Many years ago, I attended a personal development course. At that time, I didn’t even know what personal development was. I had read no books on the subject and, in fact, didn’t even know there was such a thing as personal development.

I still remember the three-day course was a complete eye-opener and I have never been the same since. It set me on a lifelong journey of self-discovery and (hopefully) improvement, and I will for ever be grateful to my sister who introduced me to the course.

There were many concepts introduced in those three days but one of the ideas that left an indelible impression on me was the way to deal with upset.

We tend to get upset for only three reasons:

1.         Disappointed expectations.

2.         Frustrated intentions.

3.         Undelivered communications.

We go through life forming expectations. Even when these are expressed as hopes, we still have an expectation of how things should look. Last weekend we went to Belgium and hired a car. Today, the car company have written to us charging us £700 for damage we had inflicted on the car. To the best of our knowledge there was no damage and so I am furious. My expectation was that because we returned the car undamaged, there would be nothing more to pay. I now have to sort this problem out, which is inconvenient, frustrating and worrying, as they have already charged it to our credit card, and we can’t stop the payment.

The annual regatta at Brightlingsea (a small sailing town on the Essex coast) takes place this August and I had intended to go for the whole week. I hadn’t considered that my husband might not be able to take time off from work. It’s a minor frustration, because we can still go down for the weekend, but still an upset.

When a person dies, or a relationship is severed, it is often all the things you are not able to say that cause the greatest grief. When everything there was to say has been said, there is still loss, but not the bitterness that lies with these undelivered communications. Sometimes we just need to say goodbye. The other side of this is having to bite our tongues when we want to express our anger at someone. We want to yell at the perpetrator of the action that has caused our upset, yet cannot, for whatever reason.

I have found this analysis of upset to be very useful over the years. If I can take a step back from my feelings and ask myself why I am upset, most often it is for one of these three reasons. Being able to categorise my upset often removes its power and put me more in control. I’m still upset but am able to see things in proportion.

What upsets do you have going on right now and which of these three categories do they fall in? Or are they something completely different?

Mary

A Moodscope member