T he pain of disappointment comes in many flavors. Sometimes it’s the kids who you thought would appreciate the heart soul and effort you poured into them and they don’t.

One young adult related to me recently that his mother expressed hurt about her son disregarding something important to her saying “I’m also a human being.”

“I guess I never really thought about her as a person separate from her role as my mother ” he mused.

Sometimes it is friends whom you think will be there for you when you need them but all you get is radio silence.

Often however the most painful disappointments have to do with our spouses. We put so much hope into that relationship — hope for closeness and friendship compassion and kindness. When that doesn’t materialize the disappointment may include a sense of loss; the loss of what could have been and to our minds what should have been.

After the monumental event of Matan Torah Moshe goes up on the mountain for 40 days. We often speak about the people’s anticipation of his return and their panic when he doesn’t appear at the time they calculated.

But what about Moshe? Can we even contemplate the feeling of excitement he had as he carried the Luchos down the mountain Heavenly stones engraved by the Creator containing the Divine wisdom; the formula for success of the individual the nation and ultimately the universe? It was a critical moment in human history.

When he saw the people dancing around the Golden Calf and chose to smash the Luchos to wake them from their reverie can we imagine his disappointment? Yet he carried on as their leader caring for them and pleading to the Creator to forgive them.

Changing Perceptions

We aren’t Moshe Rabbeinu. Yet the pain of disappointment is a real one. What tools do we have that allow us to cope and carry on as well?

For one thing when we change our perception of a situation our emotional response to it changes as well.

No one enjoys getting the flu shot or dental work yet we know we can tolerate them. Emotional pain is often more difficult to endure than physical pain yet a healthy person knows that life brings with it that type of pain as well and while we don’t relish it we can carry it.

The Hebrew word for patience savlanus comes from the root sevel suffering. We know that while this suffering is unpleasant it isn’t harmful and we’re capable of carrying it. Think of a mother walking home from the grocery store with heavy bags digging into her fingers. While it’s uncomfortable she knows she can make it home.

A second aspect of savlanus is the idea that just because I want something to be a certain way that doesn’t mean the Creator has to acquiesce. Savlanus means accepting that things don’t have to go according to my desire. As a Yerushalmi talmid chacham told his daughter “What investment did you make in the Heavenly bank that allows you to demand payment?”

The Chovos Halevavos teaches that Hashem set up the world so that sometimes things work out according to our ratzon and sometimes they don’t in order to give us regular reminders that we aren’t in control He is.

Similarly the expectations we have of others are often the cause of our disappointment. I expected my boss to recognize that I stayed late three nights a week until the project was complete. I expected the woman whose car pool I drove for two months until her broken leg healed to acknowledge what I did for her. I expected my husband to notice that I had stopped criticizing him and would become less reactive.

Just because I decided that a person should act or react a certain way doesn’t create a master plan in the universe. My free will is uniquely mine as is theirs. As much as I would like it to I can’t impose my perception of what’s correct behavior on another person.

Accept Limitations

We often pride ourselves on how well we know those who are nearest and dearest to us. Yet our understanding of another person even our spouse has limitations. Each person’s kochos hanefesh are multifaceted and complex. It takes a lifetime for an individual to understand himself. It’s presumptuous to assume that we know someone else well enough to understand how they should react in any given situation.

Accepting that someone else has a different ability to perceive a situation and therefore a different capacity to respond to it is key to containing our disappointment.

Melanie and her husband had a difficult relationship. The more she expected of him the more he disappointed her. She wanted closeness; he wanted separate vacations. Her constant angst was depleting her emotionally. When she ended up in the hospital with breathing difficulties she realized that she had to make a real change.

Finally she was able to accept that she isn’t him and that 12 years of “Why don’t you do this?” and “Why don’t you care about that?” wasn’t getting her anywhere but sick.

She recognized that she didn’t really understand the difficulties her husband had faced growing up because she hadn’t been there and even if she had been her personality is so different from his that the same situation would have engendered an entirely different response in her. Her husband felt her acceptance and things calmed down at home.

Melanie perceived that the constant disappointment she was living with had made her into a person she didn’t recognize. When she stopped fueling her disappointment through constant criticism she regained her drive and began to invest in projects both in and out of her home that she had always loved and had given up. She’s still sad that her husband doesn’t want or perhaps isn’t capable of the relationship she craves but as she says “Every husband is a package and this is the one Hashem gave me.”

She now has energy to invest positively in the relationship energy that wasn’t available previously because it was being sapped by her disappointment.

Right Idea Wrong Application

One of the best tools our yetzer has to take us off course is to flip things on us — meaning right idea wrong application. Rav Dessler brings a classic example. When you’re trying to learn Torah or to grow the yetzer comes along and nags you “When are you going to do for others?” When you’re doing for others the yetzer is the voice that says “And what about you when are you going to invest in your own ruchniyus?”

This is true in the realm of expectations as well. The yetzer convinces us of the merit of our expectations of others when it would be much more productive to refocus and turn our expectations to ourselves.

Everything that we don’t truly know about those close to us even our spouses we can know about ourselves. That knowledge can allow us to form expectations of self that are high yet at the same time realistic. We want to avoid the easy route which won’t stretch us into growth and achievement and simultaneously not set ourselves up for constant failure.

Think of it as an exercise class. How silly would it be to watch another member of the class and decide how many push-ups she should be doing? We must set our own pace the pace that will allow us to grow stronger without injuring ourselves. And that is something each person can only do for themselves.

Finally sometimes our frustration with others is an expression of a deeper disappointment with ourselves. The Vilna Gaon in describing the rewards and punishments of the World to Come relates that immediately after the soul separates from the body the person realizes how he could have utilized his time on this earth and what he could have become and that disappointment in oneself is extremely painful.

When we choose to focus more upon raising the level of our own behaviors and responses and less on those of others we’ll have less to be disappointed about and more to be gratified about in This World and the Next.

Debbie Greenblatt is a senior lecturer for the Gateways organization and a teacher of both observant and not-yet-observant Jewish women for over 30 years. Debbie’s lecture topics include Jewish texts Jewish thought and relationships.  (Originally featured in Family First Issue 545)