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Frustration is a signal pointing to blocked, hidden ambitions; it's not just a mood to be managed.

Beliefs formed in childhood often block ambition to unconsciously protect loved ones.

Naming ambitions and their objections helps expose and loosen deeply rooted limiting beliefs.

If you're frustrated with your life, something specific is in hiding. Something is blocked, and you can't quite see it. It's not a vague dissatisfaction—it's a particular thing you want to be doing and aren't.

Frustration is usually treated as a mood, something to be managed or waited out. It isn't. It's a signal, and it's precise. People who don't want anything don't feel frustrated. They feel flat, or bored, or blandly content. Frustration requires an obstructed aim.

The trouble is that most of us can't say what we're wanting to do, or to make, or to be. We've concealed it — first from other people, and then, with time, from ourselves.

Ambition is the thing we learn to conceal

Most of us weren't raised to show open ambition. Women especially, though not infrequently men as well. At 3 or 4 years old, or later, someone warned us that wanting to be successful invited danger. Open ambition is risky; it invites envy, ridicule, or disappointment in the people you love and who love you. So whatever fantastic dreaming we did as small children, we learned to send those images underground.

What remains is a set of expectations about what will happen if we pursue the things we want. Some predict failure. But the more powerful ones predict something else: that if we succeed, someone we love will be hurt.

These are called pathogenic beliefs—from pathos, suffering, and -genic, giving rise to. These are beliefs that produce the trouble. They form early, out of childhood experience, and they aren't........

© Psychology Today