Have you ever been disappointed? The act of disappointment comes from holding two beliefs at the same time, beliefs that struggle with one another. I found significant relief by examining how certain kinds of disappointment arise in such a way that often leads to a double bind (damned if you do, damned if you don't) and how to undo it.
Red Ball
An initial belief carries within it a typically positive or at least neutral expectation. Consider a red ball. That is pleasing enough. As always, you can only see one side of the ball. As you turn it in your hands, anticipating a uniformly round smooth red ball, you suddenly perceive that the other side isn't smooth and red, but presents both a green color with a dent in its surface. For both appearances your senses of touch and sight and resulting judgments are actively constructing the appearance of the ball. At first it appears one way. Suddenly expectations are shattered because the other side appears completely different and unsatisfactory. Thus occurs your disappointment.
Each viewing is confirmed by your powers of intention. You intend the red side of the ball. As you turn it you anticipate a continuation of that initial perception until what appears is the green dented side. Both intentional acts involve your mind putting together what you perceive. The result is conflicting intentions. Conflict leads to disappointment.
What is more, two conflicting intentions about the same object produce a certain doubling in the overall sense-content of the perception. What is new and different blankets the anticipation of the initial appearance. The anticipation of a uniform experience is thrown into conflict. Most of us, when met with two conflicting perceptions, will retrace our steps to see how the conflict came about, an exercise in temporal retrospection, looking at what the object turned into before looking back to the original experience of it, thus doubling the full content of the event. Such a stream can become a sort of trap. "How did that happen?" we ask. One may also notice the puzzling ambiguity of the situation, that is, one receives an incomplete meaning of the event as well as taking part in actively creating it.
So much for our red ball. Let's apply this principle to more meaningful areas of life. Faith in God, loving another, parenting, anticipation of an unfolding state of affairs intended to produce something good and lasting.
Faith
When it comes to faith in God some have a very strong start. It seems that anything they ask of him he does. The early days following the planting and development of the seed of faith in the heart were joyous days. This is commonly reported by young believers and new converts so that it has gained the nickname of the honeymoon. Many anticipated that the honeymoon would never end. The notion of a promise may also have been a significant element intertwined in anticipation.
A promise believed is a powerfully positive intention. But if the initial belief is challenged, blanketed in a second negating intention, the resulting struggle can form a corrupt fusion of positive and negative such that the negative begins to feed off the positive energy of the positive. They become entwined. They begin to grow together.
A spiritual honeymoon can end this way. It may end gradually - or perhaps even suddenly - before coming to a close. By then the developing convert hopefully would have gained enough sound theology to understand the faith and how to hold to it even in the midst of what feels distinctly like God's absence, or withdrawal of the knowledge of his presence. The story of the sweetness of first love comes to an end. But life goes on. The world has lost its halo and may take on a stark new aspect, mundane and tiresome, hostile or possibly sinister. What to do?
Such an unexpected turn of events may bring deep disappointment, a profound emptiness, a persistent experience of nothingness. This can be agonizing. You were looking at a smooth red ball and it gradually became green and dented. Your prayers go unanswered, and you feel left on your own to sort out how you will comport yourself. The faith declares resolutely that God never leaves nor forsakes his children. So why does it feel that he has? The sensation of his presence has been withdrawn, he has become absent, but the doctrine is irrefutable: "I will never leave you." Some say they can only continue on as if he were still close by, as if they still felt his presence. The apparent absence felt as nothingness, the ambiguity and the emptiness may easily be interpreted as negative experiences leaving the believer in a wretched state, possibly in a double bind.
The bottom line, however, is that the initial belief about how to relate to God has run up against a second belief that is at odds with it, struggling against it because the joy of first love has been thwarted and given way to a new persistent stark reality. This too is a common experience recorded multiple times in the Psalms, Job, and other ancient books.
The negative, the Nothing, barges into the position carved out by what was first the fullness of a joyful relationship with God. Nothing has its own independent status on a par with Being itself.
The important thing is to get at the essence of what is happening. The mind of the believer actively and positively creates the closeness to God, not on its own of course, but in response to the agency of the Spirit reaching out to him. The antithesis of an eventual distancing one experiences, the Nothing, is also created by perception, the perception of felt absence. Now because the two perceptions are intentional creations, it is left up to the believer to make what he will of this new state of affairs: the remembrance of God's enlivening presence shrouded now by the emergence of Nothing. Will he agonize over not being able to restore himself to his earlier joyous experience? Or will he acknowledge that God never left? Will he deliberately choose to ascend through reinterpretation of this rotation of Being and Nothing and thus acquire a new caliber of maturity?
In the end, it is by one's choice that one turns disappointment into a balanced realistic acceptance - with no loss of faith. By acknowledging the facts of the matter one can come out from under the burden of one's initial negative judgment leading to disappointment by recognizing the struggle as a temporal rite of passage, not a permanent reality.
Love
What about love? Have you fallen in love with someone only to find in time your beloved wasn't behaving toward you as at first? You remember how well it all started, the thrill of feeling a special exclusive and unique unity with another person. This is where half the love songs come from. But somehow he or she changed, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly. Now you feel abandoned, betrayed. Was the spirit of the initial promise interwoven in a solemn vow was too hot to handle? What did you make of it? Most people cannot avoid the spun out disappointment of a true love gone sour. They hold onto or, at least have a difficult time letting go of, the sourness, the abandoned promise leading to perpetual disappointment, doubling the painful retrospective sense of the richness of being in love thrown out of the saddle by its absence. This is where the other half of love songs come from.
The same principle of two conflicting beliefs holds here as well. They are both intentional creations of your mind, your spirit. They are durable, they are powerful. Now it is time to reinterpret correctly. What will you make of them? This is your story. You are the author. How will you rewrite the scenario to arrive at a truthful suitable acceptable outcome?
You will notice, if you are following my train of thought, that disappointment cannot be blamed on another, at least not entirely. You created it through your inmost power of intentionality. And just because you judge the scene a failure, two conflicting beliefs struggling for dominance, doesn't mean your initial reaction to the overall state of affairs is the only truthful authentic interpretation. The power to choose what each belief is and how it led you to anticipate good things followed by the second conflicting belief and resulting disappointment is as much in your hands now as it was when the relationship began. The heartbreak of emptiness in this scenario is not purely negative. Your ability to create the intentions - even negative intentions of nothingness - is a positive act. Treat it as such. Now what? That's up to you.
Parenting
Consider a third scenario. It is only natural for a child to love his father and mother. Family affection is an innate universal human instinct. We are born with it. From childhood we choose it, intend it, practice it. Thus even family affection becomes a sedimented state of affairs of the heart and mind, one defined by dynamic developing relationships. Again, its root is a positive intentional creation.
Nevertheless, even here we are left open to the possibility of disappointment. Father or mother may behave toward you in your youth or childhood in a manner contrary to your first "happy family" rendering, your first belief. The happy family stream of consciousness may suffer an unexpected dent. This sets up a peculiar and complicated struggle, especially if you have nowhere else to go. You are in your father's house and adulthood may be still a ways off.
Many struggle with this very betrayal of trust. For some it is light enough that one simply carries on; for others it is devastating. Reinterpret the disappointment with an eye to finishing the struggle. Reconcile the intentions that are in conflict in order to regain a full sense of yourself and recovering an accurate assessment of your personal power. Recognize that time itself plays an important role in allowing your emotional perspective to mature before you can solve the puzzle and return with a full rich reinterpretation.
Though the initial thrust of negating experiences at the hands of father or mother may have been little more than the piercing of a needle cutting you to the quick, when met with the momentum of the initial positively charged negation it may take on a life of its own. But the root is not in itself negative. It is positive. Casting it as essential negation is a mistake that empowers the downside. It may subtly, persistently become a wound that keeps on wounding. The healing remedy requires a clear vision of how the power of two conflicting intentions is to be sorted out. You are the author. It's your story. Reinterpret. Enlarge the scenario to its fulness. Keeping your view narrow can only hamstring your attempts at a complete reconciliation.
Higher Education
A final brief example is college. You just stepped into legal adulthood full of energy, supported by culturally reinforced high expectations, a promise for what your college education would enable you to become, with a bright vision for your life. Getting a college degree is held in high esteem for good reason. It means coming of age, gaining status and respect, being prepared to work at a career designed to bring you personal satisfaction.
You expect to be suitably challenged by the subject matter of your courses and meaningfully supported by your professors as you meet those challenges. This is a complicated state of affairs. It involves learning, achievement, anticipating your future social status and your ability to carve out a living that satisfies you. It also involves contractual parties: the institution versus you.
All universities and colleges are not created equal. Some have a rich informed overriding vision and mission for their institution. They hire superior professors who care about their discipline and also care about the progress of their students. Other universities seem more like huge impersonal enterprises that churn out graduates by the thousands. They give the impression that students serve them, not the other way round. They seem more in the business of making money and for their own self preservation. Room exists for disappointment at both ends of the quality spectrum.
To be a good student means to make oneself uniquely vulnerable. If you attended a top rated university you will be well rewarded for your learning efforts. But if your defenses go up because your classrooms are actually hostile to the spirit of learning, you cannot engage fully. Your honest curiosity and wonder about how things are put together is stymied. If you are open you run the risk of public humiliation by arrogant or careless professors barking at you before your classmates just for asking a genuine question, making an astute observation or admitting your ignorance. (Hey, if you weren't ignorant, you wouldn't be in college, right?)
Once a student is humiliated this way his system of wonder will begin to shut down. He will defend himself against being humiliated again. The learning process takes a major hit and a bit of cynicism might enter in. If learning is so great, if knowledge is a living thing to be properly engaged how have so many professors lost sight of the joys of education? Again, two conflicting intentions struggle and the battle over disappointment while on the cusp of adulthood is an internal one.
Students don't change their institutions, their institutions change them. This, too, may be felt as betrayal. Only now the scale is the individual against his own society. Cynicism is not a remedy to being browbeaten by a once-trusted instructor. Correct interpretations of one's opposing intentions plus a change of venue provide better paths forward.
In each of these examples there are multiple ways of addressing the problem of disappointment. I have emphasized only one, the readjustment of the action of the mind through a careful reinterpretation of one's own intentions, intentions that are in themselves rooted in positive acts, being and nothing, presence and absence, which came into conflict. I have demonstrated that it is possible to unravel a response of agony, disappointment or defeat by re-asserting the essential positive energy inherent in both.