State of frustration. What to do and how can a psychologist help?

What is frustration in psychology? This is a psycho-emotional state caused by a discrepancy between a person’s desires and his current capabilities. Failure to make a dream come true causes acute disappointment, irritation, anger and despair. Frustration is typical for perfectionists and emotionally sensitive people.

Frustration - what is it?

The term “frustratio” is translated from Latin as “deception”, “vain expectation”, “failure”. Frustration is an emotional state expressed by dissatisfaction, disappointment and bitterness. It is caused by difficulties in achieving one or another goal, the inability to make a desire come true.

There are the following types of frustration:

1. Biological: occurs when capabilities are limited by biological factors, as well as diseases that cause a frustrated state.
2. Mental: barriers placed in the human psyche prevent one from achieving desire. The group includes fear, stress, uncertainty, and psychological pathologies.
3. Sociocultural: restrictions on the fulfillment of desires are imposed by norms, rules and obligations within society. The group is divided into 2 large subgroups: social and cultural type of frustration from the outside.
4. Material: formed when there is a lack of funds and material goods necessary to make a dream come true.

In turn, these types of frustration are divided into small subgroups. Thus, the mental group includes widespread love frustration, and social frustration includes sexual and existential dissatisfaction, the desire for independence in adolescents.

What can long-term frustration lead to?

When some feeling, positive or negative, lasts for a long time, for example, several months, then this is already a pathology. Frustration, like other states, must quickly replace each other. Normally, a person can feel frustration, then see a funny picture on the Internet, and his frustration will change to something else, and so on. If this does not happen, and the feeling of frustration is not replaced by anything, but is fixed and looped, this can lead to the development of depression.

Who is susceptible to frustration?

A frustrated state occurs when there is an acute need to achieve success, combined with increased emotionality. Risk groups include:

1. Perfectionists with an inflated level of responsibility.
2. Melancholic, deeply vulnerable personality types.
3. Children and adolescents with “excellent student syndrome.”
4. Impatient people with weak willpower.
5. Self-centered individuals with high self-esteem.
6. Disabled people, people with disabilities.
7. People from disadvantaged families, with low income.

Frustration also often occurs in people prone to mental illness: depression, neuroses and psychoses, and various mental disorders.

The mechanism of occurrence of the emotional state

Frustration is formed in 3 main stages:

1. Setting a goal. A person decides to make this or that desire come true, sets the necessary bar, thinks through the methods and timing of achieving the goal.
2. Striving to achieve a goal. A person makes efforts, tries to achieve the intended results, investing effort, time or money into it.
3. Failure. Despite the efforts made, achieving the goal becomes impossible. The person becomes disappointed, angry, and plunges into a frustrated state.

Further behavior depends on the person’s character and the degree of his indignation.

Causes of auto-aggression and its classification

Auto-aggression is one of the forms of destructive activity that a person directs directly at himself. In this case, we are talking about excessive self-flagellation and even suicide attempts. Psychologists all over the world agree that auto-aggression is a protective mechanism of the psyche.

Such destructive activity arises precisely when a person, for one reason or another, cannot direct an aggressively colored message to other people who provoked the appearance of strong anger. This inability to openly express negative feelings towards another person leads to the person redirecting the flow of rage towards himself.

Experts in the field of psychology identify a number of reasons that lead to this state of affairs:

• - lack of access to the object of anger;
• - there is a fear of losing the love of an important person;
• - there is a fear of strong condemnation by society.

At the same time, the aggression that arises deep inside manifests itself through the person performing self-destructive actions. Abuse of strong alcohol, use of illegal drugs and eating disorders are signs of the presence of auto-aggression. There are several categories of behavior characteristic of this disease.

1. — Deliberate auto-aggression (manifests itself in making cuts, thinking about an effective plan for committing suicide).
2. — Unconscious behavior (the presence of a desire for dangerous actions).
3. — Direct danger (high risk of self-harm).
4. — Indirect threat (manifests itself in the process of provoking situations that create danger).
5. — Psychological auto-aggression (the emergence of destructive thoughts).
6. — Physical manifestation of negativity (direct self-harm).

Often, people susceptible to auto-aggressive disorder are capable of independently, intentionally or acting subconsciously, provoking situations that pose a danger to their lives.

How to get rid of frustration

The feeling of frustration can be overcome with psychotherapeutic techniques and auxiliary treatment methods: breathing exercises, yoga, dancing. In severe forms of pathology, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, sedatives and tranquilizers are used.

Medications

Drug treatment is used for biological factors of frustration and mental illness. Antipsychotics, tranquilizers and sedatives are also indicated for increased patient aggressiveness.

Psychotherapy

Correction of the frustrated state is carried out by general and clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists.

Psychotherapeutic methods for getting out of frustration include:

• Rosenzweig's drawing frustration technique;
• art therapy sessions;
• individual consultations;
• problem-oriented trainings;
• group sessions with frustrated people.

Most specialists combine these methods with each other.

Helper Methods

Additional ways to cope with frustration include:

• breathing exercises;
• yoga exercises;
• aromatherapy;
• massage and self-massage;
• creative hobbies;
• listening to calm music.

These methods effectively calm the nervous system, relieve stress, and help cope with aggression and disappointment.

An effective way to get rid of auto-aggression

Due to the fact that treatment of auto-aggressive disorder can begin at any stage, there is a high probability of quickly getting rid of the problem with a responsible attitude to therapy. Having determined the true causes of the illness at a meeting with a specialist, it is important to jointly find effective ways to overcome unbearable experiences, which will differ in each individual case. A competent psychologist can select ideally suited techniques and methods that can easily fit into the habitual lifestyle of a person with an auto-aggressive disorder in order to correct behavior day after day.

Examples of real life situations

Real-life cases of frustration are presented in examples.

Example 1

At school age, frustration often occurs in children with “excellent student syndrome.” Students work hard to get high grades and stand out from their peers. When a child appears in their environment who demonstrates great success, individuals with the “excellent student syndrome” experience severe frustration.

Example 2

An example of love frustration would be a breakup. The person made plans for a future together, cherished dreams and fantasies, invested time and energy in the relationship. When his desires collapse overnight, this is accompanied by the emergence of frustration and its characteristic symptoms: acute disappointment, resentment and bitterness.

Example 3

Lack of success in the workplace leads to career frustration. A person may make great efforts in the hope of a raise or increase in salary: staying late, doing work for other employees. If the desired position is given to someone else and the salary increase is denied, frustration arises.

Frustration is a complex psycho-emotional state that causes discomfort and many unpleasant emotions. You can get out of it with the help of classes with a psychotherapist, relaxation techniques and taking sedatives, antipsychotics, and antidepressants.

Frustration is a state that arises in a situation of real or perceived discrepancy between our desires and available possibilities. That is, in a situation of impossibility of achieving something desired, satisfying a need.

This feeling is extremely conflicting, unpleasant and hurts self-esteem. Surely this experience is familiar to you, and you have had to deal with it at least once during your life.

And, as happens with unpleasant experiences, you always really want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. And there are several strategies or trends here. Let's look at them:

1) Frustration = challenge

Often, the inability to achieve what you want is automatically perceived as a challenge and leads to even more active attempts to achieve the desired goal. Then all distractions fade into the background and the person, no matter what, tries to achieve what he wants. The attractiveness of a goal that has not yet been achieved in this situation only intensifies. Sometimes there are even aggressive attempts to go ahead, head-on, which usually only aggravates the situation, requiring a more thoughtful, subtle and balanced method of action.

For example, when a person makes thoughtless purchases or suddenly invests money somewhere.

Instead of one expensive thing that he cannot afford, he buys a dozen cheaper unnecessary things, which in the end turn out to be even more expensive. Or he impulsively signs up for some courses, which he then just as impulsively abandons. Or he starts running and gets stressed out. Etc. and so on.

This causes a lot of discomfort, so there are the following lines of work in therapy:

– black and white thinking gradually breaks down: “it’s either pan or bust”, “all or nothing”, “now or never”, etc.;

– more adaptive ways are being sought - to do something while maintaining self-esteem, to do a piece without taking on the whole bulk, to do something in between, to wish in parts, etc.;

– we teach to see competing needs, desires and interests, which are often lost “in the heat” of achieving an overly significant goal;

– replacing the means of achieving the goal: searching for a new perspective on the situation as a whole, reviewing previous actions, searching for an alternative way to achieve the goal;

– goal replacement: searching for an alternative goal that satisfies a need or desire. Sometimes the goal is imposed by other people, for example parents, and is not at all so desirable upon close examination, then it is not difficult to transform or replace it;

– reassessment of the situation, the significance of the situation for the rest of life. Sometimes it turns out that it is possible to unite conflicting aspirations by reducing the significance of the situation and looking at it differently.

This allows you to act more flexibly, not rush into embrasures and maintain self-esteem at an acceptable level. A person himself masters some of these techniques throughout his life, and this helps him reduce frustration.

2) Frustration = withdrawal

This is the opposite vector, but it also occurs quite often, when a certain individual threshold of tolerance for frustration is reached and a person can no longer withstand the stress associated with it. Although the avoidance response can provide relief, withdrawing from a situation is destructive because it does not achieve goal achievement.

At the University of Iowa, K. Lewin's school conducted an experiment with children on frustration. It was called "Frustration and Regression in Children."

The authors concluded that as a result of frustration, some children's creativity decreased, they regressed (behaved like younger or lower-level children), and they experienced a loss of touch with reality.

This can also be seen in the behavior of adults.

Indeed, if you cannot achieve some very significant goal, it is better to go to an area where it is safer, for example, where these goals are not so important, valuable, etc.

Or another important withdrawal mechanism that children do not yet have, but appears in adults - devaluation of an unattainable object of desire, like “green grapes,” and exaggeration of the value of what you have, like “sweet lemon.”

– the “green grapes” phenomenon is about a situation when a person fails to take possession of the desired item, and he devalues ​​it, that is, endows it with negative traits (as in the fable “The Fox and the Grapes”, when the fox could not get the grapes and called it “unripe” ", green);

– the “sweet lemon” defense is an exaggeration of the value of what you have (according to the principle “a bird in the hand is better than a pie in the sky”).

And in themselves these are not bad, working defenses, and there is nothing wrong with them, but sometimes they do not allow a person to even try to get closer to his own goal.

Here in therapy it is important to build such a process so that a person has the opportunity to try something new, to gain such experience, despite difficulties and obstacles and without the possibility of completely devaluing the new activity.

It is extremely important to experience success through difficulties.

3) Adaptation balance

It is ideal when a person has in his arsenal both adaptive methods of coping with frustration and maintaining his self-esteem, as well as experience in accepting a challenge and successfully overcoming difficulties in a significant situation. Then life does not develop according to the type of avoiding situations of frustration, but also does not turn into a fierce struggle for a dream in spite of everything.

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