Estrangement - a weird form of Empowerment

 

Detachment has long been touted as the recipe for an empowered and peaceful life. I have written about this, and its variation, Detachment without Indifference. The empowerment comes from a state of no emotional interdependencies, and no expectations. This can only result in a positive outcome. (I may even cynically cite a management consulting "success strategy" - set low expectations, and overachieve.)

The only difference between detachment and estrangement, is that detachment is often voluntary (that is, one works towards it and may achieve it to a smaller or greater extent), estrangement is involuntary (that is, it just "happens," is totally out of one's sphere of influence). While the final outcome may be the same, estrangement can arouse a "victim" feeling.

The personal challenge, then, is to treat estrangement with the same dispassion as detachment. This can help to achieve an acceptance of the situation and the elimination of hope about the estrangement diminishing or going away. If it does, and if it is what one wants, one may choose at that point in time to treat it however one may wish. If it doesn't, the expectations are absent, and the possibility of a disappointment is negligible.

When it comes to managing expectations, there is much to learn from out-of-favor stocks in the equity markets.

Look at the behavior of the Citigroup (NYSE:C) stock over the last four decades. I know people who kept buying more and more in 2007-08 when the stock started falling from its October 2006 high of over $500. "How long can this fall possibly last?", "This is a steal", "The stock must go up, sooner or later" were the sentiments I heard from the buyers. The stock has remained at less than 12% of its peak value for over a dozen years now - the "sooner" never happened, the "later" is nowhere in sight. In this case, we readily accept that there is no hope that it will rise back to its peak ever.

So, an estrangement is like the Citigroup stock. The quicker we achieve a state of acceptance of what it is and what not to expect from it, the faster is the attainment of internal tranquility and clarity on the path forward.