Disappointing people is the worst. I hate it. I am a people-pleaser. I am a helper. I am a problem solver. Telling people that I just can’t help them is the hardest thing EVER. But it’s necessary sometimes.

There are a lot of reasons it’s good to disappoint people. Sometimes it’s necessary. And we have to get comfortable disappointing people.

Sometimes disappointing people is the end of enabling them. In a ton of my cases where the client is in the throes of an active addiction, I also have a set of parents that are making excuses for them and solving their problems. I have seen parents in their sixties still wringing their hands over telling their 30-something-year-old children that no, they won’t be putting money on their account in jail so they can buy special snacks, and no they can’t come live with mom and dad while they’re still using drugs. Those kids raged at that news. Those parents had spent decades saying yest to those kids and solving their problems, and fixing whatever issues came up, and forsaking their own lives to try to make things better for their kids. And it still didn’t work. The kids still got in trouble, stayed in trouble, and made no changes. They never hit rock bottom because they knew their parents would always help them out of the hole they’d dug. Until they didn’t. The disappointment those parents had to deliver was hard for them. More than once I’ve had someone my own parents’ age crying in my office because they feel like a terrible parent for not bailing their kid out of jail or letting them live at home despite using illicit substances. Disappointing people you love is hard.

Sometimes you’re disappointing people because you just have to draw a boundary. A friend or family member wants you to bend over backward to help them out with whatever issue they’ve got and you’re already at your tipping point with your own things. You have to tell them no just to save yourself from drowning. That’s hard. We want to be there for the people we love. We want to show up for everyone every time. But we have to prioritize things. Cracking yourself up and getting behind on sleep, work, health, all the things that you need to keep yourself going, just so you can help someone else, has to be a very very limited thing. I’ve learned that I can’t be there for everyone all the time. I hate that, but it’s a reality of life. I keep a lot of plates in the air. If I get behind, those plates fall. And that makes other people drop their plates etc. Boundaries are hard. It is inevitable that when you draw a boundary you disappoint someone. But it is such a crucial component of a balanced life. You have to keep solid boundaries in place to preserve your own health and well-being so that you can be there for others.

Dating and relationships seem to be a constant exercise in minor and major disappointments. Don’t get me wrong, Boyfriend is the best and he constantly makes life better than I ever expected it would be. But dating is fraught with disappointments from the very beginning. You may meet someone who is very nice but you’re just not interested. You have to disappoint them and say no when they ask if you’d like to go out again. You finally find someone you like enough to keep dating and you learn things about each other. Some of those things will disappoint you. You don’t like the same food or you have different hobbies that don’t really overlap. Their family isn’t your favorite or vice versa. Those adjustments are minor and sometimes major disappointments. Boyfriend loves to ski. I have been skiing once and my instructor’s takeaway was “I’ve never seen anyone fall quite like that before.” We have a lot of shared hobbies, but I will probably always disappoint him at least a little when it comes to skiing. We have to make efforts but also realize when it’s just not a fit. I am prepared to be a forever disappointment on this front. Because I want to try, but I am not willing to make this my mission in life. I can’t reinvent myself just to make my partner happy. I am getting comfortable disappointing him when it really matters. It’s hard. Of course I don’t want to disappoint the person I love. But sometimes we have to do hard things.

We have to recognize that boundaries and authenticity matter even more than disappointing people. Setting and keeping boundaries, even when it hurts the people that matter to us is super important and also super hard.

But we can do hard things.