And What Else?

Rewriting the Narrative of Disappointment to get out of All or Nothing

• Wendy O'Beirne (The Completion Coach)

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Disappointment shapes our lives in ways we may not fully understand, leading to cycles of all-or-nothing behaviour and hyper-independence. This episode addresses the emotional weight of disappointment, the importance of trust in relationships, and practical steps towards breaking free from these patterns. 

• Exploring the impact of disappointment on our lives 
• Understanding all-or-nothing thinking and hyper-independence 
• The connection between overworking, burnout, and emotional struggle 
• Examining the fear associated with rest and vulnerability 
• Practical strategies to rewire our relationship with disappointment 
• Encouraging self-reflection on personal patterns and connections

If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and subscribe! And if you want to learn more from me, come and say hello on Instagram @thecompletioncoach or via email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or find out more about working with me on my website, thecompletioncoach.co.uk.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to and what Else, the podcast with me, wendy O'Byrne, also known as the Completion Coach, and today's episode is all around why disappointment has created such an impact in your life, especially for those who can relate to all or nothing behavior. If you've ever felt like life has been one series of disappointments, that you are expecting or waiting for the disappointment in some way, if you are somebody that thinks you can get it but you can't keep it, that something just never seemed to stick for you, even if you work really hard. We're going to dive into something today and that's how disappointment has shaped your entire life, and that's how disappointment has shaped your entire life and how it will keep you stuck in cycles of using those hyper independence traits, avoidance and all or nothing thinking. And if you found yourself swinging between the extremes ie going all in, being all out, overworking, burning out, anxiously attached to completely avoidant and if you feel like you've got to be perfect, you've got to be seen to have all of your shit together all of the time, otherwise you have failed Then I want you to stick with me.

Speaker 1:

Stick with me on this one and see it through to the end, because disappointment isn't something that happens to you. It's something that actually starts to rewire you. And so if you have spent a lifetime thinking about possibilities, having a huge imagination, being somebody with actually big dreams, and life has given you experiences that were continuously tainted with disappointment, when people haven't shown up for you the way that you need it, when success has always seemed to land with the person next to you and not you, when you get a taste of happiness, only to have it squashed with disappointment quite quickly afterwards, for your emotional caretaking to have featured quite heavily around disappointment, and for your early interactions with friendship groups, with adults, with partners being tinged with a disappointment, then what starts to happen in the brain is we start to just register things. Our things will always fall apart, good things don't last and I can get it, but I can't keep it, which is where this all-or-nothing thinking really starts to dig in.

Speaker 1:

Because when you believe stability isn't real, you operate in these ways you try to control everything, you mic-throw, manage everyone, you manage everybody's needs, you're trying to make sure that nobody else is ever disappointed. So you try to manage everything to allow them to avoid disappointment, whilst continuously disappointing yourself, letting yourself down to put them first, or you find yourself completely in and then completely numb and out, and what you might also register that is is feeling completely connected, committed and in and out, being a burnout which feels like complete emotional tiredness and or disassociation, which is why sometimes, when you get to the rest part, when you get to the out part, you feel really guilty because you're not managing the in part of trying to make sure nobody is disappointed. So the reason why you struggle with rest can often be this fear that you are going to allow other people to be disappointed. So even when you take time off work, there might be an underlying fear that somebody's going to find out you really shit at your job. Yeah, they'll be disappointed that you hadn't covered all of the bases. There might be the fear that if you rest or if you're not doing, then somebody else will have to deal with their own disappointment. And there might be the fear, which is again added to this, that you won't be needed in some way, and being needed has allowed you to override the idea that you're disappointing.

Speaker 1:

I want you to know, first of all, you're not broken. I want you to know that this isn't just you, and I want you to know that this is actually what your entire system, your body and brain have created as a survival strategy to protect you from disappointment, whilst exposing you to it all of the time. But these are big extremes, so you never feel like you actually get attached. You never actually get attached because you don't believe it will stay anyway. You never get attached because you think there will be disappointment, but it's still disappointing to not be attached. So if you are someone who struggles with balance, who struggles with consistency or keeping things going once they've started, then I want you to know that there's patterns where you'll get bursts of motivation and throw yourself into something full force. You'll push yourself really hard because you believe if it's not hard, if it's not something that's consuming you, it won't work. You feel exhausted, overwhelmed and see things slow down. You panic because if you stop even for a second, you're afraid that other people will be disappointed or that everything will be lost. You burn out and quit completely. You beat yourself up for being lazy or inconsistent and the cycle starts again. Notice that through all of this, the thing that is being reinforced is that you are the problem, Because all or nothing thinking is actually deeply rooted in a lack of trust, and a lack of trust of other people, a lack of trust of things lasting and, ultimately, just a lack of trust.

Speaker 1:

And that's where these hyper-independent traits kick in, why we can be so hard and push all of the time and make things harder. Because I want you just to sit with this. Even the people that are successful at one part of their life because the people I work with will be successful on the whole at work in one way or another but I want you to just sit with this on the whole. If you believed you were a success and you believed that stability was possible, would you be forcing it so hard? And if you believed your relationships were safe, would you have so many thoughts about them? If you believed your worth wasn't tied to how much you're doing and how much you're proving yourself, would you keep running yourself into the ground? And I'm asking these because what we need to do is rewire ourselves, repattern ourselves to learn about holding success and holding our connection to ourselves and our relationship with trust. Because here's what I've found that I work with who are using hyperindependence traits.

Speaker 1:

Their brains have been trained to believe that stability is unsafe, because they have never truly experienced safe stability, pleating moments, but not safe, ongoing, consistent stability. So they would have grown up in instances where it just wasn't safe, there were outbursts or there were silences. Maybe they started trusting people only for them to disappoint them. Maybe they worked their backsides off only for things to collapse. Maybe they really opened up to somebody and they were disappointed that that person didn't hear or see them anyway, and so disappointment can really feel like loneliness sometimes, because disappointment can often be deeply rooted to.

Speaker 1:

I was unseen, unheard or misunderstood, and so disappointment and the protection mechanisms you've got around disappointment can start to drive your life. So your system learns not to trust stillness, not to trust silence. It feels unsafe and so it overworks, it micromanages, it tries to be really controlling, because slowing down feels like failure and that it will lead to disappointment, or it shuts down, isolates and avoids because trying feels pointless. So this is why you will struggle with consistency or the idea of consistency, which is not constant, by the way. That's a whole other podcast. But this is why you either go all in or check out completely, and this is why, fundamentally, you can't trust things to last.

Speaker 1:

It's not a lack of discipline in the sense of you need to be doing more, but it is the idea that there's no point doing those small things on repeat that help me daily, because I'm going to lose it all anyway. So the discipline element of doing them is the outcome. You can see, I'm undisciplined. I don't do the things that I know I should be doing. The reason before that, the root cause before that, is because I don't think there's any point. The reason I don't think there's any point is because of my relationship with disappointment. My relationship with disappointment is rooted in all of my behaviors. So now we get to see the pattern and we don't shift it by being hard on ourselves. We don't shift it by bringing in more micromanagement and judgment and we certainly don't deal with it by being disappointed in ourselves.

Speaker 1:

What we need to do is practice and work with our relationship with disappointment, our relationship with safety and loss and our relationship with extremes. Because again, you might have experienced friendships that were extreme, bonding that came with disappointment, parenting that may have offered extreme moments and then came with disappointment, disappointment. And so part of this is to stop expecting loss. Part of this is to start to build real trust with yourself and recognizing that we're not looking for more force, we're looking for you to create more trust. It's not to suddenly become really vulnerable, because that's going to be like ripping a plaster off, but it's just noticing where you're assuming people will let you down. I want you to notice your reaction when somebody does let you down. Instead of assuming success won't last, practice letting it be there, even just 10% more. And instead of pushing people away before they have the chance to leave, experiment with holding connection a little longer, especially connection that feels like intimacy.

Speaker 1:

Because right now your brain is running on old evidence. It's remembering the times things broke, the times people left, the times you were let down, specifically emotionally let down, with disappointment, and your job is to now start looking for new evidence, the new patterning, which is where have things stayed? Where have people really shown up for you, even if it was imperfect, because that's driving your perfectionism, by the way what success have you had? And even if it didn't last forever, what was it like? Because the emotional wounding says I can't trust people to meet my needs and the brain's hyper-independence traits kicks in to to say I'll just do everything myself. The emotional wounding says if I open up, I'll be judged, rejected, abandoned or not truly heard. I'll be lonely. And the hyper independent part in your brain now is saying I'll never let anyone see me struggle. Part in your brain now is saying I'll never let anyone see me struggle.

Speaker 1:

The emotional wounding says don't get too comfortable, nothing lasts and you'll be disappointed. And that part of the brain is saying I need to control everything so I don't lose it. And so you hate feeling dependence on anyone. You instinctively push people away when they get too close. You struggle to believe in anything lasting for a long period, and this programming makes you think it's you, that there's something wrong with you, which is why you had all of these disappointing moments of rejection, because disappointment taught you people aren't reliable, so you became the person who handles everything alone.

Speaker 1:

Disappointment taught you that things always break, so you stopped fully trusting in your own success. And disappointment taught you that vulnerability will lead to rejection, to being alone. So you've learned to keep your emotions locked down, because life has sort of taught you through these experiences whether they were what you've recorded them as or not that people will leave and that people aren't really safe, and that trusting yourself, even when you're brave, means that you still won't be heard properly yourself, even when you're brave, means that you still won't be heard properly, and so everything that your system learns is to just avoid experiencing that pain, so it will do everything to try to keep you away from it, even though you're still experiencing disappointment. So I want you to really just sit with how this might be showing up in your life, where you're attempting to micromanage and really control everything, because there's no trust when in any of your behavior, when you truly think about it, is there because a lack of trust in you being in it for the long game, even as I've said that there's a reaction in my body. What does it mean when you're in it for the long game? Oof, even as I've said that there's a reaction in my body, what does it mean when you're in it for the long game? What does it mean when you are staying?

Speaker 1:

If you were staying, what does the reaction of staying and being in something for the long game bring up in you? Especially the things and the places and the spaces where there isn't external validation, because quite often people with these traits really high achieving, really dedicated to work, really struggle with rest, really struggle with intimacy, but are really open to helping strangers all of the time that's because we have a problem with trust, that's a problem with trusting people, and so the more we have people that are just work colleagues or strangers that we are assisting and helping, the better it feels, because we're not expecting that to be long-term, we're not expecting that to be long-term, we're not expecting that to be intimate, and that disappointment doesn't feel anywhere near as painful as the disappointment of truly letting people in, anywhere near as painful as really being in other things for the long-term. I'm going to leave this one here, but I would really love you to even just jot down how has disappointment shaped my life and really sit with that, because I think it's a really important piece of work. As always, you can send me a dm at the completion coach or drop me an email, wendy, at the completion coachcouk, and if you think this episode would have been of use to