Healing Rejection
Scenario: You’re just getting up the courage to walk over to that attractive lady shopping for a … whatever. She looks up and catches you looking. You smile and ask her something to start a conversation. But she responds coldly, obviously uninterested in chatting. Shortly, she says ‘good-bye” and rushes away, leaving you with a choice that you often don’t notice; you and those like you, the victims of that highly feared yet poorly understood phenomenon called rejection.
But how is there a choice in rejection? To understand the concept, you first must take control of your emotions. That is, you must strongly believe that all your voluntary thoughts are actions which are in fact under your control. Just as you choose to raise your head and then lower it again, so too may you determine how you react to love rejection. The choice becomes yours only when you really get this.
In a normal life, we must deal with rejection every day. Yet it produces more sadness, anger, guilt, and depression than most others external stimulus. Why? Because of the voluntary yet habitual ways we respond to it. A person who’s just received the boot would likely react in the following ways:
1. He may wonder what’s wrong with him that his love interest spurned him.
2. Perhaps he “knows” what’s wrong and gets depressed because he doesn’t believe he can fix it.
3. He laments his loneliness and wonders, now that it’s worsened by the rejection, if he’ll ever be able to find someone who will say yes.
4. He doubts he can go through the pain of trying again to approach a potential sweetie.
5. He believes that he was, once again, fooled.
All these sentiments are common in the days following rejection, and some would argue that it’s normal to feel this way. Well, yes, these thoughts after having just been told “no” are, by today’s standards, natural. But this need not be, at least, it need not be for very long once that initial sting of rejection disappears.
Thought 1 for example, assumes that whatever wrongness there was in his asking is exclusively his burden to carry. But often, it’s the rejecter’s fault. Her moods, circumstances, or hang-ups contributed to the outcome as well. Some rejecters lie about their true reasons for saying “no,” and not always intentionally. They might suggest that it’s the pursuer’s fault. But it isn’t. Not really. The bottom line: We can’t know for sure why she said no, even if she’s specific about what she thinks is wrong with us. So we should not take it personally. We have the option of changing whatever it was she didn’t like, if it is changeable. Or we can realize that not all girls will find that trait offensive.
For thought 2, all of us have traits that turn people off. Perhaps he’s too short or she’s too tall. Maybe he’s handicapped or her skin is too light. We all have qualities that could be improved. And this sometimes brutal society will confirm this. People will often and all too willingly tell us what they think our problems are. But nobody knows us like we know ourselves, and so it’s likely that the rejecter is wrong. If they knew us better, they might not feel as much like rejecting us. So again, the love rejection could be a function of mere timing; another reason not to take it so much to heart.
January 29th, 2011 at 7:32 am
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October 23rd, 2011 at 11:45 am
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