In the last post we discussed the negative emotion of anger and how it takes you out of your calm and cool-headed mind with a lot of fire.  If you were to have a dream where your house is on fire, you know that your anger is calling you to being cool-headed. 

I like to discuss frustration closely to anger because it has the same kind of strong active energy to it. Sometimes people confuse anger and frustration or may have a combination of the two emotions.  While anger is about having a really hot head, frustration is about banging your head. When frustration presents itself, it means that you have a goal in mind, but your attempts to accomplish it or make adequate success have failed repeatedly.  The huge tendency with frustration, when failure has occurred, is to do the same activities with more energy and more often. It is as if you believe that doing more of the same thing that failed is going to give you a different result. It doesn’t.

The attachment with frustration is to the process or method of getting to the goal. This is what educators traditionally tried to do with students who presented learning challenges. The idea was to give more repetition of the strategy that didn’t work, and take away the places in the child’s life where they were having success such as in sport. Obviously it was a failed strategy, but people attached to a single-process such as repetition were in the belief that children with learning challenges were just stubborn.  You know when the process is incorrect because frustration is the feeling.  When we discuss disappointment, you will see that the opposite is true. Disappointment means that the goal or expectation is incorrect, but the process is on the right track. It just needs more energy.

What should you do if you are stuck in frustration? The first step is to recognize the feeling by saying it. ” I am really frustrated!”  That lets you know that you are attached to how to make it to the goal. If you can allow yourself to let go of your attachment, which may not be all that easy, then you can start to have some flexibility and creativity about how to get to the end. While the go to positive energy for anger is patience and calm, the energy called for with frustration is flexibility and creativity. 

If anger is mixed with frustration, then first you calm yourself, and then you invoke your creative and flexible parts.  In many cultures people get stuck in thinking that hard work, toughness, self-discipline, and responsibility will solve everything because they are so valuable to a person’s life, but there are places where love and compassion, patience, peacefulness, creativity or encouragement are what is needed. Sometimes courage is what you have to be. Frustration let’s you know that a new something is needed.

Sometimes the attachment associated with frustration is there because there is a fear of trying something new. What if the solution to a relational issue is NOT toughing it out? What if you had to be closer or more loving? That would be very threatening to some people who haven’t developed that virtue yet. By letting go of the attachment to doing things in the same manner that you are used to but is not getting results, you open up whole new avenues of where you can develop. It is as if you are adding more tools to your toolbox.  It is particularly problematic for people who are gifted intellectually, but are not so in other areas. Gifted academic students may find it very easy to breeze through classes without ever having to put in much effort, but have a terrible time in relationships because the relational tools don’t come as easily as the academics do. 

If you can think of frustration as one of those great doorways to new develop, you can actually be excited when it appears. You can say, “Yay! Frustration!” ”I get to try something new.”