expectations

expectations are shaped by experience - they don't just materialize out of thin air. And they can also be shaped by what we perceive around us - what others have (possessions, experiences, circumstances), what we see in movies, books, magazines, etc.

The expectations I'm talking about are the ones that cause us to be disappointed by what actually happens in our lives.

There was an article I read I while back (haven't been able to hunt it down, so am going to have to paraphrase and may be mis-remembering some of it) that was talking about children's learning experiences and what keeps a child either focused or bored in a classroom.

It was talking about expectations in terms of how we match our current experience to previous experiences; but also, there's an innate expectation of being able to do something with a certain amount of competence - that is, if a teacher is showing you something on the blackboard, for example, and she's a third-grade teacher and you're a third grader, there's an unspoken assumption by everybody in the room that because she's teaching you that thing, at that time and in that place, you should therefore be able to understand it.

What happens, then, when you're unable to understand it? The circumstances of the situation compel you to believe that it's your fault. Which doesn't feel good, which instantaneously triggers an entire chain of chemical reactions inside your body that prompts you to look away from this negative stimulus, thus prompting the reaction of disinterest, boredom, or apathy.

Now, this apathy is not an innate condition. It is your natural reaction to being in an environment that is mismatched to your internal conditions at the moment; in other words, some basic need is not being met for you. And you respond the way your organism is designed to respond: By turning away from the inappropriate stimulus.

But what happens next is the problem, and there are so many problems it's hard to know where to start listing them: In an average classroom, the one-teacher-to-thirty-or-so-students ratio is not going to allow the overtaxed teacher to notice these minute, moment-to-moment reactions/needs of all her charges. She's going to miss most of them, simply because there are thirty of you and one of her. The ratio is just wrong. So the situation is impossible to begin with; it might be alleviated somewhat if the 'classroom' was structured in such a way that more freedom was possible - say that instead of students in desks facing the same way, all focused on a single stimulus (teacher) who may or may not be providing what's needed at that moment for your best growth - say that instead there were many options for you to find just what was needed at that moment. For example the freedom to leave your desk and explore various stations around the room that contained things that might be interesting to you and might teach you various things that you'd like to know or discover.

Now how does this tie into the expectations thing? Well, it's meant to illustrate that, while we talk of expectations as if they're something that we have complete, conscious control over (which is how many self-help books talk and seems to be what the whole therapy movement believes), in fact, expectations are largely unconscious and not subject to conscious control.

This means that expectations may actually be an expression of needs in some way. That is, our expectations show that, given the environment in which we find ourselves, this particular thing is what we expect to happen next, given the experiences we've had to date. There's a kind of logic to our expectations that comes from our intuitive, unconscious extrapolation of what we've experienced up to this point. (I hope any of this makes any sense - sometimes it feels like I'm typing from someplace sort of beyond myself, and I can't really tell what I've written, or whether it makes any sense, til I've got a bit of distance from it - sometimes even just a few hours later I can come back and look to see what I've said. Or day, or weeks.)

When expectations are dashed, it's a big deal. It's not just that we've misunderstood what's happening around us and failed to take certain things into consideration; it's that our environment (including our relationships) has simply failed us in certain basic ways. It's a kind of betrayal, a letdown. It saps our energy and enthusiasm for putting ourselves out there again, because we can no longer trust our world, our relationships, our intuition. It no longer feels safe.

***
Ok, so now I remember why I got on this whole subject in the first place.

My concern is that people will read this ('this' meaning the blog) and go, Jesus, what a whiner! She has no problems - she's so fucking privileged, she can't even see it! I mean, she wasn't beaten, or molested, or locked up in a room somewhere. I mean, this is so fucking pathetic I can't even believe I'm reading it!

And I would argue that people experience trauma depending on what their expectations are.

For example, maybe a person born to a poor family in a blue-collar neighborhood during the Depression wouldn't expect much; they'd be happy as long as they were getting what everybody else seemed to be getting. That is, if everyone around them was surviving on breadcrusts, they'd maybe be hungry a lot, but they probably wouldn't see it as unfair. Because, hey - their parents were eating breadcrusts, their neighbors were too. So it wouldn't seem 'unfair', it'd just seem to be the way things were.

But if you grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in a middle-class neighborhood where nobody ever seemed to be short the odd dollar necessary to buy a new pair of shoes or a bicycle when you got to be old enough to ride one - well, your expectations are different. And when you get to an age where most of the people around you were being sent to college and supported to get what they needed to do well in the world, and yet for some inexplicable reason your own parents weren't providing the same support for you - what happens inside your head?

Well, first you try to find an explanation. Obviously they expect you to go to college; obviously they expect you to get a job and eventually go on to do the things they're doing - buy a house, get married, raise a kid or two. That's what we do in this culture, right? That's how things are done.

Yet, somehow, something's not right. Something doesn't match up. You can feel the pressure, the push (invisible, but powerful) to get out there and make something of yourself. But somehow you don't feel that you have the resources to do this thing.

And yet, they act as if those resources are all internal - as if you should just know what to do. As if you were born with an instruction manual for how to live life and all you have to do is go look it up, like you would go to the dictionary to look up a word.

And so you try, you do your very best to do what they seem to expect, which is to just know things that you couldn't possibly know, or do things that you have no experience with.

They don't answer questions; they don't offer advice. They seem to be in no way aware that you simply don't have the tools to do what they seem to be expecting of you, and that you feel like a gigantic failure because of this impossible double bind they've put you in.

It's like that saying of "Responsibility without authority" - you're expected to be able to do something that requires a certain level of (I'm stuck here - I know that I have to untangle this internal message, because if I can decipher the unspoken/unwritten 'code' that was handed down, all unknowing and unconscious, by my parents, then maybe I can get myself out of this impossible, infernal, eternal double bind that keeps me trapped in emotional immobility, blaming myself for things that aren't and weren't my fault, things over which I had, and continue to have, no control).

It's that thing that's referred to as fundamental attribution error, where we attribute successes and failures incorrectly, giving credit where no credit is due, and conversely, assigning blame where no blame should be given. It's such a basic bug of human nature that it's damn near impossible to suss out and figure out what really happened.

Deciphering my own error code: I was expected to be self-sufficient and autonomous without being given any of the tools that allow one to become self-sufficient and autonomous.

One more time: Responsibility without authority. Lather, rinse, repeat.