About Me Coaching and Programs Podcast Meal Plans Resources Shop Testimonials

#397 Disappointment Detox - How to Stop Setting Yourself Up to Suffer

Subscribe on iTunes
Watch the full episode on YouTube

Episode Overview

In this episode of Better Than Before Breast Cancer, we’re talking about the emotional landscape of disappointment.

We’ll explore how unrealistic expectations, emotional attachment to outcomes, and projecting our own beliefs onto others can set us up for unnecessary suffering.

Laura share actionable strategies to reframe disappointment, embrace curiosity, and use setbacks as stepping stones to growth and self-awareness.

 

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  1. Why disappointment stems from unmet expectations and how to identify them.
  2. How radical acceptance and mindfulness can help you navigate disappointment.
  3. The difference between focusing on outcomes versus embracing the process.
  4. Why cognitive distortions, such as catastrophizing and all-or-nothing thinking, amplify disappointment.
  5. Practical strategies to set realistic expectations, build resilience, and create lasting growth.

 

Key Resources and Studies Mentioned:

 

Episode Highlights:

  • [0:01] Introduction: Understanding the universal nature of disappointment.
  • [7:15] Setting ourselves up for disappointment by attaching emotions to specific outcomes.
  • [15:30] Radical acceptance: Seeing people and situations for what they are without judgment.
  • [22:45] Cognitive distortions and their role in amplifying disappointment.
  • [29:00] Mindfulness practices and curiosity as tools for growth and self-compassion.

 

Practical Takeaways:

  • Reframe disappointment as a natural part of life and a catalyst for growth.
  • Practice gratitude by focusing on progress rather than perfection.
  • Burn your "manual" for how others should behave and accept them for who they are.
  • Set flexible goals and embrace curiosity to keep moving forward even when outcomes fall short.

 

Let’s Connect!
If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit from hearing it. Want to take the next step in creating a healthier, happier life after breast cancer? Visit The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach and explore:

 

Subscribe & Review:
Subscribe to Better Than Before Breast Cancer on Apple Podcasts and leave a review to help others find this show. Your support means the world to me!

 

Follow Laura on Social Media:

 

 


Read the full transcript:

 

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lemmer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey, friends, welcome to episode 397

0:36
of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host. Laura lummer, I'm thrilled to be here with you today, and I want to start off this show with a thank you and an acknowledgement. So first of all, thank you. Your username is Cora lovey, which is really cute. I like your username. Cora lovey left a review for the podcast, and I want to share it because I want to address it. It was a great review, and thank you so much for taking the time to do that. I really, really appreciate it. And what you said in your review that I want to address is that my only complaint about this podcast is that it's for breast cancer survivors. The information here is so juicy, rich and hopeful for living. I constantly want to recommend it to friends who are not going through cancer. Yes, thank you for acknowledging that. And I want, I want to say something about it, because I hear this all the time. I hear this from my clients. I receive messages from people who don't have cancer and never have had cancer that do listen to the podcast, and it's an important thing to bring up. It's an interesting thought that we have that we can't share this information because it's about breast cancer, right? But it's not about breast cancer at all, right? It is about life, and it is about living, and it is about loving yourself more and creating a life that's a better than before breast cancer, I of course, named the podcast that because it was a diagnosis of breast cancer that changed my life, and it was a diagnosis of breast cancer that brought me into a community of women who were struggling to align their lives and themselves for the way with the way they wanted to live. After a breast cancer diagnosis opened their eyes to a lot of things, and they didn't have the tools or the understanding of how to implement these changes. So in my community, right? This is the women that I support are women who have had breast cancer, but I also do support other people, and you're absolutely right. This information is about living. But in order to make sure that I reach the audience of women who I know are struggling after a breast cancer diagnosis, hence the title of the podcast, right? And it's my own experience. You know, my own experience of healing, of living, of realigning my life is really just the foundation of it was a cancer diagnosis. So Cora lovey, thank you for bringing that up. It's a very important topic, and I will tell you what. Here's a little, I don't know, sneak peek. It's not a preview yet, because it's not ready yet. But I've heard this so much, and I've had so often, clients of mine reach out to and say, Would you work with a friend of mine? Would you work with a family member of mine? And of course, I would work with anyone who needs help, but my better than before breast cancer life coaching membership is a sacred space for women who have had breast cancer. So that is a space that I don't just bring anybody into, right? And it is because even though all of this information applies to life. We do have a very meaningful, traumatizing, transformative experience as people who've had a cancer diagnosis, and it's important to me to hold a safe space where these women feel that they can come and be understood by other women. I even have a breast cancer recovery group, which is a free Facebook group, and there are over 1000 women in there. And I often have people who are support people or caretakers for those who've been diagnosed, and they will ask to join the group because they want information or feedback or hear what other women are going through. And so I pull that that Facebook group, and I ask those women, is this okay with you? Do you want me to let family members in or support people in? And it is a resounding no. Every time I ask, they say, No, we want to save space where we understand each other. We want to save space where we can talk about what we're going through and what we've been through, and ask questions of other people who get it. And I've been there. So, you know, I think that this is the way the human brain works. We really resonate. It's almost like no matter what we've been through, if it's a College Alma Mater, if it's a life changing experience, if people were in the military service, if people. People have had a cancer diagnosis, there's something in us that resonates, and we meet those people, we understand that we've had a shared experience, and there's just a, I don't know, a connection, right? And we say, Oh, you get it, you know what I mean? Because we know people outside of a specific experience can certainly be empathetic, right? They can certainly hear what our experience was, and they'll be like, Oh, I'm so sorry, but there is a big difference between people who have not had a diagnosis or any other traumatic life experience and people who feel empathy for those right. There really is a difference. And so that energy of holding that space for those who have had this diagnosis is something that's very, very important to me, and reaching them so that they don't feel like they're out there alone. Hence, again, the better than before breast cancer title. But I did say I was going to give you a little bit of a sneak peek, a little preview, and because I've had so many people reach out to me, and because I have, gosh, almost five years of of lessons and content and coaching and courses inside my life coaching memberships, I have decided to repackage them in a way that people who have an added cancer diagnosis can still resonate with and look forward to more announcements about this. It will be something outside my better than before, breast cancer life coaching membership, because, as I've just hopefully stated pretty clearly, that's a very sacred space for me. But it will be something and I'll give you, in fact, I will, I'll tell you the new URL so that it can reach a broader audience and support people who really want to make the change in their life, in their health, and just bring more joy and more empowerment in and the URL for what is to come is called University of unlearning, and that was inspired by a book the boy, the horse, the fox and the mold that was given to me by one of my very special clients. And it is a quote from that book where the little boy is talking to the horse, and he says, I wish there was a school of unlearning. And one day I was walking on the beach, and I was, that's my place where I think it's my place where I meditate. It's my place where things come to me. And it was just something that came to me so strong, and it was like, you can put this out there into the world to help even more people in a way that doesn't take away from the energy and the time and the effort and the space that I've created for my very special Community of breast cancer thrivers. All right, so hopefully that's exciting for you. It's exciting for me. It's in the works. It's a lot of work, and it's not coming out next week or anything like that, but I will keep you posted. And meanwhile, share this podcast with people. Feel free to do it and let them know this is not about cancer. I even have friends who have been through breast cancer, and they say, I know I would, I would love to listen your podcast, but I can't deal with hearing more about cancer. There's my podcast is not about cancer. It is about living your best life, right? It's about understanding how to take charge of your thoughts, of your health, of your relationships, of anything you want in your life. Because I'm not an oncologist, so I don't know about cancer, and I don't focus on cancer, but I do know a lot about health, and I do know a lot about wellness, and I am educated and trained in that, and that's what this is about, so it's perfectly okay to share it. And in fact, this is a great segue into what we're going to talk about today. So this is about life. This is coming up now on the end of January, and something that starts to happen around the end of January, but But it happens all throughout our life, is we start to kind of feel a little let down, maybe feel a little discouraged about New Year's resolutions or new goals we set for ourselves. We're coming up to being a month into this, and we start to be like, this is never gonna work, or I've already dropped the ball. Disappointment is a really interesting thing, and I want to talk about it because the idea of disappointment is something that really it can be a huge blockade to creating a life you love, just a huge block. So I want to talk about why we feel disappointment so deeply and what it actually is, right. How do we unknowingly set ourselves up for disappointment. And most importantly, how can we shift our mindset to navigate disappointment, not to not feel it? Because disappointment is a human emotion, and I actually think every human emotion is valuable, even when they are un. Comfortable, right? Disappointment, it's uncomfortable. Doesn't feel good, but if we resist it, if we try to design a life around never feeling disappointed, how in the world is that life gonna look that's a life of never trying anything new. That's a life of never putting yourself out there. It's a life of like no hope, in my opinion, because we're going to try things and we're going to fail. We're not going to see the outcome the way we want it to be. It's going to happen. As long as we're focused on growth. It's inevitable. So how do we navigate that? You know, when I was going through my Life Coach School, my life coach training at the Life Coach School. Brooke Castillo, the founder of The Life Coach School, she taught a skill that I think is super valuable, and it's one that I work with my own clients on, and it's setting yourself up for 25 things you're willing to try and fail at. That's a huge lesson, right? Well, and you know, I've heard people say in response to like, why would I want to fail at something. It isn't that you want to, is that you're willing to, is that you're willing to risk, even though you know it might not be successful, because in taking the risk of trying 25 new things, in taking that chance and that risk and that effort and that growth, you're going to learn, you're going to grow. You're going to learn what worked and what didn't work. You're going to create change in your life. So it's really powerful, because there's so many things in our mind that we will have to overcome in order to be willing to try 25 new things and let go of the expectation of their outcome. So that's where we're going to start with, this very simple and very clear truth, disappointment stems from unmet expectations. And those expectations, where do they come from? Well, they're rooted in how we want people to behave, how we think situations should unfold, how we think things should end up. So let me give you a really profound example that if you're listening to this show, you've probably experienced the idea that you're doing everything you can to support yourself, to be well and healthy and heal, and then you receive lab work or a scan that you don't like, that has an outcome that doesn't make you happy, and so you feel very disappointed, right? Let's say, and many of us have experienced this, because it's a big thing that's talked about in the world of a diagnosis, right? People get ghosted. We say we're ghosted cancer. I think they call it cancer ghosting it's not just breast cancer, it's all around and people say, you know, I got a diagnosis and so and so, didn't show up for me. I never called. They never came, they never did anything. I I thought this person was so different, and they ghosted me, right? So we feel crushed. They didn't show up, they didn't respond in the way you think they should. Right this situation, this circumstance, didn't produce the outcome you wanted it to produce. This is the decision to attach your emotions to an outcome and then facing the reality that things didn't go as planned, that outcome did not manifest in the way you wanted it to, right? So you already decided, if this doesn't happen, I'm going to be disappointed, and I'm going to talk to you about other ways we can look at that. So there was some research on the psychology of disappointment, and I will link to that study in the show notes for this episode. That study and the others I'll refer to here, you'll find those at the breast cancer recovery coach, com, forward slash 397, anyway, so there was this research done by zelenberg, and what they found was that disappointment arises when reality doesn't meet our expectations. An interesting thing here is that disappointment in this study that they looked at was very distinct from regret, because regret focuses on our choices, where disappointment focuses on the external world not aligning with what we wanted. So what can we take away from that is that we're not just reacting to what happens. Okay. We're reacting to what we expected to happen. We are setting ourselves up for this. And another major cause of disappointment, as I alluded to, is the expectation that other people will behave the way we think they should. So we project our values, our beliefs, our experiences, on other people, and when they don't align their words, their actions don't align with what we expect, we feel let down, but we have to recall that everyone has their own lens. Through which they view the world. They have their own lens. They have their own experiences, their own ideas, their own traumas, right? And when we think people should act like us, we're expecting people to have had the same life experience as us, and that's just not realistic, right? People are not us. And one of the things that happens is that when we start to project our own manuals, our own rule book, on these people, you should behave this way. And we've got them. We've got big rule books, right? I think there was a lesson I can't remember when in my life coaching membership where I just call it, burn the manual. We've got to look at these rule books we establish for life, and we've got to burn it. We've got to practice radical acceptance, acknowledging people and circumstances for who and what they are, not who and what we wish they would be. Now I'm going to be very clear, this does not mean that you have to accept harmful behavior, and I actually think that this helps us more clearly to see when others behavior is harmful to us and the choices we make to allow it into our lives or not. And I'll give you an example when we are with someone, and I don't mean like romantically involved in someone. When we're engaged someone is in our life, and we perceive that person's behavior as being in violation of maybe some of our healthy boundaries. And yet, we look at the person we say, well, maybe it was this, and maybe it was that, and maybe this is wild. Maybe if I do something different, they will change, and then we put our hope and our expectation in them changing, then it becomes like a tip for Tet. Well, they still didn't change, and I did all this work and they didn't change, and they're still not doing what I expected them to do right? And we don't get to control other people, other adults, right? That doesn't happen. And so when we can step back, and instead of putting this expectation or belief on another person or on any outside circumstance, but we can stop, and we can look at that and just accept it for what it is and say, this is that person, right? I see you right? I see who you are, I see how you respond. I see your expectations. I see your behaviors. Let me ask myself, without judging the person, right, you're bad, you're horrible, you're this or that. But let me ask myself, Is that the way I want to be treated? Is that the type of behavior I want to accept in my life, when we see people for who they are, when we see circumstances for what they are, then we can ask better questions, and we can become empowered. So instead of attaching our emotion to another person's behavior, we can just observe another person's behavior, and we can decide the choice we want to make for ourselves, our health, our wellness, our happiness, our joy. So it really is a process of releasing the need to control another person's actions and the need to control another person's outcomes. And when you do this, you actually release yourself from the cycle of frustration and disappointment, because you release yourself from attaching your emotions to something you cannot control, and to empower yourself to ask yourself better questions. What did I set myself up for? What do I want in this situation? Am I okay with this? How do I need to handle this differently so that it works better for my life, right? So let's, let's talk about this. I mentioned earlier in the show. I said, Okay, now it's January. We already might start falling off of some of the things we said we were going to do when we set goals for ourselves. So let's talk for a second about goal setting.

19:09
Everyone has dreams and desires, I hope, because if we don't have dreams and desires, then we really need to get help, because we are stuck in a rut, and that does not feel good. There's absolutely nothing wrong with striving for something. It's wonderful. The challenge comes in where we emotionally attach ourselves to the outcome, to the goal itself. Rather than Who do I need to become to move closer to this goal that I think I would like to have in my life. This is such an important part of my becoming you. Program, becoming you 2.0 is all about. Who do you want to become? Who do you have to become? If I'm a person who heals from metastatic breast cancer, who do I have to. Become. So this is really closely intertwined with the Expectancy Theory of motivation, and that dates back to 1964 this is a theory that says we base our efforts on the belief that it will lead to a desired result, and then what happens when that result doesn't materialize? Disappointment, right? So that doesn't mean that you shouldn't set goals. It doesn't mean that I'm going to say that I'm going to let go of the goal of walking into my college office one day and seeing him come in and hearing him and seeing him turn around look at me and say, You have no evidence of active disease. That's a goal I'm never going to let go of, because having that goal helps me show up for myself as a person who does the things I believe support my ability to heal, right? So it's not saying let go of the goal. Instead, it's saying focus on the process rather than the outcome. Embrace curiosity. So I say I'm doing all the things to support my ability to heal. Let's say I get lab work or a scan that shows progression or an increase in tumor markers, I can decide to be disappointed. And in fact, probably at first seeing that the first thought and the first emotion that's going to just naturally and organically pop up is going to be disappointment, but as soon as I see it and feel it and become aware that I'm in disappointment, I can decide to embrace curiosity. I can decide to say, what can I learn from this right? What can I learn from what I'm seeing right now? And so I'll give you an example, like I would say, over the last few months, I've kind of been evaluating my lifestyle and my nutrition, and I've indulged in a glass of wine here and there way more often than I used to. I used to. There was a period where I wouldn't touch it at all, and then it was maybe like a glass on a holiday. And now it's like, I'm doing so good. You know, everything's great. If I were to get lab markers or or a scan or something that showed progression, instead of being disappointed, I would look at that and say, what can I learn from this? I can see that I can get better about the plan, get better about being more consistent in my nutrition plan, in relieving my toxic burden. What can I learn from this that I actually have power over without judging myself, without saying, God, you're so dumb. You shouldn't have done that, right? I'm not going to allow myself to go into that, because that's not going to support my healing either. So it isn't that we won't feel disappointment. It isn't that disappointment sometimes isn't a natural thing that's going to pop up. We're human beings with a full spectrum of emotions, ones that we consider positive, ones that we consider negative. I prefer to consider them comfortable and uncomfortable. And so when we are in that uncomfortable emotion, what do we want to decide? Do we want to decide to stay in disappointment, self judgment, or do we want to decide to become curious and grow in 2011 there was a study on mindfulness and emotional regulation, and in that study, they found that mindfulness practices can help regulate emotions. They can allow us to experience life with greater acceptance and less attachment to specific outcomes. So in that study, it said mindfulness strengthens the ability to observe and accept emotions without judgment, reducing the emotional impact of disappointment. So again, not saying don't feel disappointment, don't recognize it, don't hold space for it, but be mindful. What is mindful in the present moment. A lot of times, I'll hear from people who say to me, you know, I've I've done everything, I'm doing everything, and my tumor markers went up, and then they'll go into disappointment, sometimes fear, sometimes anger, and even this, this kind of thinking can even cause us to stop showing up for ourselves. We can look at and say, I did everything, and now this changed. So why bother doing everything? Because I didn't get the outcome that I wanted. And whenever we go down that road, if we stop showing up for ourselves, then we're really in big trouble, right? So how can we look at and experience and hold space for disappointment in any area of our life, and also be mindful and also be in the present moment. So if I were to hear again that I had increasing tumor markers right now, I could also be in this moment. Go, okay, that's interesting. Yet here I am in this moment, still functioning, still feeling well, I'm not in pain. What does this mean to me? How can I be curious about this? Where are my thoughts going with this? So I can be in the moment and hold space for myself to feel what I'm going to feel, but also to understand that I have control over the story I'm going to choose in this situation, right? Yeah. And so what happens when we catch ourselves going, you know, if this doesn't happen, everything's going to fall apart. If this doesn't happen, if these people don't say something, I'm going to be crushed, or, even worse, well, I'm going to do everything myself, because people always let me down, and I don't want to feel disappointed, so then we feel angry and taken advantage of, because we do all the things because we need to control other people's behavior so much so that we don't feel an uncomfortable emotion, and yet, then we live in uncomfortable emotions. It's pretty wild. And when we get curious about that and we start to see those thought patterns, it really helps us to understand how our thoughts can be completely disconnected from what's true and what we want to create. These are examples of cognitive distortions, ways that our mind twists reality into something more negative than it actually is, right? So common distortions, all or nothing, thinking, right? This is all black and white. I did this. I didn't get that result. This isn't worth it, right? Or this one is a deep neurological pathway with every human being I've ever met, including myself, that I have to work on all the time, catastrophizing, expecting the worst case scenario. The human brain just does this right? It expects the worst case scenario when we hear something happen. Oh, that's not gonna go well. Oh, but what if this goes wrong? Oh, like I talked about the exercise of 25 things you're willing to fail at.

26:38
Would you think when I said that? Did you think? Well, what if I succeeded at all 25 of them? Probably not, right? Because our brain just doesn't go there automatically. We've really got to train it. Our brain probably went like, that's going to be devastating. Experience myself failing at 25 things. That's going to suck. Why didn't our brain go to Ooh, if I thought about 25 new things I could try for this area of my life, and I succeeded at all 25 or even at 10. Wouldn't that be awesome? But our brain just doesn't do that. So we have to reframe these all or nothing thinking patterns, these catastrophizing thinking patterns. We have to start to just recognize them and challenge them. Initiate curiosity again. Instead of saying, this was a complete failure, right? What if you were trying 25 new things with the willingness, the willingness to fail at them, and you looked at it, you could judge it and say, Well, that was another failure. That's number 22 or you could say, Okay, well, that one didn't go as planned. Here's what I learned from it. Here's what I can take away from that. Now we can come up with 25 more things based on that, right? So what if disappointment wasn't something we had to avoid? What if it was something we decided to embrace? What if we saw it as a chance to grow when we experience disappointment, it's an opportunity for reflection and curiosity. So many questions can come up when we realize I'm feeling disappointed. We can ask ourselves things like, Okay, well, what was my expectation? Did I have a realistic expectation? Here we can ask ourselves, How did I set myself up for potentially feeling this disappointment? Did I decide if it wasn't this one way I was going to feel disappointed? And if so, how can you shift your mindset? Resilience is an incredible skill to develop, and it does not mean avoiding hardships. How can you become resilient if you never experience disappointment hardships? So it's not about avoiding the difficult things in life. It's about bouncing back. So there's another study in 2001 that looked at resilience, and it described resilience as ordinary magic that anyone can develop. Think about that ordinary magic that's a pretty interesting concept, and just by reframing this appointment as a natural part of life, and approaching it with curiosity instead of dread, the shift that can happen in your life can be ordinary magic. Things can change dramatically for you. So how do we set ourselves up for success and not constantly set ourselves up for disappointment. One we must have realistic expectations and be flexible and open to change and also not attach timelines to some of these expectations, right? So if we go. It's my expectation. Someone might say, Is that realistic? Is your expectation to heal from widespread stage four cancer? Realistic? In my mind, it is, I think it's a realistic expectation people heal. I'm a people I can heal. I'm just figuring it out along the way. What happens and where I might set myself up for disappointment is if I decide on a time right now, if I want to decide on a time, if I want to say I'll be cancer free in October of 2025, it's okay. I can set up that time frame, as long as I'm willing to be flexible right as long as I don't attach disappointment to that time frame, and I'm open to change, and I'm open to growth. And october 2025, comes along. And if I haven't achieved that, if I can look and say, Well, how far have I come? What have I learned? Okay, am I willing to move this deadline? Or I'm going to look at this and say, well, here it is. My deadline has come and gone, and I didn't heal. Screw it. I'm going to give up, right? The only way we can ever fail in life is when we stop showing up for ourselves, when we give up and when we attach uncomfortable and negative emotions to outcomes, that is almost a surefire way to give up on ourselves. Okay, so one is, let's look at our goals. Let's ask ourselves, Is this realistic for me? And you know, there's one thing that we can control, our decision to believe, right? Our just our decision to decide, like I decide I have the ability to heal and I'm going to achieve that I have control over that. I don't really have control over time. And maybe even that is a limiting thought, right? But here's the thing, it's really important to believe in ourselves. So when we're setting goals and expectations for ourselves, do we believe at least it's possible, right? Here's the thing, if I were to say, Well, wait a minute, Laura, maybe setting a time frame on yourself, or telling yourself you can't set a time frame is a limiting belief. Okay? So could I say to myself out loud, I believe I will be instantly healed. My body kind of goes eat, right? I don't believe that. I don't know why there's something in me, right? That's like, if I just accepted right now that I could stand here and say instant healing is in me. It doesn't feel true to me, right? Feels like I'm kidding myself. If I want to believe instant healing is possible, then I have to work on understanding and uncovering all of the thoughts that stop me from believing that, right? If you want to change a job, change a career, make more money, change a relationship, and you say out loud, this is possible, and your body says

 

Close

50% Complete

Two Step

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.