Disconnects between expectations and experiences

I found this interesting article referring to expectations and experiences and it reminded me of when we first brought home our sibling group who were 20 months and 3 years old at the time.

Despite all my exhausted research and experience, I had not lowered my expectations enough to be realistic for what each of my two new children had already experienced before joining our family.

"Our expectations of our experiences dramatically color not just how we experience waiting for them but the experiences themselves. Four scenarios exist regarding expectations and experiences. We can have:

Low expectations and a poor experience, where our low expectations can mute the disappointment or even the discomfort we feel at actually having a poor experience.

Low expectations but a good experience, leading to a pleasant surprise.

High expectations and good experience, in which we get to enjoy not only the anticipation of looking forward to something fabulous but an experience that actually lives up to our expectations and therefore feels thoroughly satisfying.

High expectations but a poor experience, in which we often emerge bitterly disappointed or even traumatized.

THE BEST STRATEGY

The "gain" at which we set our expectations tends to be more a matter of habit and disposition than conscious intention for most of us. Some of us expect little, perhaps as a way to defend against disappointment, accepting the cost of a muted or absent anticipatory sense of joy. Others of us can't help having high expectations, basking consistently in the glow of anticipation but often paying a different price: the painful disappointment that comes when experiences fail to live up to those high expectations. Even worse, sometimes having unrealistically high expectations prevent us from being able to enjoy our experiences at all.

I honestly don't think one strategy is better than another but rather that different strategies are better suited for different types of people. If you observe yourself to be continually disappointed by experiences you feel you should be able to enjoy, you may do better by consciously lowering your expectations somewhat. Likewise, if your expectations remain so consistently low you never think things will work out for you, you may find yourself plagued by a gloomy pessimism that blocks you from savoring a truly enjoyable part of life—the anticipation of good things—and you might work on allowing yourself to expect just a little more.

Though we all may have a built-in set point at which we unconsciously tend to set our expectations, that doesn't prevent us from consciously grabbing the reins and adjusting them up or down to suit our needs. Certainly it would be ideal if our expectations always perfectly matched our experiences, but as the quality of many experiences is hard to predict, we might do better to adjust our expectation of how much we think we'll enjoy or dislike an experience based more on how we know those expectations will affect us than on how accurate we may think they'll turn out to be.

My own personal preference is to know up front as much as I can about both good and bad experiences coming my way. For me—and, I've observed, for many others—not knowing what's coming when anticipating something bad creates even more anxiety than having full knowledge of how bad what's coming will be. Knowing the limits of the "badness" I'll be facing enables me to focus on preparing for it rather than on managing my imagination's tendency to inflate it beyond all rational proportion. For me at least, the devil I don't know is far worse than the devil I do."

I would like to think my children have finally taught me to set my expectations differently for each of them, depending on each situation. And although for the most part I am usually successful at this, nothing is guaranteed as you all well know! But if everything was guaranteed, how dull my life would be!

As a friend of mine said "I've lowered my expectations for my son so low, that I trip over them every morning getting out of bed."

Here's the link to read the whole article

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201003/the-danger-having-unrealistic-expectations