Expectations
Let me tell you a true story of expectations.
Once upon a time
there was a principal named Ms. Jones.
Ms. Jones was known as a very caring person. Although she was busy, she always seemed to have time for her teachers. If anything went wrong in a classroom, the teacher could bring it to Ms. Jones and Ms. Jones would take care of it. She would call parents; she would talk to students; she would mediate between feuding colleagues.
One day, Ms. Jones got a phone call from a parent who was upset that the school librarian had banned her son from the school library. Ms. Jones called the librarian into her office.
The librarian told Ms. Jones, “I didn’t ban anyone from the library. I did report the student you’re talking about, though. Last week Ms. Tanner’s class spent the period in the library, and that student left early. All I did was let Ms. Tanner know.”
Now Ms. Jones had to talk to Ms. Tanner. Who, when asked about the banning, admitted that, well, she had banned the student but had told the student it was the librarian’s decision.
“WHAT?!?”
Ms. Jones couldn’t help showing her astonishment. “You blamed the librarian for your bad decision?!?”
Ms. Tanner nodded her head — and began to cry. And spent the next 25 minutes telling Ms. Jones about her divorce and her son who was acting out and her financial difficulties.
Ms. Jones was shocked to feel
not empathy
not compassion
but rage.
Rage that Ms. Tanner had thrown a colleague under the bus. That Ms. Tanner was taking up Ms. Jones’s time with details about her personal life — which Ms. Jones could do nothing about. That chaos had crashed into her office despite her best efforts.
Because rage was a new emotion, and because it disturbed her, Ms. Jones decided she needed help understanding it. So she got in touch with
her friendly neighborhood
psycho-coach:
me.
(Though I lived far away from her. We zoomed.)
We pretty quickly got down to expectations. Here’s what we laid out:
Ms. Jones expected people to be incompetent. (For good reasons that lived in her childhood.)
Ms. Jones had become a master problem-solver so as to stave off the chaos she expected would result from others’ incompetence.
Because Ms. Jones was so willing to take on other people’s problems, people brought their problems to her and expected her to solve them. (Hence, of course, fulfilling Ms. Jones’s expectations of them: namely, that they would be incompetent to handle their own problems.)
Because Ms. Jones’s boundaries weren’t clear, people began expecting her to handle problems that went well beyond her responsibilities — like personal and family problems.
In a psychodynamic (that is, psycho = internal and dynamic = relational) nutshell:
Expectations that arise in childhood (called transference)
lead to behaviors when we’re adults
that beget behaviors from others
that perpetually reinforce our original (now maladaptive) expectations.
Round and round.
Until something happens that draws our attention to the expectations that have trapped us. Like rage.
Thank you, rage.
So how does this story end?
Ms. Jones got relieving clarity about her unconscious, self-preservative expectations.
Ms. Jones was able to anticipate future triggering events.
Ms. Jones planned her responses to these possible events ahead of time.
Ms. Jones practiced implementing her responses knowing that she had a supportive psycho-coach to fall back on.
Ms. Jones worked assiduously at establishing, respecting, representing, and surviving her own personal boundaries.
Ms. Jones’s attention to her personal boundaries forced her teachers and direct reports to manage their personal boundaries.
Ms. Jones’s school, over time, became a much more effective, professional place.
And she lived happily ever after.
With the occasional emotional reminder that she had some relational tweaking to do. Which is what I’m here for.