal might not need such radical adjustment. Either way, I would like to both notice (and name) your emotions, as well as your thoughts that are a response to them. When you learn to be more aware of our thoughts, you can most easily identify thought bias and challenge them so that you won’t take all of them as truth (because, spoiler alert, they aren’t all true!).
Find the next Step(s)
By now you have let yourself feel, used coping mechanisms, analyzed the pain and adjusted your perspective. Finally, I want you to come up with the next step(s). Many struggle to come up with the next steps for themselves. A small trick is to pretend you are giving your best friend advice. Often it is easier to come up with suggestions for others, rather than yourself. Then you act on your own advice. If you struggle to come up with ideas, even when you are pretending to give advice to someone else, get others involved. Ask someone you trust and who might have been in a similar situation before for suggestions. As we’ve just learned, most people enjoy giving advice to others much more than coming up with plans for themselves.
How long and strongly you will stay in each of these phases is highly individual and depends on the disappointment. So do not be too harsh when it takes you longer than expected to move on. I also recommend that you don’t wait around for closure. Often life does not offer closure and it is a waste of your time to wait for it. Finally, if you think that you won’t be able to move on by yourself, it is completely valid to reach out to someone who is paid to help you cope. You can reach out to me if you need help getting over a recent disappointment and together we’ll figure out how you can get back up and take advantage of the next opportunity.
Featured photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash
Margaretha Madoures 