Some time ago I spoke to a client about the expectations she had regarding a girlfriend. She had canceled a possible appointment with her friend, because she had an image about friendship: friendship must come from two sides, I expect her to contact me and I don't like it when the initiative is always coming from my side.

When her friend didn't behave according to her expectations during an e-mail exhange, the client became angry and canceled the appointment she had recently made with her friend.

What she didn't saw was the implicit demand she had towards her friend: she didn't give her friend the freedom to contact her or not.
Conviction: it isn't normal that the initiative for an appointment within a friendship always comes from one side. 

My experience is that many people confirm this statement of the client.

My reaction: is that right? What if your need is completely different from her need? Maybe you always take the initiative first, because your need is stronger than that of her...
Before she can feel that she wants to contact you, you already contact her. And that is how a pattern develops over the years: you are always the first one who contacts her. And why is that a problem? If you don't have any opinion about that, if it doesn't trigger anything of pain in you, then that is the situation: you always contact her first for an appointment and she confirms your proposal to meet each other. That's all.

And have you ever spoken in all openness about your friendship? What does friendship means for you and for her? What is the need that you feel and what is her need in relation to your friendship and how often do you want to see each other?

And do you see which images you stick on her if she doesn't contact you? And that those images aren't about her, but about pain that is already present in you, which is triggered by your friend? 

She isn't the cause of your pain, she triggers the pain (I am not important to her), who has already been in you since your childhood. 
Do you see that you react from that old pain? And that the mind created a belief about friendship in order not to feel the child's underlying pain, the pain of not being worthy of receiving attention?

Do you see the result of that conviction? That you impose a demand on her, an expectation that she has to meet: she must contact me. And the moment she doesn't…, you get triggered (old pain of not being loved) and you think you can rightly be angry at her... 

That's how it goes: we condemn the other, we blame the other person, without realizing that we thereby avoid the pain that is hit in us on a deeper level..., old pain. The pain of the child, the pain of not getting the attention that we needed.

Every form of expectation and desire leads to pain: 
disappointment, because reality always differs from expectation; 
anger, because the other doesn't do what we implicitly expect from the other person; 
sadness, because the other person doesn't live up to our image what we had created about friendship.

How would our life be without expectation? Without desire? Without implicit or explicit demands? Without images about ourselves, the other person or about a situation?

Investigate what expectations and desires exist in your life and what the consequences are in encounters with others. 

It isn't about suppressing desires (it is wrong to have expectations or desires), but about recognizing and acknowledging the expectations and desires that lives in you. And realizing the effect of desires: it leads to conflict and pain.

If you really see the effect of all those expectations, the desires will slowly extinguish so that you can release the other person.

Then friendship and intimacy is really possible.

Buddha said continually: 'Be free from desires and you will be free from samsara, from suffering; free from the world.'


www.thehealingcircle.one
LinkedIn: Caroline Ootes