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“Time passed, evening approached, he was not so wretched as to have forgotten his expectation; therefore neither will he be forgotten. Then he sorrowed, and the sorrow did not deceive him as life had; it did for him everything it could: He possessed his disappointed expectation in the sweetness of sorrow. It is human to sorrow, it is human to sorrow with the sorrowful, but it is greater to have faith, it is more blessed to behold the faithful one.”
~Referring to Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
Expectations will get you—me—every single time. They just will. In AA they say “expectations breed resentments.” This is an incredibly true statement. And yet, at least for me, I don’t know if it’s possible for me to entirely stop having expectations. The problem is that the expectations are automatic, or at least they feel that way: They seem to come from somewhere deep within, a place I cannot resist. From some core inner room inside me.
I think, for me, it’s this simple: Privileged as I was growing up—privileged, that is, with the externals, the class—from an emotional perspective I simply felt abandoned, both by my father who was emotionally remote, basically vacant, clinically detached, and by my mother, who was the exact opposite: Hot, full of fire, frothing with intensity, tumultuous, trending towards narcissism, controlling, strict, fearful.
Both my parents were deeply wounded. There are three suicide attempts between them, and those are only the ones I’m aware of. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn of more. Secrets: Another funhouse circus in my familial clan. The suicide attempts from my folks are all, as far as I know, from when they were young: Teens and twenties. But clinical depression, narcissism and alcoholism are rich in my family.
It's an interesting thing. My parents did what it seems the vast majority of people do: They experienced severe trauma and then did the best they could to cover it over and not look at it anymore. There are many ways to do this, of course. My folks used the tried and true: Denial; lying; revisionist history; self-mythologizing; ignoring reality; selective hearing/listening; perception-management; etc. I’ve always loathed these methods because, since I’ve never been able to fully or accurately utilize them myself, I’ve always felt myself to be the uncanny victim of them.
Now, right away we bump into a problem here after this above last statement, at least for me: I hate the word “victim,” and I feel strongly about adulthood and personal responsibility. Ergo: I can’t allow myself to get away with saying that I have unrealistic expectations “because” of my parents, because they set me up for failure a la emotional abandonment. Because my expectations were never fulfilled emotionally with them—and they never understood this, always doubling down on buying me more stuff; yes I know I sound like a brat—I think what happened is this set up a grotesque perpetual [psychological] cycle wherein, even now, as a 40-year-old man, I still have these unrealistic expectations of my partner, my friends, even my own mother, who I should have by now learned my lesson with.
It’s sort of like Freud’s Repetition Complex, the idea that you keep repeating the same behaviors over and over again until you finally solve the riddle, change the behavior and move on. Ever wonder why you seem to date the same kinds of people over and over and over and the same problems perpetually come up? It’s probably because you still haven’t learned the underlying lesson. Once you do, and you alter your behavior accordingly, you’ll likely start to date different types of people.