IS IT ASKING TOO MUCH?

Someone once said that we often dislike people the most who are either most like us or who show the same weaknesses that we have overcome. I’ve often wondered if this is true.

I have long accepted however, that some people and I will not likely ever get along. I felt that we were just too different from each other. Maybe it is just the opposite, that we were instead perhaps too much alike to be friends.

When are we angriest? Maybe it’s when we feel most powerless. It could also be when we feel most taken for granted, disappointed or disrespected. We feel most powerless perhaps in situations which we feel we can do nothing to change. Chronic illness, acts of God, serious losses especially of those we love, might all qualify as things which might cause us to feel helpless or powerless.

Unrequited love is a really brutal experience. Hopefully you get it over with when you are very young, or at least young enough to realize that you can, and most likely will, love again and that it will be reciprocated.

Betrayal really slows us down. It can sometimes take years to recover from the kinds of pain we experience when we are cheated, betrayed or have things taken from us by someone to whom we had given unconditional love and trust.

However, what happens when someone disappoints us? We often feel that they have let us down. We also feel that they have not met our expectations. We may feel varying degrees of being angered, upset and/or hurt. In such cases however, how much of our disappointment comes from what someone else does, or did not do, and how much from what we hoped might happen and did not?

The question becomes, how much of what happened is a result of our own hopes and dreams and how much is based on another person just being themselves?

Do we have a right to be angry that we did not get what we wanted? Perhaps we do, but possibly only when we were promised that our hard work would be rewarded, and it was not.

Otherwise, maybe we misjudged what we might expect as a result of certain relationships, what we hoped or dreamed we might obtain, rather than what we might reasonably expect from the situation in question.

Where being disappointed is a trickier problem is when we have invested a lot of our time, effort and possibly also resources, freely and generously on someone we know and care for and find, either an unequal or unrequited response from the other person. Although this may not be a betrayal, it can feel that way sometimes.

When what you give far exceeds what others give you, you have either expected too much, or the other person has decided that what you have to offer is not as important or valuable to them as you think it should be.

In such cases, we need to determine how much of what happened was an unrealistic dream we had, and how much we might logically have expected in an allegedly reciprocal relationship.

You can accept that your miscalculated the value of what you offered. You can reflect on the others response and decide whether additional effort or discussion might still give you what you feel you deserve or need.

Alternatively, sometimes it becomes obvious that a lack or deficit of mutual respect and esteem exists, and always will, despite your best efforts.

It is when you recognize that the situation will never be reasonable or balanced, you might decide to write off your losses and move on to somewhere where what you have to offer will be genuinely valued and appreciated.

I suspect that leaving a situation with few chances of success, and moving on, will likely lead to one that is more likely to succeed sooner than you might imagine.

Once you stop wasting time, and energy, on hopeless causes you become free to take a chance to move forward. Using a new approach and interacting with new people, might more easily lead to a better appreciation of what you have to offer.