Do you feel as if nothing ever goes your way and nothing you do is ever good enough? Maybe you feel like no one really shows you they care about you or you feel like you get taken advantage of or you just overall feel like you’re just not meant to have good things in your life. When you’re sitting there feeling that way you’re probably wondering why is this happening? You are a good person that tries to do good things, why don’t good things happen to you?
Trust me it has nothing to do with you or anything being wrong with you. It has to do with your expectations and your beliefs.
Expectations are beliefs about whether you’re going to get the thing you want or not. We live off of expectations. We live based on what we believe we deserve. Our beliefs are formed from the time we are young about based on things we heard and based on things we experienced. So for instance, if when you were a kid every time you get an A on a test you would get a piece of candy. You now believe that you should get rewarded every time you get an A.
We live our life based on our expectations and our beliefs. So if you were a child that experienced a lot of bad things like your parents divorced, you were abused, maybe you got really sick, or you got really hurt as a child, you cannot use logic or reason why those things happened. Instead, you will internalize it and think “Oh I deserve these bad things, it’s me, I’m the reason why these bad things happened, it’s my fault.”
As this innocent little kid, you believe you deserve bad things. Now you take that belief system with you throughout your entire life, believing that you deserve bad things. What happens with our beliefs is that we now act on these childhood beliefs. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect something to happen and you believe something will happen, you will then make moves and take action towards that belief.
So let’s say you go on a date, if you believe the date’s going to be bad you will then maybe not be yourself. You won’t glam yourself up or put effort because you’re just expecting it to go bad. Why would you put in the effort? You believe good things can’t happen to you so you act in that manner. A big reason this is is because we as humans, we look for predictability, we look for patterns. That’s how we’ve survived all these years. We assume or we predict something’s going to happen to better protect ourselves. When we experience something, we expect it to happen again.
So you may ask, how do I know if I’m someone where I believe bad things will happen? Well, let’s look at your actions. One big thing is you may be codependent. So if you were a little kid that was invalidated as a child, you’re not really aware of what you want. All you are aware of is that you expect to be mistreated and so because of that you look for any outside validation. You will people please, you will fix and you’ll take care of everyone to feel validated. You’re always focused on everyone else.
When you focus on everyone else, there’s no room to focus on yourself. You may fear what other people think about you and you really want to be liked but because you don’t have a strong sense of self and you seek the validation of others, you expect them not to like you. So then that will cause you to want to go please and people fix and overly help them to then get them to like you. That then leaves no room for yourself because you’re so focused on everyone else that you are not getting what you want. You’re not thinking about yourself. You may take the belief system that you are not worth the time, worth anyone else getting to know, or worth having your needs met. This will cause you to heavily rely on others to fulfill those needs.
A lot of times when people have this mindset where they don’t ask for what they want or what they need they think people should just know. They think they would do it, so why wouldn’t someone else do it? You may expect people to read your mind. When you don’t ask for what you want/what you need or you don’t go after what you want/need, you now believe you don’t deserve those things. You feel they should just happen. If you really are a deserving person, they should just happen. But that is not how the world works. We have to ask for things or we will never receive them.
Self-sabotage. You may fear good things happening or you want something to happen so badly but you expect it’s not going to happen This will cause you to sabotage. It’s a huge self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re causing your worst fears to happen. It also creates familiarity. You’re giving yourself what you expect and you expect this thing to happen, this is familiar it’s comfortable and you also believe that it may not be possible that these good things could happen. In your mind, it makes more sense for you to sabotage and create that expectation. This is why you may do things like procrastinate, or start fights with someone that you really love. Or you’ll have a perfectionist mindset and expect yourself to reach these expectations that you know you can’t reach just to sabotage yourself from that belief and fear. The fear that you will never get what you want.
The victim state. You always think things happen to you and you have no control. You’re helpless. There’s nothing you can do about it. The victim mentality can come from the time when you’re young where you have a lot of things bad things happen to you and you feel in this state of helplessness. It is a state of feeling like you have no say, you still feel like that helpless child. It can still cause you to feel like you can’t make decisions or you can’t come up with solutions to help yourself out of these problems. Also being in the state of being a victim, is a very comfortable state. It feels a lot more comfortable and safe thinking that other things and outside influences are happening to you rather than thinking that you are responsible for the way that you handle these bad things that happen.
Again it’s that familiarity. This is familiar to be in this victim mentality, it’s safe. And I can also gain some sort of sympathy from others or I can blame outside people rather than myself. It feels a lot easier to blame outside influences for why you’re not having the life you want to be living. When you’re in this victim mentality, you’re always expecting bad things to happen and you expect yourself to always be a victim of your circumstances. You may feel like you just have to naturally allow these bad things to happen. You may always be in a state where you’re trying to protect yourself because you’re always expecting bad things to happen. Then when they do happen, you’re like see I knew this would happen!
Our beliefs come from the thoughts we have in our head. A lot of the time you will have inner critical thoughts about yourself or you have an inner critical thought about the thing that’s about to happen. This can lead to behaviors like codependency, self-sabotage, not asking for what you want, and being in that victim mentality.
Determine what you want versus what you expect. These are two very different things. You can want a good relationship but you can expect it never to happen. your beliefs and your wants need to match up. So take some time to think about it. Go through the list of what you expect and go through the list of what you actually want.
This means going through your fears, the worst-case scenarios of what you imagine things to happen or what you feel is not possibleS. Go through all of those things because then you can see the disconnect and how much they do correlate. That can also help you to be more aware and see how big of a difference you have between your expectations and your wants.
The way that you change your beliefs is by reaffirming the opposite. So normally on a regular basis you may notice yourself saying things like “This is never going to work out, nothing good will ever happen to me, I’m wasting my time.” You want to recognize that inner critic.
Something that can really help is by naming that inner critic, naming it Frederick, naming it something so that way you can disassociate and recognize that it is not your voice. That is a negative voice that’s not yours and then you will have you come in, whatever your name is, come in and reaffirm the opposite. Reaffirm the positive things, reaffirm that you can do it, reaffirm that you are going to make this happen, and reaffirm that good things can happen to you. Whatever negative thing you tell yourself you want to reaffirm the opposite.
What’s super important is that you need to feel it when you say it. So you may notice things like fear will get in the way but the thing is, you have to recognize this is an insecurity and a fear. You want to be very aware of what you’re telling yourself because ultimately you are choosing what happens based on your beliefs.
Once you really determine what you want and your expectations and you really go through changing your beliefs, now you need to act on it. Now you need to ask for what you want and go for it. So ask yourself, how can I make this happen? What can I do? This will also help you take you out of a victim mentality if you are someone where you feel like just bad things always happen to you. Ask yourself :
What are my choices in this situation?
How can I change the situation?
Let’s say that you want a healthy relationship. You can ask yourself how do you make this happen? Well maybe you need to go reach out for help to fix some underlying issues, maybe you need to really work on what you want in a partner, your requirements, and your expectations. Maybe you need to go out, date, and figure out what you want. Maybe you need to work on learning how to be more of yourself or let’s say that you want to improve your current relationships. You feel like you’re getting taken advantage of, what can you do differently? You now can remind yourself that you can ask for what you want, it’s okay for you to ask for what you want and then go after it.
Something that I hear very often with my clients is that they say you know my friend didn’t do this thing but I would do it! Sometimes we have to tell our friends what we need and what we expect. For instance, to some people birthdays are a big deal and to some other people, birthdays are not a big deal. If your birthday’s a big deal, let your friends know so that way they can cater to what you expect. You want them to show you some appreciation on your birthday and that’s okay. You’re allowed to ask but you have to show that’s what you need and that’s what you want.
We teach people how to treat us so you want to teach the ones around you how to treat you. Also recognize if your expectations are too high or if they’re unrealistic, or if people cannot reach them. If you notice you struggle to reach your own expectations, you probably have too high expectations for others.
Notice this and try to really lower those expectations for yourself so then you can lower those expectations for others. You need more realistic expectations because you want to match your wants with your expectations. This is to help you be more realistic because you may be in a very unrealistic state where you are not in reality. So if you’re ever wondering why are you not getting what you want, it’s because you don’t believe you deserve the things that you want which is causing you to not go after the things that you want. Change your beliefs and you will change your life.
What do you guys think? Leave it all in the comments below!
