Expectations are Twofold

I caught myself making the mistake of thinking I wasn’t holding expectations when in fact, I was.

When telling myself to not have a certain expectation against someone, I did usually make sure to control my behaviour towards them. If I anticipated that I shouldn’t have the expectation of an event taking place, I made sure not to make the responsible person feel negatively about the non-event. I figured that not holding the expectation would mean that I may not act upset or angry towards them.

The mistake I made was to think about the latter as sufficient condition to claim to ’not have had the expectation’ instead of regarding it as simply one of several implications.

Not having an expectation against someone means both not acting negatively towards that person as well as not thinking or feeling negatively inside, independently of the behaviour, i.e. act, displayed towards others.