Grieving the Life You Thought You’d Have: Letting Go of Expectations
It’s not uncommon to find yourself feeling reflective about your life at a milestone or a birthday, or maybe even a random Tuesday afternoon. Sometimes, within those reflections, we find past wishes, hopes, dreams, or expectations about how our lives would unfold, maybe how things were “supposed to be”, and when we compare that to our reality, there’s a gap, or sometimes the entire Grand Canyon between where we thought our lives would be and the reality we sit in. Nobody talks about it much, but there can be real grief in that space. So today, we are going to talk about why this hurts so much, why it really is a legitimate form of grief, and some ways to help us let go.
Grieving the life you thought you’d have is called an ambiguous loss, and that is defined as grief that doesn’t involve the death of a person or a pet. It is also sometimes referred to as a non-tangible loss. Other losses that fit into this category may include the diagnosis of a chronic health condition, financial difficulty, loss of safety, estrangement, retirement, moving, and the list goes on and on.
Grieving the life you thought you’d have can also be categorized as disenfranchised grief, which is grief that is not generally acknowledged by others. Nobody brings you flowers when you are grieving this kind of loss. People may not even realize you are going through this, and if they do, they may not understand what the big deal is. So, this type of loss can feel really lonely. I have a blog post about disenfranchised grief, which you can find HERE.
This kind of grief can also show up as a secondary loss, meaning it comes only in conjunction with an initial loss. An example of this might look like grieving your life after the loss of your spouse, because you planned to do things together in retirement, and now they aren’t there. Or you may grieve post-divorce that you have to share time and custody of the kids with an ex, or your financial situation is stressful and scary after divorcing.
It doesn’t matter so much what we call this kind of grief. You don’t have to lose a person or a pet to be grieving, and other people don’t have to understand for it to count. Grieving your hopes, dreams, and expectations that haven’t, and maybe won’t ever, come to pass, is very real. Grief is grief, no matter the label.
If everyone sat down at age 15 and wrote about how they thought their lives would go, surely every one of us would be surprised by the way life actually turned out. Life doesn’t go according to plan for most of us, so what are we really talking about here? This is more about grieving a specific future or expectation than life unfolding differently than you assumed when you were young. The ways this can show up are endless, but here are a few concrete examples.
Grieving a marriage that changed or ended. Maybe you’re not as compatible as you thought you’d be, or maybe there’s been the previously unimaginable development of infidelity, addiction, abuse, abandonment, or mental or physical illness that has changed everything.
Grieving a version of motherhood (or fatherhood) that didn’t happen. Perhaps you’ve dealt with infertility and all that goes along with it. Maybe you have a child with special needs who you love dearly, but who has completely changed your life. Maybe you’ve had a difficult relationship with a child. Maybe you have physical limitations that didn’t allow you to be the kind of parent you wanted to be.
Grieving a career. Maybe you never took a risk and regret it. Maybe you took a big risk and now regret it. Maybe you continually got passed over for promotions and never progressed in your career the way you’d hoped. Maybe you got fired, laid off, or were forced to retire before you were ready. Maybe you couldn’t make ends meet with the job you loved, so you had to work in a job you hated.
Grieving financial difficulty. Whether you lose money in a bad investment, face unexpected medical expenses, have career difficulties, or you’ve made some bad choices along the way, it can be painful to realize we are not in the financial position that we thought we would be at any given stage of life.
Grieving your body or health. Whether it’s a chronic or acute illness, an injury, or an accident, what happens to our bodies can impact our entire lives.
Grieving an estrangement. We don’t plan on becoming estranged from people we love, so when that happens, even when it’s by your own choice, we can wish that the circumstances or the people involved were different so that we didn’t have to be without that friend, parent, or other relative in our lives.
Grieving the closing of a chapter in your life. This could be having your kids at home, a part of your career or volunteer work you really loved, living in a certain place, being in school, or the time before you became a caregiver.
This type of grief is not about being ungrateful for what you have. In fact, we often try to push down our grief by reminding ourselves that we should feel grateful for the good things we do have. I’m a big believer in the power of gratitude, and I don’t think it should be dismissed. However, both things can be true. You can grieve what you’ve lost and be grateful for what you have.
When we can point to something in our lives and say, “I am grieving this,” it helps take away that vague feeling of “what’s wrong with me?” It’s much easier to point at the death of a person or pet or a divorce as the source of our grief. So why are these losses so hard to point to? We can carry these feelings for years or even decades, and work so hard to keep them buried because they seem like things we shouldn’t be feeling.
As I stated previously, nobody brings you flowers for this type of loss. Our friends, our families, and society at large do not know how to recognize or support us through these kinds of losses. Many of these things we keep private and close to the heart, so the people in our lives may not even realize we are grieving.
We are more likely to internally minimize these types of losses. We can think to ourselves, “At least …, “ or “It could be worse!” or “It’s not that big a deal, I should be over this by now,” or, as I shared above, “Maybe I’m not being grateful enough.” We can even have thoughts like, “I’m a bad person for even thinking this,” and that simply isn’t true. Walt Whitman said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” And it’s true. We do contain multitudes, and there is room for grief alongside gratitude, joy, and all of it.
People in our lives are also more likely to minimize these types of losses than when you divorce or have a loved one die.
The ambiguous nature of these types of losses makes it harder to pinpoint a specific time the loss occurred. They’re often, though not always, losses that occur gradually over time. Also, they aren’t usually followed by the grief rituals associated with death. So it makes it harder to grieve, and at the same time, easier to just carry and suffer silently for years.
This grief can resurface during holidays, birthdays, and other milestones. This may also resurface when you see a friend’s photos on social media or receive a Christmas card featuring the picture-perfect family. You may discount it as regrets of growing older, a midlife crisis, or just that you are jealous of someone. We rarely name it as grief.
When we can name our reaction to these kinds of losses as grief, it helps give a name to the complex and conflicting feelings we’ve been experiencing. It lends validity to our pain and helps us realize there’s nothing wrong with feeling this way. We are just grieving.
In a quote commonly misattributed to William Shakespeare but probably actually rooted in Buddhist teachings, we read that “expectation is the root of all heartache.” This is never more true than in these types of loss. We expect the person we marry to love us forever and treat us well. We expect that if we work hard, we can retire comfortably. We expect that if we take care of our bodies, they will work for us for all our days. We expect. We deserve. We work. We dream. We hope. We try. But sometimes, despite all that, it doesn’t happen, and there’s not much we can do to change it. So how do we let go of the expectations we’ve held so tightly?
First, let’s look at what letting go of expectations actually means. Letting go is not just a mindset shift. Letting go doesn’t mean pretending it never really mattered to you. It also doesn’t mean thinking of all the things you’re grateful for instead. And it doesn’t mean that you have to decide that this all happened for a reason, or that there were big lessons you had to learn this way.
Instead, we can look at letting go as a grief process. I love Ross Gay’s idea that grief is how we metabolize change. So when our life changes either from what it was, or from the picture we painted in our minds of how it could or should be (or how we could or should be), there’s a gap. And we can grieve that gap. In fact, this is something we can work on together in my 7-week grief program. If you’re interested in what that might look like, schedule a free consultation call HERE.
So how do we do the work of releasing our grip on a future we hoped and dreamed of, but isn’t our current reality? Here are some options to try:
It can be helpful to acknowledge to ourselves that this future we dreamed of was never guaranteed. We couldn’t have known then what we know now. We don’t need to hold any shame about what we hoped for or how things have turned out.
Write a letter that you’re obviously never going to send to your life, the person who upended your life (even if that person was you), to the disease, or natural disaster, or whatever it is, and just let out how you feel. Remember, if you are writing to a person, this is not a letter you will send. When you are done, you can save it, burn it, rip it up, whatever feels best. But it can be really healing to write out what you are feeling.
Get specific about what you are actually grieving. Instead of saying, “I’m grieving my divorce,” which is huge and overwhelming, get specific. “I’m grieving not getting to spend every holiday with my kids.” Instead of, “I’m grieving moving to a new state,” narrow it down to, “I’m grieving leaving lifelong friends behind. Long distance isn’t the same.”
When your grief resurfaces, get curious about why. “I’m feeling down on my birthday,” becomes “I thought I would be more established in my career by now, and turning 40 feels like a big milestone that reminds me that I’m still just trying to get my foot in the door.”
Let it out. Do you have a trusted person you could talk about this with? If not, what about a journal or an art project? Letting your grief out on your terms helps it not to spill over when you keep pushing it down.
Sometimes these types of losses feel very private and personal, but take some time to consider whether this is something you are feeling alone with. Maybe there’s someone else in your life who is grieving the same thing or something similar enough that you’d benefit from sharing with each other.
I’ll say it again, working with a grief specialist like me can do wonders in helping you feel seen and able to process your loss in a healthy way. Schedule a free consultation HERE.
It can take time and effort to move past the grief we feel over losses like this. There is no timeline, and letting go may happen layer by layer rather than all at once. And you don’t have to be done grieving this to live well. You can grieve this while still finding joy in the life you have, feeling grateful, and living a full, rich life. Deciding to let go of the pain of what we hoped, dreamed, and expected from life can help us more fully embrace the life we have now.
