Self-Knowledge • Emotional Skills
How We Respond When Life Gets Frustrating
Life is inherently filled with frustrations but how we interpret these frustrations – what we take them to mean, who we think is responsible for them and how we opt to complain about them (or don’t) – is fascinatingly diverse.
One of the best guides to the differences lies in the work of the American psychologist Saul Rosenzweig who in 1934 came up with what has become known as the Rosenzweig Frustration Test, a series of cartoon-like images showing people facing a range of vexing situations: someone’s clothing has been splashed; a vase has gotten broken; a fellow spectator’s head is in the way at the cinema…
In every case, we are given an empty speech bubble to complete – inviting us to show how we might characteristically behave were the world to trample on one of our hopes.
What the test instantly reveals is that though frustration may be universal, responses to it are anything but. When their clothing has been splashed, one person might say with relative nonchalance: ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure you didn’t mean it’. Another might reply in a tightlipped way: ‘It’s absolutely fine. No problem at all’. While a third might burst out: ‘You bloody idiot, look what you’ve gone and done. You’re trying to destroy me, like everyone always is.’
The test highlights the role that self-esteem typically plays in responses to frustration. The more we dislike ourselves (almost certainly because someone close to us didn’t like us very much in childhood), the harder it is to read frustration as anything other than a deliberate attempt to hurt us. Of course people are trying to splash us, given who we are! Naturally everyone is trying to ruin our experience at the cinema, given that we’re not good enough and never were – ever since our father or mother powerfully suggested as much in our preschool years. Wouldn’t it be normal that someone would try to break our favourite vase, were they to guess – as they surely can – at the repugnant nature of our soul? Bad things logically and necessarily happen to bad people.
Correspondingly, the more we have been taught – in our first home – that we are fundamentally decent and valuable people, prone to the odd mistake but neither damned nor sinful, the more setbacks can strike us as innocent accidents, rather than plots or retributive acts. Why would someone try to destroy our nice clothes, when we have done nothing especially wrong and have generally noble intentions towards the world? Why would anyone harm a good enough person? Accidents are far easier to believe in when we don’t carry around with us – in pained layers of the unconscious – a lingering sense of our unworthy natures.
Along the way, the test helps us to measure our relative capacities to express pain. Must we always pretend that everything is fine? Or are we sometimes allowed to let out a cry? But what kind of cry can it be? A dignified bounded complaint that allows us to hold on to our esteem? Or a titanic roar that injures us as much as it does our offender – because we have had so little experience of mastering our own anger and because we have no secure sense of the legitimacy of our dispute? As ever, our past directs our responses: the child who was able to cry for a while, and with sufficient sympathy, when their toy broke or a school friend ate too much of their birthday cake may mature into an adult who can combine honesty with self-control. They neither have to say nothing; nor put on a dramatic performance in which all the hatred and injustice that has ever been heaped on them seeks a desperate and sudden way out.
The Frustration Test doesn’t ideally only tell us how we relate to frustration now. It holds open the possibility that, through self-awareness and much kindly and patient exploration of our childhoods, we may learn to respond a little more wisely and calmly, compassionately and thoughtfully, to all the obstacles large and small that will inevitably continue to come our way every remaining day of our lives.
