Expectation Hangover

by Christine Hassler

  You have an innocent and playful side that is willing to be curious and try new things the way a young child does. You have a sensitive side that has taken things personally and deserves compassion. You have a warrior side that is courageously committed to positive change. You have a wise woman or man within you who has amazing insight and experience, and gently nudges you along, the way a loving parent would. And you have a spiritual side that can see everything from a place of detachment and acceptance.

  I ask you to be willing to take this journey with me and to go at your own pace. I’m going to ask you to let go of your expectations. “But,” you may say, “my expectations motivate me and help me achieve my goals.” Not true. Let’s make a distinction: An expectation is defined as “an eager anticipation for something to happen.” A goal is defined as “a purpose or objective.” When we are clinging to expectations, we are waiting for something to happen and giving our power away. As we start to identify and release our expectations, we can take more empowering steps toward achieving our goals, with a clear sense of purpose.

  The Expectation Hangovers I have witnessed have deeply touched my heart and inspired tremendous compassion for the pain that is part of human experience. I am moved by what I have seen people face. You’ll read many stories throughout the book about clients and their Expectation Hangovers. I too have experienced Expectation Hangovers and seen the blessings that come with them. But don’t worry — I’m not just going to tell you that everything happens for a reason without showing you how to discover the reason. I’m here to teach you how to change the way you experience Expectation Hangovers so you can change your life. I’m here to inspire you with my story and the stories of others so you can actually get excited about the opportunities your Expectation Hangovers have in store for you. I’m here to relieve you of the expectations you are holding of yourself and others. I’m here to show you that the fulfillment you are seeking outside is much closer than you think. And most of all, I’m here to gently guide you out of suffering and into transforming your disappointment.

  I cannot promise that after you finish this book, you will never have another Expectation Hangover, but I can assure you of two things. First, when you do experience disappointment, you will know how to move through it in a faster, more uplifting way. Second, the time between your Expectation Hangovers will increase. What you learn in this book will help you achieve a life that may not be free of disappointment but that will no longer be hindered by it.

  “I’ve learned I was afraid of failure before my Expectation Hangover. I still am afraid sometimes, but I continue to make choices and try things because I am not paralyzed by my fear of failure anymore — it’s happened, and I dealt with it. If it happens again, I’ll deal with it again. The biggest blessing from my biggest disappointment is that I now have self-confidence and faith that I can handle anything. Until you see yourself go through something, you’re never quite sure you can — now I am.”

  — Matthew

  Each of us has felt broken and bruised; and each of us has the inner resources we need to heal and transform. Every unfortunate circumstance can bring us great fortune. It is in the most undesirable of external circumstances that we discover internal qualities like courage, faith, compassion, inspiration, acceptance, and love. Life often throws us a curveball to get us to look in a different direction, one that is even better than we planned. Before that new direction is revealed, there is a window of opportunity — a chance to change behaviors that keep us in limiting patterns where we seem to face one Expectation Hangover after another. This is your window of opportunity.

  “To be alive is to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you’d ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.”

  — Joan D. Vinge

  Part One

  EXPECTATIONS

  Chapter One

  MY EXPECTATION HANGOVERS

  “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”

  — Agatha Christie

  I am no stranger to Expectation Hangovers.

  Before the ink was dry on my college diploma, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dream of working in the entertainment industry. I was driven by a tremendous expectation of myself to be wildly successful to compensate for the insecurity I had been plagued with since childhood. By the ripe old age of twenty-five, I had an office with a view, an assistant who answered my phone, an expense account, a real salary, power lunches, television industry screenings, clients, and business cards. I dated and attended industry events. I even spent New Year’s Eve with George Clooney — now there is a midnight kiss I will never forget! From the outside, it looked like I “had it all.” There was just one problem: I was absolutely miserable.

  Where were the happiness and worthiness I thought all my goals would deliver? Every day, I tried to talk myself into liking my job. I felt obligated to stay because I had worked so hard to get there, but I dreaded each day. I started getting migraines, rode up the elevator to work with knots in my stomach, and was irritable all the time. To save myself from a total meltdown, and others from the bitch I all of a sudden was becoming, I quit.

  Leaving my prestigious career changed my external circumstances, but I still found myself miserable. Burned out and craving a total change of direction, I became a personal trainer — I thought it might be my “passion.” Wrong again. I then had nine different jobs in two years, constantly searching for something that would make me feel better about myself. During that time, I went into thousands of dollars of debt; got diagnosed with an “unknown autoimmune disorder”; stopped speaking to my mother after I made a decision that did not fit her expectations of me; and got dumped by my fiancé six months before our wedding. So there I was, now at twenty-seven: heartbroken, in debt, sick, at odds with my family, and lacking direction in my career. Nothing had turned out the way I expected, despite my meticulous planning and overachieving. Major Expectation Hangover.

  One pivotal night I found myself, for the first time ever, contemplating how I could end my life. That was a terrifying thought, but I felt so incredibly hopeless and lost I did not know what to do.

  And then something happened.

  Suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, a wave of unconditional love and compassion flooded over me. Time stopped. My pain was replaced with comfort. I knew that everything was indeed happening for a reason. Unlike the past, when people used that cliché on me and I felt like punching them and screaming, “Well, I don’t know what the freaking reason is, and this sucks!” this time I knew it to be true — even if I did not yet know the reason. The feeling of peace and connection only lasted an instant because my mind came in to try and figure it out; but the impact of that moment will last a lifetime. For the first time in my life, I felt like I experienced God — and I had my Expectation Hangover to thank for it.

  At that point, I made myself a promise to dig in, look at my life, and figure out who I really was, what I really wanted, and how I was going to get it. I opened my mind to the possibility that somewhere in the midst of this Expectation Hangover there could be a blessing. The first blessing revealed itself two days later when I woke up with the idea for my first book, which launched my very unexpected career as an author, professional speaker, facilitator, life coach, and spiritual counselor. My biggest Expectation Hangover was the catalyst for stepping onto a career path that I absolutely love.

  My quarter-life crisis was behind me, and I believed I was on my way to creating the life I wanted. I broke free of debt, healed my relationship with my mom, and regained my health. After years of searching, I found my true passion in terms of work. And after recovering from a broken heart, I married a man I loved deeply. My thirties were looking the way I thought they should. I finally “had it all.” (Ha! How cute of my ego to think that.) Then another Expectation Hangover bega
n to emerge. Everything I expected to make me happy had manifested, yet I still felt a deep sense of longing for something I couldn’t define. It was a thirst that could not be quenched by a job or a man or a paycheck or a trip to Bali (I’ve taken three). This Expectation Hangover had a deeper message for me. I embarked on a journey of learning how to leverage disappointment — a journey that shook me to my core.

  The most notable fallout of this shake-up was a divorce that catapulted me further into the Expectation Hangover, which became the most severe I had ever experienced. I agonized over whether to get divorced so much that I lost half the hair on my head. But in my heart I knew our marriage had an expiration date (you’ll learn more about those later in the book).

  When I was going through my divorce, someone said to me, “Christine, milk this time for all it’s worth.” That was one of the best pieces of advice I received. The thing about an Expectation Hangover is that it is never just about the issue we are currently feeling hungover about — it triggers all kinds of juicy stuff from our past that has not yet been resolved.

  This thirty-something Expectation Hangover included the perceived failure of a marriage, financial insecurity, and having no children despite hearing the loud ticktock of my biological clock. But I milked it for all it was worth. While grieving the demise of my marriage, I dived back into work at an accelerated speed, sold the home I had renovated with my husband, and moved into a place of my own — all the while showing up for people as a coach and inspirational speaker, which was not easy in the midst of my own Expectation Hangover. I was dealing with the shame I had about my “failed” marriage and had to quiet the “Who am I to give advice when my own life is not turning out the way I planned?” judgments. What I realized is that I am one of the best people to be teaching about Expectation Hangovers because I learned how to move through each one and walk through those doorways of transformation that were opening all around me.

  When I wrote previous books, I felt I had proven techniques for overcoming Expectation Hangovers because I had created certain external results. But my most recent Expectation Hangover was different. This time I don’t have a “happy ending” that would “prove” I treated my hangover effectively. But I am happier than I’ve ever been before because I’ve freed myself from suffering even though my life doesn’t look the way I expected it would.

  Even the things that feel absolutely miserable are in service to our growth, learning, and healing. The cure to Expectation Hangovers is not to figure out another way to get what we thought we wanted, but rather to move out of our own way enough to see what we really need.

  “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

  — Henry David Thoreau

  Chapter Two

  THE WHATS AND WHYS OF EXPECTATION HANGOVERS

  “Sometimes things have to go wrong in order to go right.”

  — Sherrilyn Kenyon

  We are all consumers of expectations. They are easy to come by — from parents, family, friends, the media — and many are self-created. Maybe it’s to be successful, get married, have children, look good, make a difference, please others… The list is endless, especially in today’s world, where there are constant opportunities to compare ourselves to others and look for ways to be more, better, or different. Never before have expectations been so high in terms of what humans are capable of, and this creates a paradox of opportunity and pressure.

  Expectations are pervasive in our lives, and most of us are conditioned to be driven by them and to attempt to realize them. But we didn’t start out that way. We are all born in a state of pure Love where there are absolutely no expectations. Think of it as our “original innocence.” When you were born, you knew these Truths: You are whole and complete. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. You are worthy and deserving. You can trust the Universe. You have a deep inner knowing. You are connected. All there is and all that matters is Love. You are Love.

  And then you got older. And things happened that moved you out of love and into fear: someone criticized you; you only got praised for your accomplishments; someone left or wasn’t there for you; you saw people fighting or got yelled at; your heart got broken; you were told your dreams were impossible; you felt incredible pressure to succeed; you got rejected; you made a mistake and judged yourself a failure; you compared yourself to others and believed they were better in some way. Or perhaps you had a blissful childhood and grew up expecting the adult world to be the same way. The moment you got your first reality check in the form of a disappointment was the moment you moved into fear.

  When in the grip of fear, we experience disconnection and a sense of emptiness. The voice of our ego and the voices of others become much louder than our inner voice and Spirit, and we feel alone and separate. To manage the disconnection, we start to be driven by what we expect will make us feel loved again. To fill the emptiness, we create expectations of what we believe will fulfill us. Our expectations then become our compass, which often navigates us right into an Expectation Hangover.

  “When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

  — Alexander Graham Bell

  “EXPECTATION HANGOVER” DEFINED

  You probably have a good sense of what an Expectation Hangover is by now, but here is my official definition: the myriad undesirable feelings, thoughts, and responses present when one or a combination of the following things occurs:

  •Things don’t turn out the way you thought, planned, or wanted them to.

  •Things do turn out according to your plans and desires, but you don’t feel the fulfillment you expected.

  •You are unable to meet your personal and/or professional expectations.

  •An undesired, unexpected event occurs that is in conflict with what you wanted or planned.

  There are many different types of Expectation Hangover, but they usually fall into one of the following three categories:

  Situational Expectation Hangovers. These occur when something does not turn out the way we wanted or we do not get the anticipated satisfaction from achieving a result. Michelle worked so hard to pursue a career in law, but it turned out to be nothing like she expected; she found herself dreading going to work each day. Jason spent over a decade at a company and was promised a hefty promotion but was laid off with no warning.

  Interpersonal Expectation Hangovers. This kind of Expectation Hangover occurs when we are let down by someone else or unpleasantly surprised by the actions of another. Jeff got a call that his son, who had always been his pride and joy, was arrested for drug possession. Sarah went on what she thought was a fantastic date but never heard from the guy again.

  Self-imposed Expectation Hangovers. These occur when we do not live up to the standards or goals we have set for ourselves. In other words, we are disappointed in ourselves and the results we’ve achieved or failed to achieve. Richard spent a year studying for the medical school entrance exam but did not score high enough to get into the school of his choice. Chelsea gave her first presentation at work and left feeling like she completely dropped the ball.

  Although the cast of characters and specific circumstances of an Expectation Hangover vary, the symptoms are generally similar to those of a hangover from alcohol but far more miserable and lasting:

  •lack of motivation

  •depression

  •anxiety

  •regret

  •physical discomfort

  •confusion

  •irritability

  •self-judgment

  •denial

  •addictive behavior

  •lethargy

  •anger

  •shame

  •guilt

  •poor work performance

  •diminished creativity

  •strained relationships

  •faith crises

  •social withdrawal

  �
�wanting to stay in bed, turn off the lights, and pull the covers over your head

  Our beliefs and self-talk fuel a lot of the symptoms we experience during an Expectation Hangover. When things don’t go our way, it is natural to buy into debilitating thoughts like “I am not enough,” “I did something wrong,” “Everyone else is better than me,” “I’ll be alone forever,” “I’ll never be successful,” “Things never work out for me,” and so on. If something unexpected happens to disrupt the image of who we think we are, we squirm, complain, and attempt to control it because our sense of identity is threatened. Our self-esteem plummets, and we may begin to feel disconnected from a Higher Power, or even question its existence entirely. We get caught up in regretting the past or latching onto the idea of something in the future we think will make us feel better. We’ll do anything to end our suffering — the problem is we just don’t know what to do.

  EXERCISE

  Identifying Your Expectation Hangovers

  Now it’s your turn to identify the Expectation Hangovers that are currently causing you the most suffering, by answering the following questions in your journal. For each yes, briefly describe the related Expectation Hangover and label it as situational, interpersonal, or self-imposed. Then, on a scale of 1 to 5, rate the level of disappointment it has caused (1 being bearable, 5 being tremendously painful).

  1.Is there something in your life that did not turn out the way you planned?

  2.Is there an aspect of your life that you are not enjoying even though you thought you would?