Build illusions and form expectations - is it bad or good, and what is bad, what is good?
Is it possible to find a person who would not build illusions about his life or fantasies about his future or past? Is it possible to find a person who would be completely devoid of expectations in relation to his loved ones or even people far from him? Is there a person who has no expectations and illusions about himself? Personally, I have not met such people. Even in the mirror.
However, there is a huge amount of psychological materials (but not only) that it is bad or at least not very good to build illusions and to have certain expectations. Adults, or rather, to say “psychologically mature people,” are well aware that sooner or later all illusions will be dispelled, crystal locks of fantasies about the future (as well as gloomy dungeons of memories of the past) will be destroyed. That any charm will inevitably end in disappointment, which cannot be otherwise, disappointment is just the other side of the charm (and they are one and the same phenomenon), and it is only a matter of time before the person turns the illusion of charm to the other. Expectations are only a little more stable and “soft” form of illusions and fantasies (it’s not important about yourself or yourself). And that is far from always soft - sometimes expectations in their rigidity can be stronger than diamond.
Sustainability of expectations lies in the fact that when confronted with a person or his behavior that does not meet his expectations, you can always say something like “this is the wrong person, you do not need to deal with him, I will look for / wait for the other, the right one” or (regarding myself) “I’m bad / didn’t do the right thing, I have to be good / right / do the right thing, next time I’ll get the right behavior from myself / become good”. Such a "knight's move" allows: a) to keep expectations, b) to ignore reality, c) not to draw a lesson from acquired experience, d) not to be disappointed in oneself and the world, e) not to make efforts to change oneself or one's expectations, f) to avoid experiencing pain or other frightening feelings. In general, the options of all kinds of protection of their own illusions / expectations in a person is in a very wide range, but among them there are especially loved by each individual.
It turns out that there are two main options for the development of events. The first - the clash of illusions / expectations / charm with reality leads to the costs of enormous (and inevitable exhaustion as a result) of internal resources for feeding existing psychological defenses for the sake of maintaining expectations, avoiding seemingly unbearable experiences and, accordingly, avoiding life in general. The second option, which takes place in the event of the destruction of expectations, confronts "nose to nose" with their own, to put it mildly, unpleasant and frightening experiences against the background of severe emotional pain and suffering. Of course, there is a third option - never in life do you fall into a situation of frustration, and then all expectations, illusions, fantasies will always correspond to reality. If this is your case, congratulations, you are God, eternal, almighty and omnipotent. Well, or, alternatively, you have such a special idea about yourself, the so-called. “The complex of God” is the one you called to protect you from experiencing your own mortality, helplessness and powerlessness (see the first option in this paragraph).
')
What comes out? Illusions and expectations - is it bad? Do we all urgently need to stop building illusions and form expectations? Before rushing to answer this question, I suggest paying attention to the very essence of what is “bad” and what is “good.”
To begin with, I want to note that in addition to “bad / good” there are similar categories - “right / wrong” and many other similar in essence, differing only in details. And the essence of them is very simple and is described in one word - “assessment”. These categories (bad / good, right / wrong, ...) - this is how a person gives an assessment of what he encountered (behavior or deed, his or someone else’s, the result thereof, or even just intentions).
I want to say that there are no bad or good actions, events or intentions, but there is our assessment of an action, event, or intention as “bad” or “good”, “right” or “wrong”. And this assessment can be of varying degrees of individuality, from “universal” (for example, assessment “to kill people is bad”), through national-group (“to kill a member of my group is bad”) to individual (“to kill the people I need is bad”). Naturally, speaking in one or another role, a person changes his assessment according to the scale of the context. However, the assessment may vary due to many other factors, but it is not about that now. If you agree that “bad / good” is only an assessment, then let's go further in the direction of its implementation.
How can I give an assessment? How is this assessment process carried out at all? In order to assess a person, first you need to compare something with something, compare, relate. For example, in the case of a school assessment, the teacher relates the actual writing (calculation, retelling, etc.) with the “correct” one, some kind of “reference” writing (calculation, original, etc.). In the case of an evaluation at work, the created product is compared with a reference product — if the degree of deviation from the ideal exceeds some norms — the product is rejected. In the case of an assessment of the service, the actions performed are compared with a certain “service provision schedule”, or final impressions with the expected ones.
Other examples can be cited, but in each of them, in order to form an assessment, a correlation / comparison of something “actual” with something “ideal” is carried out. Further, depending on the available evaluation criteria, the verdict is “bad / good”, “right / wrong”, “good / bad”, etc. Of course, the criteria can also be very different - here we immediately recall the bearded anecdote about a cat in a car, as a way to check its tightness by the Germans and Soviet engineers. But if with the criteria for evaluating something material (“objective”) everything is simple and clear (you can measure, calculate, calculate everything more or less “objectively”), then with a subjective assessment everything is more complicated.
For clarity, you can look at how the verdict "bad man", a small child and an adult person. For a very young child, to assess the “bad mom / bad dad” is enough only for his current experiences to be unpleasant for him. Even without going deep into the wilds of psychoanalysis and “bad chest”, one can observe firsthand how a small child whose mood / state of health has deteriorated greatly due to the actions of a mother or father, in a fit of feelings says “You are a bad mother” (or “father”, respectively). It is clear that he will say so until he is banned, which usually happens very quickly. In this case, the child, who has not yet fully parted with the feeling of omnipotent omnipotence, has corresponding expectations regarding his state of health and mood. And it is this criterion that could be labeled with the words “I don’t want to feel it, it’s unpleasant for me, I want to feel only good and pleasant, urgently give me back my well-being” is enough for the child to conclude “ / dad is bad.
Please note that in this case, the actual actions of the mother / father do not play any role in the child’s assessment of the actions of the mother / father. In such a situation, to protect against their unpleasant experiences, the child resorts to protection through projection (his own anger and aggression against the parent on the parent, so the evil and aggressive parent appears) and splitting (this is how the “bad” and “good” parents appear separately). But millions of articles have been written about this, I will not go into details, I’ll only emphasize once again that in this situation, the evaluation of the “actual” is compared with the “expected desired”.
For an adult who operates with higher-order protections, a similar comparison of the “actual” with some set of complexly organized and complex concepts of what a comparable “bad” person should be would occur. Due to the complexity, breadth of diversity and non-linearity of the hierarchy of ideas about the "ideal", an adult has to turn to an integral assessment which, moreover, is rarely possible to calculate exactly. If an adult does not cope with the frustration arising at this moment from the uncertainty of the situation, then he can resort to a wide range of high-level defenses that will give him supposedly reliable and unambiguous criteria for an appropriate assessment. It is very convenient in such situations to refer to specific or implied (ethical, moral, legal, etc.) codes, regulations, laws and regulations that not only eliminate uncertainty, but also allow you to avoid responsibility for your assessment: “ I do not appreciate it this way, it is the rules / law that values ​​it. ”
As can be seen, in the case of a small child, and in the case of an adult, complexity and entanglement contribute to the characteristics of the evaluation criteria, but the very essence of the assessment - comparing the “actual” with the “ideal” - remains the same, simple and unchanged. The same simple (and mature person is quite obvious) conclusion follows from all of this - statements like: “you need to fight illusions”, “expectations are bad”, “fantasies will not lead to anything good” - they contain an assessment, and assessment is impossible without the “ideal”, the one with which the comparison is made. But this “ideal” in itself is an illusion, an expectation, a fantasy ... about yourself or about someone else. All such assertions or suggestions do not relieve a person from expectations, but only “translate arrows” to a different set of expectations, more disguised as “noble goals of self-improvement and development”. And from these implicit expectations, the problems may become even more, besides, they will be even less noticeable and obvious than the previous ones. Although the person himself at this very moment may think that "now my life will change for the better, now everything will be different, many times better than before."
I hope that many have already noticed in such a development of events a typical scenario of various so-called courses / trainings. “Personal growth” and other similar ones, where the presenters, with gusto and excitement, begin to tell the naive listeners about how “bad and wrong” they lived, and what they now need to do to make it “good and right”. What can I say - everyone earns as he can, and it is not for me to judge them. But you can, if you really want to. By the way, psychologists / psychotherapists just teach non-judgmental perceptions so that they do not impose their own expectations on their clients - clients usually have problems with this, and perhaps they would be worth solving and not aggravating.
So what can be said about the fact that we, people, all people without exceptions (except the gods - but they are not humans) are building expectations, illusions and fantasies? This is neither bad nor good, it just is, it just has a place to be. We live like this. With illusions, fantasies, expectations and charm. And the subsequent pain and suffering from shattered illusions, unrealized fantasies, unfulfilled expectations and bitter disappointments. Integrating this unpleasant experience (if you manage to do it) a person matures. From childhood, from the very moment of birth of a person, his whole life will be accompanied by the pain of loss and disappointment. Growing paths are thorny. Well, this is not surprising, because this is the way “from Gods to people”, from the world of the ideal to the real world.
Fortunately, in the real world there is a place for pleasure and pleasure, for happiness, joy and even euphoria. Unfortunately, a person will not be able to get completely into the real world - he will always be separated from the real world by a thin line that holds a person in the world of his illusions, fantasies, dreams and expectations, no matter how close he is to reality. Mathematical analog: hyperbolic curve - no matter what work is put into the movement along the curve - you never get to “merge” with the absolute / axis. Those. reality and fantasies / ideas / expectations about reality are inversely proportional dependence - the less “fantasies” the more “reality”, which is more than obvious if you look at it from this position. And if this is so, then the following conclusion should be made: a person will never be able to be completely in the “real” world or be completely in the world of “fantasies”: a man, like a hyperbola, is “suspended” between reality and fantasy - it exists not in the space of reality and not in the space of fantasy, but in a space where reality and fantasy are orthogonal. Pragmatists who consider themselves to be an “objective measure” this “impossibility of reality” will upset and cause a storm of protest, those who are inclined to “soar in the clouds” can reassure a little - 100% “fly away from reality / go crazy” will not work no matter how hard you try :)
So, what comes out on this path, from the world of the ideal to the real world by means of getting rid of illusions and expectations, there is no point? The meaning is, the only and simple: the destruction of meanings, with which these same illusions, fantasies, expectations were loaded. In addition to this, there are no other meanings on this path. There is the formation and development of many useful and necessary skills that will be very useful on another path - the search for and finding meaning. But more about that another time.
PS Question to readers: if we continue the metaphor of a person as a function of the inverse proportionality of reality and fantasy, then what function in this space would be to describe a computer? And what is the program? :)
However, there is a huge amount of psychological materials (but not only) that it is bad or at least not very good to build illusions and to have certain expectations. Adults, or rather, to say “psychologically mature people,” are well aware that sooner or later all illusions will be dispelled, crystal locks of fantasies about the future (as well as gloomy dungeons of memories of the past) will be destroyed. That any charm will inevitably end in disappointment, which cannot be otherwise, disappointment is just the other side of the charm (and they are one and the same phenomenon), and it is only a matter of time before the person turns the illusion of charm to the other. Expectations are only a little more stable and “soft” form of illusions and fantasies (it’s not important about yourself or yourself). And that is far from always soft - sometimes expectations in their rigidity can be stronger than diamond.
Sustainability of expectations lies in the fact that when confronted with a person or his behavior that does not meet his expectations, you can always say something like “this is the wrong person, you do not need to deal with him, I will look for / wait for the other, the right one” or (regarding myself) “I’m bad / didn’t do the right thing, I have to be good / right / do the right thing, next time I’ll get the right behavior from myself / become good”. Such a "knight's move" allows: a) to keep expectations, b) to ignore reality, c) not to draw a lesson from acquired experience, d) not to be disappointed in oneself and the world, e) not to make efforts to change oneself or one's expectations, f) to avoid experiencing pain or other frightening feelings. In general, the options of all kinds of protection of their own illusions / expectations in a person is in a very wide range, but among them there are especially loved by each individual.
It turns out that there are two main options for the development of events. The first - the clash of illusions / expectations / charm with reality leads to the costs of enormous (and inevitable exhaustion as a result) of internal resources for feeding existing psychological defenses for the sake of maintaining expectations, avoiding seemingly unbearable experiences and, accordingly, avoiding life in general. The second option, which takes place in the event of the destruction of expectations, confronts "nose to nose" with their own, to put it mildly, unpleasant and frightening experiences against the background of severe emotional pain and suffering. Of course, there is a third option - never in life do you fall into a situation of frustration, and then all expectations, illusions, fantasies will always correspond to reality. If this is your case, congratulations, you are God, eternal, almighty and omnipotent. Well, or, alternatively, you have such a special idea about yourself, the so-called. “The complex of God” is the one you called to protect you from experiencing your own mortality, helplessness and powerlessness (see the first option in this paragraph).
')
What comes out? Illusions and expectations - is it bad? Do we all urgently need to stop building illusions and form expectations? Before rushing to answer this question, I suggest paying attention to the very essence of what is “bad” and what is “good.”
To begin with, I want to note that in addition to “bad / good” there are similar categories - “right / wrong” and many other similar in essence, differing only in details. And the essence of them is very simple and is described in one word - “assessment”. These categories (bad / good, right / wrong, ...) - this is how a person gives an assessment of what he encountered (behavior or deed, his or someone else’s, the result thereof, or even just intentions).
I want to say that there are no bad or good actions, events or intentions, but there is our assessment of an action, event, or intention as “bad” or “good”, “right” or “wrong”. And this assessment can be of varying degrees of individuality, from “universal” (for example, assessment “to kill people is bad”), through national-group (“to kill a member of my group is bad”) to individual (“to kill the people I need is bad”). Naturally, speaking in one or another role, a person changes his assessment according to the scale of the context. However, the assessment may vary due to many other factors, but it is not about that now. If you agree that “bad / good” is only an assessment, then let's go further in the direction of its implementation.
How can I give an assessment? How is this assessment process carried out at all? In order to assess a person, first you need to compare something with something, compare, relate. For example, in the case of a school assessment, the teacher relates the actual writing (calculation, retelling, etc.) with the “correct” one, some kind of “reference” writing (calculation, original, etc.). In the case of an evaluation at work, the created product is compared with a reference product — if the degree of deviation from the ideal exceeds some norms — the product is rejected. In the case of an assessment of the service, the actions performed are compared with a certain “service provision schedule”, or final impressions with the expected ones.
Other examples can be cited, but in each of them, in order to form an assessment, a correlation / comparison of something “actual” with something “ideal” is carried out. Further, depending on the available evaluation criteria, the verdict is “bad / good”, “right / wrong”, “good / bad”, etc. Of course, the criteria can also be very different - here we immediately recall the bearded anecdote about a cat in a car, as a way to check its tightness by the Germans and Soviet engineers. But if with the criteria for evaluating something material (“objective”) everything is simple and clear (you can measure, calculate, calculate everything more or less “objectively”), then with a subjective assessment everything is more complicated.
For clarity, you can look at how the verdict "bad man", a small child and an adult person. For a very young child, to assess the “bad mom / bad dad” is enough only for his current experiences to be unpleasant for him. Even without going deep into the wilds of psychoanalysis and “bad chest”, one can observe firsthand how a small child whose mood / state of health has deteriorated greatly due to the actions of a mother or father, in a fit of feelings says “You are a bad mother” (or “father”, respectively). It is clear that he will say so until he is banned, which usually happens very quickly. In this case, the child, who has not yet fully parted with the feeling of omnipotent omnipotence, has corresponding expectations regarding his state of health and mood. And it is this criterion that could be labeled with the words “I don’t want to feel it, it’s unpleasant for me, I want to feel only good and pleasant, urgently give me back my well-being” is enough for the child to conclude “ / dad is bad.
Please note that in this case, the actual actions of the mother / father do not play any role in the child’s assessment of the actions of the mother / father. In such a situation, to protect against their unpleasant experiences, the child resorts to protection through projection (his own anger and aggression against the parent on the parent, so the evil and aggressive parent appears) and splitting (this is how the “bad” and “good” parents appear separately). But millions of articles have been written about this, I will not go into details, I’ll only emphasize once again that in this situation, the evaluation of the “actual” is compared with the “expected desired”.
For an adult who operates with higher-order protections, a similar comparison of the “actual” with some set of complexly organized and complex concepts of what a comparable “bad” person should be would occur. Due to the complexity, breadth of diversity and non-linearity of the hierarchy of ideas about the "ideal", an adult has to turn to an integral assessment which, moreover, is rarely possible to calculate exactly. If an adult does not cope with the frustration arising at this moment from the uncertainty of the situation, then he can resort to a wide range of high-level defenses that will give him supposedly reliable and unambiguous criteria for an appropriate assessment. It is very convenient in such situations to refer to specific or implied (ethical, moral, legal, etc.) codes, regulations, laws and regulations that not only eliminate uncertainty, but also allow you to avoid responsibility for your assessment: “ I do not appreciate it this way, it is the rules / law that values ​​it. ”
As can be seen, in the case of a small child, and in the case of an adult, complexity and entanglement contribute to the characteristics of the evaluation criteria, but the very essence of the assessment - comparing the “actual” with the “ideal” - remains the same, simple and unchanged. The same simple (and mature person is quite obvious) conclusion follows from all of this - statements like: “you need to fight illusions”, “expectations are bad”, “fantasies will not lead to anything good” - they contain an assessment, and assessment is impossible without the “ideal”, the one with which the comparison is made. But this “ideal” in itself is an illusion, an expectation, a fantasy ... about yourself or about someone else. All such assertions or suggestions do not relieve a person from expectations, but only “translate arrows” to a different set of expectations, more disguised as “noble goals of self-improvement and development”. And from these implicit expectations, the problems may become even more, besides, they will be even less noticeable and obvious than the previous ones. Although the person himself at this very moment may think that "now my life will change for the better, now everything will be different, many times better than before."
I hope that many have already noticed in such a development of events a typical scenario of various so-called courses / trainings. “Personal growth” and other similar ones, where the presenters, with gusto and excitement, begin to tell the naive listeners about how “bad and wrong” they lived, and what they now need to do to make it “good and right”. What can I say - everyone earns as he can, and it is not for me to judge them. But you can, if you really want to. By the way, psychologists / psychotherapists just teach non-judgmental perceptions so that they do not impose their own expectations on their clients - clients usually have problems with this, and perhaps they would be worth solving and not aggravating.
So what can be said about the fact that we, people, all people without exceptions (except the gods - but they are not humans) are building expectations, illusions and fantasies? This is neither bad nor good, it just is, it just has a place to be. We live like this. With illusions, fantasies, expectations and charm. And the subsequent pain and suffering from shattered illusions, unrealized fantasies, unfulfilled expectations and bitter disappointments. Integrating this unpleasant experience (if you manage to do it) a person matures. From childhood, from the very moment of birth of a person, his whole life will be accompanied by the pain of loss and disappointment. Growing paths are thorny. Well, this is not surprising, because this is the way “from Gods to people”, from the world of the ideal to the real world.
Fortunately, in the real world there is a place for pleasure and pleasure, for happiness, joy and even euphoria. Unfortunately, a person will not be able to get completely into the real world - he will always be separated from the real world by a thin line that holds a person in the world of his illusions, fantasies, dreams and expectations, no matter how close he is to reality. Mathematical analog: hyperbolic curve - no matter what work is put into the movement along the curve - you never get to “merge” with the absolute / axis. Those. reality and fantasies / ideas / expectations about reality are inversely proportional dependence - the less “fantasies” the more “reality”, which is more than obvious if you look at it from this position. And if this is so, then the following conclusion should be made: a person will never be able to be completely in the “real” world or be completely in the world of “fantasies”: a man, like a hyperbola, is “suspended” between reality and fantasy - it exists not in the space of reality and not in the space of fantasy, but in a space where reality and fantasy are orthogonal. Pragmatists who consider themselves to be an “objective measure” this “impossibility of reality” will upset and cause a storm of protest, those who are inclined to “soar in the clouds” can reassure a little - 100% “fly away from reality / go crazy” will not work no matter how hard you try :)
So, what comes out on this path, from the world of the ideal to the real world by means of getting rid of illusions and expectations, there is no point? The meaning is, the only and simple: the destruction of meanings, with which these same illusions, fantasies, expectations were loaded. In addition to this, there are no other meanings on this path. There is the formation and development of many useful and necessary skills that will be very useful on another path - the search for and finding meaning. But more about that another time.
PS Question to readers: if we continue the metaphor of a person as a function of the inverse proportionality of reality and fantasy, then what function in this space would be to describe a computer? And what is the program? :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/373845/
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