The woman who had been betrayed didn’t just fall in love again; this time she loved with her whole being. She fully engaged in her next relationship and experienced a level of intimacy that she didn’t even know existed. This second relationship was far more fulfilling than her first one. Through her experience of loss, she learned how to really love a man and how to receive his love.
In these examples, the individuals weren’t just resilient, meaning they didn’t just refuse to let an adversity define them or their dreams. These individuals bloomed in the dark. They allowed the force that collapsed something in their lives to be the very energy that caused them to become a better version of themselves.
You Must Get Your Hopes Up
How many times have you been told (or even said it yourself), “Don’t get your hopes up!” We’ve been conditioned to think that it will hurt more if we get our hopes up and then they don’t come true. We rationalize that if we set our sights lower, we won’t be as disappointed. In the medical field, I’ve heard my colleagues say things like, “I didn’t want to give my patient false hope, so I made sure they knew the chances were slim for … [a cure, a positive response to a new treatment, a speedy recovery, and so on].”
My heart always sinks when I hear things like this. Hope is a powerful force and critical ingredient for healing and transformation. We must get our hopes up if we want to bloom in the dark. In fact, it’s so important that we’ll return to the idea of feeding our hope in a few chapters.
For now, try thinking about getting your hopes up as setting an intention or an expectation for a future outcome. Why is this important? Because, in general, we get what we expect. I don’t mean this in the way of the Law of Attraction (although I do think there’s something to this idea energetically that we don’t fully understand). In the world of psychology, this principle is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. When we expect something, we act in ways that line up with our expectation. These actions help to bring about the thing we expect. For example, if we expect to have a fun evening with friends, we likely arrive in good spirits and eagerly engage in the conversation. Our positive attitude and engagement is felt by our friends and is reciprocated. We feel encouraged and pleased that we are being responded to well and this inspires more positive feelings and actions. Eventually, by the end of the night, we have created a fun evening for ourselves.
Conversely, if we expect to be miserable, we will likely arrive with a poor attitude and either withdraw from the conversation or contribute in negative and critical ways. This will not be received well by the people we are with, who will send subtle or not-so-subtle messages of their disappointment or disapproval. These messages will further confirm our expectation that this was going to be a miserable evening, and we will end the night having experienced exactly what we expected to experience.
Our Beliefs Are Powerful
The placebo effect is another example of the power of hope or expectations. A placebo is an inert substance that doesn’t have any healing properties in and of itself. However, people can experience benefits from an inactive substance, such as a sugar pill, just by expecting that it will help. When this happens, it’s called the placebo effect. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that, remarkably, our bodies can adjust our experience of pain relief from a medication just by altering the information we’re given and (presumably*) the expectations we have as a result of this information28.
Throughout the study, each patient received true, false, or uncertain information about the pill they were taking to help reduce their migraine pain. Sometimes they were given pain medication and were told they were taking pain medication (true condition), and sometimes they were given a placebo pill and were told it was a placebo pill, meaning it was inert (i.e., a sugar pill) and would not have an effect on their pain (also true condition). In the false condition, they were either given the real medication and told it was a placebo (to lower expectations) or given the placebo and told it was the medication (to raise expectations). Finally, in the uncertain condition, they were given a pill and told it could be either a placebo or the medication.
Here’s what happened. People who received the pain medication experienced a greater reduction in pain than those who received the placebo pill. And, those who received the placebo pill did better than no treatment. These two findings were expected (no pun intended!). Now here’s where it gets interesting, where we start to see the power of information and expectancies. People who were given the migraine medication but were told it was a placebo pill experienced less pain relief than when they were told they were getting the medication (false condition to lower expectation). In other words, the pain medicine was less effective when people didn’t believe it was medicine.
Furthermore, people who received the placebo pill and were told it was medicine (false condition to raise expectation) experienced more relief from their pain than if they were told they got the placebo pill. In fact, they experienced the same amount of relief as those who received the medicine, but were told it was a sugar pill! In other words, the placebo was more effective when participants believed they were actually getting the medicine.
These results, and those from hundreds of other similar studies, demonstrate that what we expect impacts us, and it does so at the very neuro-cellular level. The effects of pain medication can be blocked by what we believe. Not only that, but we can also create pain relief in our body just by believing we are doing something that is going to reduce pain. I believe this pain relief isn’t just applicable to physical pain; our beliefs impact our experience of emotional pain, too. The bottom line of the research on the placebo effect and self-fulfilling prophecies is that we get what we expect. And given that, it is so important that we be intentional about what we expect and use this power for our good.
Your Expectation Is Your Choice: Choose Wisely
But when we’ve been pummeled by life, it can be very hard to expect things to get better, especially when the pummeling just seems to keep on coming. It can also feel scary to expect things to get better, because what if they don’t? Then what? It can feel unbearable to think of having to go through more pain and disappointment. However, what I’ve noticed in my own life and in the lives of my clients is that it’s far better to hope for change and not see it than it is to sink in the pit of hopelessness and despair and resignation.
You see, here’s the real kicker: You are never expectation free. You’re always expecting something. You’re either expecting nothing to change, for things to get worse, or for things to get better. Given what we know about the self-fulfilling prophecy and placebos, it’s clear that we can change our reality with our beliefs. Remember in the Introduction we learned about how our perception is our reality? This is where the rubber hits the road. Where you get to make a choice. Where you get to set an intention. Up-level your expectations. Set yourself up to bloom in the dark.
You didn’t have a choice about going through the suffering you’re experiencing right now. But you do have a choice about how you want to respond to it and who you want to become as a result of it. That’s what I mean by setting an intention to bloom. Blooming or transformation isn’t an automatic process; it’s one that requires clarity, intention, determination, and persistence.
Indeed, very few of the things we want to accomplish in life happen automatically. For most everything, we have to set a clear intention (i.e., set our belief and expectation for something), and for most everything, we have to exert some effort and persist in that expectation and effort until we realize our goal. It all begins with the intention we set. The research is clear: What we set our mind on—our intention—affects how things turn out.
Setting an intention: That’s the first step of blooming in the dark.
Your Turn
Below are some writing prompts designed to help you set your intention for blooming. You’ll engage in “possibility thinking,” where you take the limits off of your current