One of the things I hear surprisingly often in my therapy office is some version of this sentiment: “I don’t want to get my hopes up.” Sometimes it’s about a new relationship, a promotion someone has been working toward for years, a pregnancy, an upcoming vacation, or simply plans they’re looking forward to. Whatever the circumstance, the underlying belief tends to be the same: if I don’t let myself get too excited, it won’t hurt as much if things don’t work out.
I understand the impulse because I’ve caught myself doing it too. There is something that feels almost emotionally responsible about tempering our excitement. We tell ourselves we’re being realistic and convince ourselves that we’re managing expectations. It can even feel like evidence that we’ve learned something from life’s disappointments, that we’ve become wiser, less naïve, more emotionally prepared.
But lately, I’ve been wondering if that’s actually what’s happening.
A Small Disappointment That Said Something Larger
A few weeks ago, my partner and I drove up to Los Olivos for a weekend away. Long before we ever got in the car, I had already started imagining the trip. In my mind, we were taking Pacific Coast Highway the entire way. We’d drive through Malibu with the windows down, stop at a little coffee shop I had picked out, listen to a playlist I’d already started making, and enjoy the winding drive up the coast. It wasn’t just transportation anymore. It had become part of the experience I was looking forward to.
About ten minutes into the drive, my partner casually directed me toward the freeway.
He had assumed we’d always planned to take the faster route. I remember feeling surprisingly disappointed and upset. I wasn’t angry at him or devastated per say, as we were still going to spend the weekend together. I cognitively knew that we were still heading to the same destination and nothing objectively major had changed. And yet I was truly disappointed and started tearing up.
Because I had already emotionally invested in a future that no longer existed. Looking back, I don’t actually think I was grieving the drive itself, but rather the loss of the experience I had imagined. Somewhere along the way, I had created a little story about how the afternoon was going to unfold, and in that moment I had to let that story go.
The Micro-Grief We Rarely Name
It struck me afterward that this is something we do constantly, often without realizing it. Our minds are always projecting into the future. We imagine conversations before they happen and vacations before we’ve packed our bags. We envision how a date will go, how holidays will feel, how a difficult conversation might unfold, or what life will look like after we reach a goal we’ve been working toward. This isn’t a flaw in our psychology, but rather a core aspect of being human. Our brains are constantly trying to anticipate what’s next and the difficulty comes when reality asks us to revise those expectations. As the saying goes: Life happens when you’re busy making plans.
Sometimes those revisions are enormous: a relationship ends, a loved one dies, or a diagnosis changes everything. Other times they’re almost laughably small, like my partner telling me to take the freeway instead of the coastal drive. But psychologically, the process is remarkably similar.
In both cases, we have to reconcile the gap between the future we imagined and the reality that’s now unfolding in front of us.
I’ve started wondering whether disappointment is really a form of grief. Not grief in the way we usually think about it, but a quieter, everyday version of it. A kind of micro-grief that asks us to release the future we thought we were stepping into. Every disappointment requires a small act of letting go before we can fully orient ourselves to what actually is.
Every disappointment requires a small act of letting go before we can fully orient ourselves to what actually is.
Maybe We’re Not Afraid of Excitement. Maybe We’re Afraid of Grieving.
If that’s true, then I also wonder whether many of us aren’t actually afraid of getting excited.
Maybe we’re afraid of grieving.
When clients tell me they don’t want to get their hopes up, I don’t think what they’re really saying is, “I don’t want to feel excitement.” I think what they may be saying is, “I’m not sure I trust myself to navigate the disappointment if this doesn’t happen.”
There’s an important difference between those two ideas.
Because if disappointment feels overwhelming, then it makes perfect sense that we would try to avoid anything that could lead to it. We tell ourselves not to dream too much or become attached. We call it being “realistic,” but I wonder if, at least sometimes, it’s actually a subtle form of emotional bypassing. Rather than allowing ourselves to fully experience hope and trusting that we’ll survive the grief if things change, we simply avoid both.
The Cost of Protecting Yourself From Hope
The irony, of course, is that excitement is happening now. Anticipation is a present-moment emotion. Looking forward to something isn’t merely about the future; it’s an experience we get to have today.
When we refuse to let ourselves feel excited because we’re trying to protect ourselves from disappointment, we don’t actually eliminate pain; we simply remove one of the sweetest parts of being alive.
What has become increasingly clear to me is that disappointment itself is rarely the biggest problem. More often, it’s everything we pile on top of it. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t be upset because “it’s not a big deal.” Someone rushes to reassure us before we’ve had a chance to acknowledge our sadness. We pressure ourselves to immediately look on the bright side. Suddenly we’re no longer just disappointed: we’re disappointed and ashamed that we’re disappointed.
In my experience, that’s often what keeps emotions stuck.
We’re not just disappointed. We’re disappointed and ashamed that we’re disappointed. That’s often what keeps emotions stuck.
What Happens When We Let Ourselves Feel It
When I let myself simply acknowledge, “Oh… I’m disappointed,” something shifts. The emotion moves through me much more quickly. Then another process begins as I start imagining what else is possible. I become curious again. My mind begins constructing a different future, one that’s based on the reality in front of me rather than the one I originally expected.
What Resilience Actually Looks Like
To me, that’s what resilience actually looks like. Not refusing to hope or shrinking our excitement. Not convincing ourselves to expect the worst or shaming ourselves for feeling a totally normal feeling. Resilience is trusting that when life inevitably changes course, we’ll know how to grieve what we’ve lost, even if what we’ve lost is simply an imagined future, and then slowly begin imagining a new one.
Life will always ask us to do both. It will ask us to dream and it will ask us, over and over again, to let some of those dreams change.
Personally, I don’t want to respond to that reality by becoming less hopeful. I want to become more confident in my ability to feel disappointment without becoming consumed by it. I want to trust that grief, even these small everyday forms of grief, are not evidence that I shouldn’t have hoped in the first place. They’re simply part of what happens when we care deeply enough to imagine beautiful things.
