Hi Everyone!
Hope is a powerful word and each day we hope for better things to happen in our lives. At the same time, relying too much on hope can be devastating. It is in our primal nature to expect from others. If you have helped somebody, you must have thought they might help you someday too. Then, when you’re going through a rough time, you expect people to help you or support you. While many people do turn up to help us but sometimes we learn one of the hardest lessons in life and it is that we cannot just expect anything from anyone.
There are a lot of things that we can expect from others but this article will focus on emotional expectations. Emotional expectations can be love, care, sympathy, empathy, emotional support or understanding and much more.
You must have heard it already that having emotional strength is crucial for a human being. It saves us from becoming an emotional wreck when we are hurt emotionally. As humans, it is okay to expect the feelings of love, care, empathy, sympathy, and etc. from your loved ones but hoping for your loved one to reciprocate their feelings toward you is like digging a big emotional grave for yourself.
When all the love and care that you showered on your loved one is not reciprocated with the expected intensity, you feel hurt and betrayed. One thing that you need to understand is that it is not your loved one that hurt you but it is you and your expectations.
So what can you do to stop expecting from others?
The only way to stop expecting things from others is to start providing those things to yourself. Practice self-love, care for your mind and body through meditation, exercise and eating healthy foods, and practice mindfulness to understand and be aware of how you feel about you and your situation.
You have to love yourself like no one else could love you and care for yourself like no one else could care for you and it is when you stop expecting the feelings of love and care from others. Because the amount of genuine love that you can give for yourself is something that someone else cannot give it to you.
Think about this for a minute, when you expect something from someone, it shows your neediness, it shows that you cannot provide those things to yourself. So, begin by providing the love and care that you seek for by taking care of your mind, body and heart and become a complete person and not a needy person.
When you start loving and caring for yourself completely, you start feeling whole and you start appreciating people for the love and care they show toward you, no matter what their intensity might be.
Moreover, since you become a whole individual, you become the giver, you start giving all the love that you have and don’t expect anything in return because you are living your life in abundance. Overtime, this characteristic translates into other regions of your life such as work and other activities where everything you do, comes from a place of love.