“Can you fill up a glass that has holes?”
We have all invested energies in something, hoping for a specific result while getting a different one over and over.
- Asking that one friend to be more present, only to see them ultimately be themselves and unable to satisfy our request
- Trying to stop smoking by listing all risks, only to slack after one glass of wine
- Seeking people who feel like a case to solve, someone to rescue, only to fail miserably in saving them
- Using the same approach to talk to our parents, hoping this time they’d understand our point, only to see the same script repeat itself
The human mind has an impeccable way to optimize its energies to attain certain results. This might be hard to imagine if you constantly end up sabotaging yourself. Repeating these cycles increases frustration and consumes hope, gradually reducing the trust you have in your own functions. Your mind doesn’t certainly seem like a friend, or a good machine. Instead, it seems like a naughty sibling telling on you to your parents, an hostile colleague always trying to get the last word.
If my partner keeps mismatching my desires and expectations, reducing my patience toward them to a thin and wet piece of paper, and I’m here throwing ultimatums, having last conversations that are never last, putting all the effort in the world to voice my frustration, it might seem like I’m genuinely hoping for things to change.
But am I?
Our mind and body are made to be drawn to what gives them pleasure, or at the very least some sort of satisfaction. We might be baffled at our repetitions, frustrated at our inability to learn from past experiences, but if we turn things around we might find a less intuitive explanation. If we keep going to the beach hoping to ski, we might not be as silly as we think. We know there’s no snow at the beach. If we wanted to ski we’d go to somewhere where there’s snow, yet we keep going back to the seaside, and hoping, and getting disappointed, and feeling stupid for having made this miscalculation again.
It rarely occurs to us we might not be interested in snow after all.
What keeps us going is exactly this frustrating cycle, that some dark part of our mind viciously enjoys: expectation, hope, crashing of hopes, repeat.
Empatherapy 