#4. Resistance through expectations
It’ll take about 5 minutes to read this article — and it’ll show you how ambitious expectations can quietly sabotage your goals under the guise of motivation, and what you can do to stop that from hap
The psychodynamic approach and psychoanalysis, particularly, talk a lot about resistance. Commonly, we refer to resistance in the context of therapy or analysis, implying psychological defenses such as denial, repression, rationalization, and others. But resistance isn't limited to a set of named psychological defenses. Freud himself said that resistance is everything that hinders the work of the psychoanalytic.
And that certainly includes everything the client does to avoid therapeutic success. Today, I want to discuss one of the many ways our resistance manifests in our behavior without our knowledge, spoiling not just the results of the hard work of psychologists, consultants, or therapists. But also disallowing the client from achieving the results they wanted. It is something that occurs in our daily lives, regardless of whether we are in therapy or not.
I'm talking about sabotaging your success through overzealous buildup of expectations. Here's how this works. Let's say James wants to quit his job, and that would be a big success for him. He's not retiring yet, but he wants to take a sabbatical and then look for another job, maybe the same kind of job in another company, or perhaps he wants to switch to an entirely new area. Or he may want to downsize and do something simpler, allowing for more free time. Either way, he has some plans for the future, which begin by leaving his current job.
As a responsible adult, he's prepared himself for that. He has a certain financial cushion to fall on. He is warning his employer in advance. He's planning for his quitting months ahead, and all things seem to be in order. However, in those few weeks or months, while he still hasn't quit, and the Q day is still in the future, he's loading that day with more and more expectations.
He starts to think, fantasize, and dream about all the things he's going to do once he quits. He thinks about all the traveling, the nights with good sleep, the courses in cooking and languages, game design, and whatever else he wants to do. All the people he'll meet. All the new activities he's going to introduce to his life. Having children with his significant other.
And at some point, his critical mind just turns on: is it all even achievable? He thinks: let's say I quit, so I'll free up myself from the work I have now, which is, let's say, forty hours a week, maybe fifty.
Are forty or fifty additional hours a week enough to do all of that? And then he starts thinking, calculating, and he begins to realize, "Oh, wait." No. Even if he quit his jobs twice somehow, he would still not have enough time, energy, and resources to do everything he wants, not to mention the fact that some of the things he wants are mutually exclusive. Because on the one hand, he wants a string of flings in nightclubs in Europe, and on the other hand, he wants to devote himself to his significant other and have a traditional family.
So, regardless of whether he has a job or quits, he's just not going to get it both at the same time. And so, at some point, he starts realizing that quitting the job he had envisioned, planned for, aimed for, and hoped for, actually isn't the cornucopia of successes he had built up the expectation of. It won't fulfill all of his wishes and desires.
And when he comes upon that realization, he just quits the plan to quit. He just goes to the boss, and he says, you know what? I thought about this. I gave it a long, hard thought. And I came to the conclusion I was wrong. I won't get what I wanted from quitting this job, so I prefer to stay. And he just stays at his job, and that's the end of the story. So, the success that he was aiming for is sabotaged.
That's the resistance: entirely achievable success is thwarted by overloading it with dreams and expectations. And that can happen, of course, not just in that specific example.
The same thing can happen in many situations. Besides James, who sabotaged his entire new stage of life, there's Bob. Who's not going to dates because he already envisioned himself returning with a harem of models, in love with him, and who's not going to a date that doesn't seem to be delivering this result - which is every date. There's Jill, who doesn't move out of her parents because she wants her own place to be a cozy nest, a high-tech smart home, a rugged gym, and an art studio - all at the same time, or no deal. And countless others.
The treachery of this particular mechanism of resistance is that it is counterintuitive and not immediately obvious. When people have catastrophic fantasies, they think of things that are bad and scary and horrible, and they say, "Oh, I'm going to quit, and then I will never find a job." "I will run out of money, and I will live out in the streets and die of a heroin overdose." You can immediately spot that that's a problematic way of thinking. You can immediately tell them, well, you know, a) that is not going to happen, and b) if that is what's stopping you from quitting and achieving your dreams, go to therapy and work on that.
The person themself can understand pretty easily, especially in modern times of fairly abundant psychological elucidation, that this kind of thinking is very unhealthy and isn't helping them. But when it's the opposite, when it's the kind of thinking that tells them, "Hey, you can do this". "You can have more goals and wishes, and think a little more about what you desire and consider your ambitions" - that doesn't seem like an unhealthy thing to do. That seems like a very good thing to do.
That doesn't seem like something you should avoid. That seems like something you should embrace. And it is a very counterintuitive step to take to stop yourself at that moment and say, or in the case of a psychologist, stop your client at that moment and say, "Woah, wait a second". What are you really doing right now? Are you really planning your better future, or are you just overloading your goals with unrealistic expectations as a way of sabotaging them, demotivating yourself from achieving them?
It's a two-step demotivation process: elevating expectations too high and then crushing them against reality. The way to avoid this kind of problem, outside of, of course, having a shrewd therapist who will notice what you're doing and help you adjust, is to pay close attention to prioritizing your goals.
If you have strong priorities, if you know very well what's goal number one, what's goal number two, what's goal number three, and so on and so forth all through the list of your goals, then no matter how long the list is, even if you run into thousands and tens of thousands of expectations and desires and wishes and dreams, you will still have the motivation to achieve the number one. And so when realization kicks in that you won't be able to accomplish the point number 9,999, you'll say, okay. Well, I'm not going to get that, but I'm going to get the number one, and that's the number one priority. I'm still going to go through with my plans to achieve the top priority for me right now.
So the trick isn't necessarily not to dream big, although excessive dreaming in itself isn't great either. But more to the point is to prioritize your dreams. Know what your primary focus is at all times, and even the most sophisticated mechanics of resistance will have a harder time diverting you off your course.
Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh
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