344 - Handling Rejection
What is rejection?
“In the field of mental health care, rejection most frequently refers to the feelings of shame, sadness, or grief people feel when they are not accepted by others.”
GoodTherapy.org
Psychological effects of rejection can include:
Trauma.
Depression.
Physical pain response.
Anxiety and stress.
Abuse.
PARTheory (parental acceptance-rejection theory) suggests that humans evolved a strong need for positive responses from people important to them, starting with parental figures and caregivers. If this need is unmet, according to the theory, people tend to develop a set of socioemotional and cognitive dispositions such as:
Hostility, aggression, passive aggression, or problems managing hostility and aggression.
Dependence or defensive independence.
Impaired self-esteem.
Impaired self-adequacy.
Emotional unresponsiveness.
Emotional instability.
Negative worldview.
How to NOT handle rejection
There are a lot of resources out there about rejection. Some are good, some are bad, but generally, what NOT to do includes behaviors such as:
Getting “revenge,” such as talking shit, being mean, sleeping with their friend, trying to make them jealous.
Picking at the person’s flaws (this is a defense mechanism).
Picking at your own flaws.
Dating or having sex with someone you aren’t interested in as a way to boost your ego.
Considering yourself “cursed,” or reinforcing a particular narrative about yourself as someone who always gets rejected or is unlovable.
Stopping caring about anything.
Alternatively, some healthy ways to cope with rejection include:
Allow yourself to feel it and don’t deny the very real emotions you are feeling.
Practice self-validation and put up boundaries with your inner critic.
Drop the resentment.
See rejection for what it is: another fucking opportunity for growth (AFOG).
Take care of yourself.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory podcast. I'm Jase.
Emily: I'm Emily.
Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.
Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.
Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about rejection. Womp womp.
Emily: Aww.
Jase: During this time, when a lot of people are starting to get back out into the dating scene a little bit more, rejection's bound to show up. It's just a part of life. It's going to happen. In addition to romantic rejection, it can also show up in big and small ways at work, in friendships or other parts of our lives. There are about a gazillion articles out there about how to handle rejection or deal with a breakup.
Today what we're doing is we're going to explore rejection, sift through some of the bullshit and work on finding a better understanding of rejection. How we can actually best cope with it and handle it in our lives.
Emily: I'm amazed we haven't done an episode on those before, quite frankly.
Jase: Yes. The closest is like breakups, right?
Dedeker: We've done breakups and we've done stuff about, I think, people rejecting you or judging you if you're non-monogamous or polyamorous, which overlaps with some of this, maybe a little bit, especially in the dancing.
Jase: We've danced around it.
Dedeker: Yes, we've done a little rejection-y dance. A dance of rejection, one might say.
Jase:
Emily: I wonder what that would look like. Fascinating.
Dedeker: I'm the one who's always been campaigning for, instead of using words, can we interpretive dance our feelings and communication to each other?
Jase: Yes, you have wanted that for a long time.
Dedeker: I would do a dance of rejection. I would rather receive a dance of rejection, honestly.
Emily: That sounds fun. I mean, maybe it was fun.
Jase: Except the part where you're getting rejected by this dance.
Dedeker: Yes, but if it's them-
Emily: It's personal.
Dedeker: -just dancing out their feelings and it doesn't have to be about all the specific ways that I've failed, but I can just get like, hmm, it's not working out for them and I know what this ritual means. Maybe it'd be a little bit easier.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: Interesting. Yes. To start out, what is rejection all about? Right? We'll have to start there. Let's just get some definitions out there. This one comes from goodtherapy.org and they define it as the act of pushing someone or something away. It can be experienced by one's family of origin, a friend or romantic partner and one can also experience rejection from groups or communities, whether those are professional communities or personal communities.
Dedeker: When we're talking about these things, of course, rejection often has attached to it feelings of sadness, of grief, of shame when you're not accepted by your romantic partner or a potential partner or a friend or your family. I'm going to read a direct quote from goodtherapy.org.
"The feeling of rejection is believed to have developed as an evolutionary tool to alert early humans who are at risk of being ostracized from the tribe they belong to. A painful rejection from others in the tribe was likely to encourage an individual to modify any problematic behavior in order to avoid further rejection or ostracism from the tribe. Those who were able to avoid further rejection were more likely to survive, while those who did not find rejection to be particularly painful may not have corrected the offending behavior and making them less likely to survive. In this way, humans may have evolved to experience rejection as painful."
Now, it's really interesting when we put it that way, because I think that the superpower that maybe many of us would like to have and also perhaps the trait that a lot of self-help might be encouraging people to have is this idea of like, oh, don't worry about rejection. Just feel the fear and do it anyway, or there's that book Rejection Proof. Just go in and get rejected and get used to it and you'll be fine.
While there's not necessarily anything inherently wrong with that, it is interesting to think about it from an evolutionary perspective that rejection is painful because it got us to adapt our behavior in ways that would make it more survivable, would make life more survivable, essentially.
Jase: Yes. We've talked before about shame, also. It's like, at least for me, it helps. Maybe this doesn't help anyone else. For me it helps to remember this thing I'm experiencing is not because I'm broken or something's wrong with me, but I'm struggling with this and I'm having a hard time with it because this is a thing that me and thousands of years of my ancestors evolved to help us, to help us be more social.
Unfortunately, it can get out of hand and it can backfire and in our modern day where we're connected with people less personally through online interactions and we're just interacting with larger numbers of people in more superficial ways, I think some of these things that may have been beneficial to us in the past can hurt us. But at least it helps me have a little compassion for myself and how my brain works. To be like, you know what? The fact that I'm feeling this isn't in itself a bad thing. I'm just going to find a way to try to manage it better so that it's not negatively affecting my life.
Emily: Rejection still can be a pretty challenging thing to go through, regardless of whether or not we spend time dissecting it and seeing that it is like a psychological or a physiological response or something that happens over a long period of time. That's an evolutionary response or something to that effect, and there are psychological effects that can happen due to rejection and they can include things like trauma, depression, physical pain response, anxiety and stress and abuse.
I'm interested in this last one. Does that mean to you that abuse happens because you feel rejection and then therefore abuse might occur to somebody else, or that you feel abused because of their reject?
Jase: I'm not really sure how this one fit into this list. We grabbed these from a number of different articles and studies talking about it. I think it's more that rejection can either have similar attributes to abuse, like abuse can be a form of rejection to that person, or potentially, like you were saying, Emily, it could be about them perpetuating that cycle out to other people, but that those feelings of rejection, right, of being told you're not good enough or you're not wanted or you're not desired here. That very much fits in with a lot of emotional abuse tactics and stuff like that, unfortunately.
Emily: Sure. Yes. Now, we wanted to do a quick shout out to Stevie Lang again who was in our last episode, who brought something up called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. This is just a note on neurodivergence. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is common in many people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Fear of rejection may occur so regularly in individuals with ADHD that some refer to it as Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.
Jase: Essentially, what that means is that-- I guess the reason why we're bringing it up is because that's a little bit different than what we're talking about in this episode. That that's this intense physiological response to perceived rejection, not always actual rejection, but it's more that it's a very physical physiological response and so the mechanisms for coping with that well are a little bit different than what we're talking about in this episode.
We will talk a little bit about some things that you can do and point you to some resources in the second half of the episode when we're talking about some techniques, but we did just want to acknowledge that if that is your experience that-- Again, don't take it to mean that this episode, if you're like, "That just seems impossible," that that means there's something wrong with you. It's like, no, there might be different techniques that you will need to take care of yourself in that case.
To start out, we're going to talk about our first study here, because we love talking about studies and this one is about rejection and particularly rejection from people that we deem to be important and how impactful that is to us. This is from a paper called Perceived Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Psychological Adjustment: A Meta-Analysis of Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Studies. This was published in the journal of family and marriage in 2002.
Here's basically the gist of it. This paper presents a meta analysis of 43 different studies around the world on the relationship between perceived parental acceptance or rejection and the psychological development and adjustment of the people who experienced it. These studies were conducted anywhere between 1976 and 2000 and they each used--
Emily: Wow, long study.
Jase: Yes, I know. Well, this is a bunch of different studies, right? This is comparing 43 different studies between those time periods. In them, they used questionnaires as well as parental exception-rejection questionnaires-- Sorry. Personality questionnaires and then parental acceptance-rejection questionnaires to assess how adults reflected on their experiences of being accepted or rejected by their parents. In doing this meta-analysis, the authors were trying to test how universal the parental acceptance-rejection theory is or PARTheory or PAR Theory. I don't quite know how you're supposed to say this because the T is the theory. PARTheory, PART. Maybe just PAR? Just called it PAR?
Dedeker: I think we just do a little slant rhyme here and just call it PART, PARTheory.
Jase: Okay, great.
Emily: Nice.
Jase: Basically, this is a theory of socialization that attempts to predict and explain the impacts consequences and other things of parental acceptance and rejection globally, across different cultures. Is it universal or is it specific to certain cultures or regional differences that could impact the relationship between parental acceptance and rejection and then later psychological adjustment?
Dedeker: According to this theory, the idea is that, of course, human beings have evolved a really strong need for a positive response from the people that are important, which, for most of us starts out as our parents or our caregivers. When we're small, that need includes parental affection, care, comfort, support, nurturance, or just love and acceptance. The theory postulates that if this need is unmet by significant others, humans have a tendency to develop a particular set of what they call socio-emotional and cognitive dispositions such as things like hostility, aggression or passive aggression, problems with managing your own hostility and aggression. Either dependence or defensive independence, an impaired sense of self-esteem, an impaired sense of self-adequacy, emotional unresponsiveness, emotional instability or an overall negative worldview.
Emily: That sounds a lot like attachment theory to me or at least--
Dedeker: Yes, I imagine there's some intersections there.
Emily: Sure. Exactly, because, essentially, so much of attachment theory feels like it is based off of what happens to you in your early life and with your parents and this essentially is saying, maybe some of these things will happen if you are, what, anxiously attached?
Jase: Right. It's just a different framework looking at maybe similar concepts of how our relationship was with our parents or caregivers when we were children.
Dedeker: Potentially, but I feel like a rejection from your parents, it could cause a number of maladaptive attachment strategies, right? I don't think that would necessarily set you up for one more so than the other, but this me just armchair attachment theorizing.
Emily: Yes, that makes sense. I guess I pulled anxiously attached out because that's the one that I tend to be, but yes.
All right. This is a quote from this paper. "Evidence provided in this meta-analysis overwhelmingly supports the postulates in PARTheories, personality sub-theory that perceived parental acceptance-rejection is associated particularly with a specific constellation of personality disposition that collectively reveals one state of psychological adjustment."
In other words, cultural differences, they don't seem to matter all too much when analyzing the relationship between people's perceived parental acceptance or their rejection and their psychological adjustment. It's worldwide. It happens whatever culture, wherever you come from.
Jase: Basically, the conclusion of this, like the point of both these papers that we're going to get to is like, this is real and it's important and it impacts people.
Emily: Essentially, just regardless of where you're from, regardless of what your experiences if you are rejected in some way as a young person, it does matter. It is potentially going to alter the way in which you develop as a human being. That's just something to be aware of and something to think back on, in my opinion, like looking at your life and looking at where you came from and your history.
Jase: I guess I'd say the key takeaway there is to realize just that rejection is important and it matters. It's not just something you can go, "Oh, yes. No, don't worry about it. Rejection is not a big deal." It's like, "No, it is. It is a big deal, actually." But if this is you, this doesn't mean that you're ruined forever, but to be gentle with yourself and be caring for yourself and just realize this is a real thing that has real effects on people.
The next study that we wanted to talk about was an interesting one and this is talking about-- Well, here, I'll just read the title of the study is Rejection May Hurt More Than Feelings, which is the name of the New York Times article. The study that it's talking about actually has a much more boring title, but this is the title from 2011 by psychologists at the University of Michigan. They found that the same areas in the brain that signify physical pain are activated at moments of intense social loss.
For this, they recruited 40 volunteers, so fairly small study, but they recruited 40 people who had recently experienced intense rejection from a breakup. Basically, they had just experienced a bad breakup and they did MRI scans, took pictures of the participant's brain activity after each volunteer viewed pictures of their exes or thought about a specific rejection experience with that person. Later the volunteers were also asked to look at a photo of a friend and think about a recent positive experience they had with that person.
To determine if the emotional pain was comparable to a physical one, these same volunteers also experienced a "hot trial" which simulates the experience of spilling hot coffee on themselves. They didn't actually burn them. I don't know how they do this. I don't know how they did this.
Emily: I spilled hot coffee on myself at work and it is horrifying. It's really bad.
Dedeker: I need to know how they did that.
Emily: Yes. I know, I'm like, "What?"
Jase: We can look at that out later. Try to figure it out, but they somehow simulated this experience to get, what does it look like when you're actually experiencing pain, so that then they could compare those brain images to see what parts of the brain were reacting.
Emily: Wow. This is interesting because I'm fascinated like, have you two ever been broken up with? I feel like both of you are so cool, like probably never.
Jase: Gosh.
Dedeker Of course I have. What are you talking about? I'm a human being and I'm polyamorous, which means that just by sheer numbers, I'm willingly exposing myself to a lot more rejection than some of those low stakes, you know, just kind of like first date as well as the more ongoing relationship kind of level. Of course I've been broken up with.
Emily: Sure.
Jase: Absolutely.
Emily: Yes, I suppose. Okay. Yes. I don't know if--
Dedeker: You've been broken up with, right?
Emily: Yes. That's what I mean. That's what I'm saying. I'm self-flagellating and saying, yes, I have absolutely been broken up with, but no, it just-- I recall talking about it a lot when that happened to like my mom and a bunch of people around me and my mom eventually was just like, "Just stop talking about it. Just stop it." Which I do get, but reading these studies, I feel like I'm validated here by my experience of like, this really blew and it was awful and it felt like it was out of nowhere.
Just I'm thinking of one particular breakup, so I don't know. That's fascinating and the pain receptors because it does feel like very physically painful sometimes in those moments and that that can in essence feel the same thing. Like your brain is firing off similar things.
Dedeker: Yes. Well, here's a direct quote from that study. "Bad breakups and hot coffee elicited a similar response in the brain, at least as measured by the FMRI machines." Previous research had shown that while social rejection hurt, it did not activate parts of the brain associated with physical distress, but this team found that when the emotional pain was awful enough, those parts of the brain were affected as well and an equal part.
According to the authors, the emotional pain simulated in previous experiments wasn't powerful enough to elicit a true-to-life response, so there's a certain amount of threshold here where our social rejection is painful, painful, painful, painful and then it gets painful enough that our physical pain receptors start to fire.
Emily: I wonder if it has to be in the moment or, I don't know, something like really intense in the moment. If it's just a rejection by someone that is on the internet, maybe, and you're like, well-- I don't know.
Dedeker: I'm going to whip out something from my SE training. Something that they say all the time about trauma, in particular, is that trauma is not in the event, it's in how your nervous system reacts to the event. What that means is something that traumatized you may not necessarily traumatize somebody else and vice versa, and I imagine it's probably the same with rejection here is that someone rejecting you, a stranger rejecting you on the internet, to someone, they may brush that off very easily and to someone else, it could be intense enough pain that it's the hot coffee response. I imagine that--
Emily: Even in different moments to the same person.
Dedeker: Exactly. Yes. Imagine that there's not necessarily a universal scale of which rejection or which types of social rejection are worse. It's probably just dependent on the individual.
Jase: Absolutely, and it goes back to something I think that we keep coming back to on this show, which is just to remember that each person and each experience is different and that just because someone else had a certain experience and is like, "Oh, yes, whatever, no big deal for me," it could be a big deal for you and that doesn't mean something's wrong with either of you and vice versa.
And, I guess, to get super Buddhist about it too, you're never the same person in two different moments in time. The next millisecond, you're now a new instance so you're a different person than you are a millisecond ago. If you think about that over days and years, that yes we are constantly different. I guess just acknowledging that, that this is very different for different people and different experiences and it's real serious stuff that has significant effects on us, even down to feeling physical pain.
Now we want to go on to talk about what not to do to cope with rejection and some things that you should do that might be helpful for you when coping with rejection. First, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some sponsors for this show and some ways that you can support this. If this content is stuff that's valuable to you and is helping you, please consider checking out our sponsors or checking out our Patreon so that you can help keep this show coming to everyone out there for free.
Emily: We are back. We've established that rejection is a real thing. It can have very serious emotional impacts on us. I definitely know from experience it had serious emotional impacts on me. I'm sure all of you can relate to that. Because of that, and not surprisingly, there's a lot of different pieces of advice out there on how to cope with rejection, but many of them are not particularly great.
Let's start with some commonly seen pieces of advice that are actually more likely to harm you and others than to help you. We're going to talk about quite a few of them and spend a little bit of time on each of them. The first one, oh boy. This is like, what many and many Dirty Harry movies are about and that's getting revenge or doing things like--
Jase: For rejection?
Emily: I mean, maybe not rejection. You rejected this person by like, I don't know. Well, or like Fistful of Dollars. I haven't seen these movies, but I'm throwing it out. I've heard of.
Emily: Revenge, clearly there's a very strong link in your mind between revenge and Clint Eastwood.
Jase: Yes, seriously.
Emily: I don't know. That was like this whole thing, right?
Jase: I think more likely, where we see revenge show up in media would be on shows that deal with relationships, right?
Emily: Sure.
Jase: I think Sex and the City or something like that, where it's like, oh, that whole like, "Oh, yes. You know how you can get over him is to sleep with his friend or to do this thing to make him so jealous," or some kind of trying to get revenge, right? As a way of, it can power in yourself, I guess is what it's going for.
Emily: Sure. I'm watching the office, and yes, a lot of people do stuff like that. Like, I'm going to get back by doing the rebound, or whatever, showing up and looking so hot, which is fine but there are more, I guess, angry worse ways of getting revenge that are probably what we shouldn't be going towards.
Dedeker: Yes, that is definitely more on the Clint Eastwood end of the spectrum.
Emily: There you go.
Dedeker: To bring it back from that side of the spectrum, there's, I think, a couple of years ago, the whole concept of the revenge body was a thing of if you've been dumped or rejected in some way, you deal with that rejection by going out and getting super hot so that they feel so sad that they rejected you in the first place.
Jase: I think a lot of the toxic ways we see this show-up, though, is more just like talking shit on social media. It's like posting bad things about this person who broke up with you or who didn't want to go out with you, or--
Emily: Or talking to their friends or other potential people in your circle about how shitty they are. Maybe they were, but maybe they just rejected you.
Jase: I think we see this a lot, too. I think women on dating apps experience this a lot. Even with that first like, "Oh, no, I'm not interested." "Oh, you bet you're such a terrible person bla, bla, bla, bla, bla." That's that reaction. That's an instant over a very small rejection. This also happens on larger scales too, and it's not helpful. It doesn't help them get over it and it certainly doesn't help the person you're doing this to or anyone else. This is bad advice. Don't give people this advice, please.
Emily: Also, the next one is picking at the person's flaws. I think that this is very much a thing that happens when you were broken up with and you feel like, "Well, I'm better off without this person." Which maybe you are. I think again, if it's an outward reaction, like I'm going to tell everybody else about this person's flaws and talk about how shitty they are, that perhaps that's not helpful. Ultimately, maybe not helpful like you getting over it either.
Jase: I think that's more what this is about is even just for yourself. That trying to convince yourself that that person wasn't any good might seem like-- trying to find all the things wrong with them might seem like that's somehow helpful or validating for you. Again, it's putting all of this focus on needing to define yourself by them, either way.
It's not actually getting at the problem here. It's not actually getting at healing your pain or processing how you're feeling. It's focusing on this almost like you're trying to do this mental arithmetic of like, "Oh, if I can come up with the equation for how they're bad enough, then I will feel better." That's just not how our brains work. That's just not how it works.
Emily: Another one on the opposite end of that and something I know well is picking at your own flaws and talking about, "Well, I didn't deserve this person," et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes that is really not helpful and ultimately can hinder the healing process, I think, for sure.
Dedeker: I think I see this happen a lot and I've definitely done this a lot if I've been rejected and I don't exactly know 100% why. Like if someone ghosts you or if someone says no to you or rejects you in some way without giving what feels to me like a sufficient explanation. Not that you're entitled to an explanation, but I do think our brains have this tendency to want to complete things and want to complete the puzzle-
Emily: Want to know.
Dedeker: -and want to know, want to find the answer and so you can go through the full gamut of this. You can go from picking them apart to picking yourself apart. All of this intense need to be like, I need to find the reason. I need to find the thing to pin it on so that my brain can feel like we've completed the sentence, we've completed the puzzle.
Jase: To think about this also from the point of view of someone giving advice to someone. Generally, we're not going to give the advice of like, you should pick apart your own flaws to try to find out what's wrong with you. We do often give, in trying to support someone who is grieving a rejection or a breakup, of trying to pick apart the person that they're no longer in a relationship with of trying to come up with like, "Oh, well, yes, I didn't like this thing about them," or, "I didn't like that thing." Again, it's like, I know you're trying to be helpful, but that's not ultimately going to help them get over it. It might actually make it worse because their mind is going to struggle with trying to reconcile that instead of focusing on their own process of getting through it.
Dedeker: Another maladaptive coping mechanism for rejection is choosing to date or hook up with or have sex with someone who maybe you're not particularly interested in but you know they're interested in you as a way of boosting your ego. Let's be fair that, of course, we just said rejection is like burning yourself with hot coffee. There is an injury here, maybe not a permanent injury, but it is an injury.
Sometimes when we're in the depth of the hot coffee sensation, it's literally anything to stop it from feeling like hot coffee. Literally anything. If that means maybe making some less than ethical choices or making some selfish choices just to be able to get a little bit of relief, that's sometimes that's how we make, I guess, not kind decisions regarding who you relate to and who we have sex with. I say this being 100% I've done this in the past.
Emily: Oh really?
Dedeker: Have you not? Am I the weird kind of person?
Emily: No, I have. I totally have slept with an ex after that person broke up with me. It was fun.
Dedeker: I have done that one. That's a whole other. That's a whole maladaptive coping mechanism.
Emily: That was nice.
Dedeker: Of course I've done that.
Emily: It's slash also not great.
Jase: Also, in this case, we're passing along some feelings of projection to that person when you don't want to keep being in a relationship. That's not making the world a better place.
Emily: This is not to say that you can't have a rebound, you can't go out and enjoy pleasure or hooking up with somebody after you've been rejected. By all means, go and do that. I think this is referring more to when maybe we're taking advantage of somebody else for the sake of making ourselves feel good.
Another coping mechanism could be considering yourself cursed. Now, what we mean by this is letting this rejection feed into a particular narrative that you have about yourself as, "Oh, I always get rejected. I'm unlovable. I'm undesirable. I'm not attractive enough. No one's ever going to love me because I am X, Y, Z. No one's ever going to want to connect to me because I'm not monogamous or because I like this particular kink, or because I'm into this particular type of person like I'm always going to be rejected."
I don't know why our brains do this. Maybe this is part of the whole wanting to complete it, wanting to make sure it fits into the pattern, wanting it to make the threads all aligned?
Jase: You want a reason.
Dedeker: Yes, wanting a reason. Right? Okay, well, the reason is because I'm just someone who's not lovable. I'm someone who's not dateable, therefore it makes sense why I'd be rejected. It's kind of a crappy conclusion to come to, but I can see how that satisfies that little bit of an itch that our brains can have for wanting it all to just make sense for once.
Another one. This is one that I feel like this is sometimes my go-to.
Emily: Really?
Dedeker: Yes, which is just stop caring about anything and not in a cool, very chilled out, enlightened way. I think, again, in a bad and unhealthy way. I know for myself when I've been rejected in either big ways or in small ways, whether that's a big, major painful breakup or just like a partner who rejected a bid, let's say.
If it's painful enough for me, it will very much activate, i guess, what I would call part of my avoidant attachment strategy of like, "Oh my God, then I'm never going to ask them for anything again. I'm never going to date anyone again. I'm never going to let myself get hurt like this again. I'm never going to connect to someone like this again. I'm just going to stop caring." That's very much, it's in my arsenal. It's in my little tool books of bad tools. Bad, bad tools.
Jase: Yes, it's definitely one that I've gone to before as well of just-- I think of it almost like a shutting down of like, "Oh, well it's not worth it. It's just, I got to protect myself. That matters most," and just cut myself off from caring about anything. Not even just other relationships or something, but just like everything. Just trying to be numb, I guess. That might sound like, well, yes, okay. We don't want to do that. That sounds bad but no one would give that advice, right?
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: In researching this episode, Keyanah came across an article by relationship coach, Marc Summers. I think this will probably sound, sadly, not unfamiliar to a lot of people. "It's important to understand that giving too much of a shit about what she's doing and why she's doing it only robs you of your power, and women are crazy about the guys who care the least. She doesn't care about the guy buying flowers, dressing up and treating her like a princess. She cares about the guy who doesn't show up on time, doesn't buy her shit and doesn't treat her special at all. It makes no sense, but that's the way it is, sucks.
Thank you. Misogyny and bullshit aside, I think that it comes from that place of fear and of pain and unfortunately in this very unhealthy, not helpful way, but I think so much of that pick-up-artisty asshole guy bullshit, comes from this really maladaptive way of dealing with the pain of rejection. It sucks that this is where we go, but I guess I just wanted to bring that up as like an evidence of, no, this very much is a way that people cope with it and even tell other people to cope with it, thinking that this is so brilliant.
Emily: People who call themselves relationship coaches.
Dedeker: I also don't think that this is necessarily even something that's gender specific. I think this is the particular flavor that gets packaged to a lot of straight guys, but there's a slightly different flavor that I think gets packaged to a lot of straight women along the same lines, which is a little bit-- Well, it's the same thing. It's a little bit of like, "Oh, you got to play like the boys play and just fuck who you want-
Jase: Not give a shit.
Dedeker: -be selfish. Don't give a shit, don't text him back, make him wait." There is still a little bit of that, let's protect ourselves in very harsh ways that are not just harsh on other people, but harsh on ourselves as well.
Jase: Right. Yes, not even helpful to ourselves. Yes, exactly.
Emily: All right. Let's talk about good stuff. Let's talk about healthy ways to cope with rejections. From various articles, we've put together a list of some of the most effective ways to process rejection in a healthier manner. Better than just like not giving a shit and going all Clint Eastwood.
Jase: Don't do that, do this instead.
Dedeker: Do I get to wear a cool poncho at the very least?
Emily: I hope so. We’ll see. Okay. Number one, allow yourself to feel it. Don't deny the very real emotions you're having. You're feeling shit. Yes, it happens and allow yourself to go through it. This comes up a lot and most people understand it, but you should try to feel your emotions without adding a story to it if you can, if that's possible. That's difficult because we all come to things with our own cognitive biases, with our own interpretation of what occurred, but if you can just exist in the emotional life of what's happening, I think that's an ideal place to start. It's this important distinction between experiencing your feelings and then wallowing in a bunch of misery and a bunch of unhappiness.
Dedeker: Yes, I just wanted to share. I actually had some personal experience with this the other day because I got rejected for that Shakespeare audition.
Emily: Oh. I forgot about that, Dedeker. Sorry.
Dedeker: No, it's okay. I finally got the email where they were just like, "Yes, sorry." I don't know, something like that, "Please apply--" The general casting director, a polite no.
Emily: The fact that they even rejected you at all, as opposed to just like ghosting you, good job.
Dedeker: That's the thing. I do have a big body of experience in acting. You deal with rejection all the time, and to a certain extent, you start to get used to it and you start to almost expect it sometimes or sometimes you even think it's lucky that they even let you know. My first impulse was to be from my more active acting days of just like, "Okay, well that's a bummer, but whatever. I'm just going to move on. Distract myself, focus on other things."
But then I was like, "You know what, actually, I'm going to let myself sit here and actually feel it," and it wasn't a huge rejection. It was pretty low stakes, but I was like, "I'm going to like close my laptop and just sit there and just let myself actually feel what I'm feeling." I did. I took three minutes just to feel the feelings go through and it didn't produce anything necessarily. It's not like I started crying or suddenly felt really happy or whatever.
I just like felt it and then was able to move on in a way that, I don't know, I think was better, that felt better than it ever had back in my acting days. I think there was something about that, but I think there's something about the stuff that we do to try to get away from feeling it. The resistance to the pain makes the pain much more intense, and even with something like this where I wouldn't call it a very highly painful situation.
I don't know, it felt nice to experience that with what I felt was like a small rejection. I'm curious to experiment with that more with bigger rejections. I think I would actually recommend that to people as well of maybe try just feeling it with small stuff at first and just see what you learn about yourself and what happens in your body and how your emotions move through.
Emily: I love that.
Jase: I have to get practice with feeling it without needing to amp it back up. It's not like, "Oh yes, I'm going to really wallow in how bad I feel or how much this means I suck," or whatever. It's just like, just feel what you're feeling without adding anything to it and just let that happen. It's easier said than done. I think that's a really great idea of starting with smaller things like that.
Emily: Yes. Okay. This is a quote from Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön, which is actually quoting from another book. One of Jason, my favorites in My Stroke of Insight by the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. This is a book about her recovery from a massive stroke. Taylor explains this physiological mechanism behind emotion and emotion like anger that an automatic response lasts just 90 seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that's all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.
I think we talk a about that a lot on this show that like so many emotions, and also the time that it takes to let an emotion go, maybe, or let a feeling go. It doesn't take that long. If you allow yourself to really fully experience it as opposed to maybe trying to ramp it back up or trying to talk to yourself about it over and over and over again. I think there's something like really beautiful to be said for that, and so many of us just don't allow ourselves to process.
Dedeker: Also to clarify, I don't think we're ever saying, "Oh yes, just wait 90 seconds and then you'll feel great and you'll be able to let it go and everything will be fixed," but there is something about just letting your body let it go and feel it and start to come down, back into homeostasis after being in a survival mode where you may still feel anger and feel angry about the thing that happened, but it's not completely subsuming you and making you lose control of how you're communicating.
Jase: Yes. Some ideas for just how to do that. Even if you're only able to do it for a few seconds, and then you go back into spiraling and thinking about it, even just getting used to taking just a couple seconds. Take a moment to just say like, "Where do I feel this in my body? Does it stay the same? Does it move around? Does it feel different? Does it have a color or a texture? Or just ask yourself questions that's about the experience rather than about the story that you're putting on the experience. Even if you can just do that for a few seconds, it can be really helpful in the long run of getting you out of that cycle, just breaking that up a little bit.
We did want to also take a moment here to talk again about rejection sensitive dysphoria that we mentioned at the beginning of the episode. Just something to be aware of here is that, if you're someone who experiences that, that it's a much more heightened physiological overstimulation, essentially, at a perceived rejection that maybe hasn't even actually happened.
So in this case, it's important that before you try to do any thinking through it or processing through it, that you first regulate yourself and get your body back into regulation. Depending on how you experience it, that may be a long process or it may be a quicker one, but an example of something that might be helpful is to look into DBT, which stands for dialectical behavior therapy.
That's something that Stevie recommended as a really good resource for that. It's something that's been shown in a lot of studies to be really helpful for personally deescalating, but also other self-soothing techniques and things like that can be useful. Just, again, to keep that in mind of essentially this step is, take care of yourself first. Whether that means just sitting and feeling it or more proactively deescalating your physiological response.
Dedeker: Next strategy that we can recommend is to practice self validation. This is otherwise known as putting up some boundaries with your inner critic. Here's a quote from a medium article by Manj Bahra called A Complete Guide to Letting Go of Romantic Rejection. "It's easy to allow a negative outcome to create false beliefs about ourselves like we're unworthy or unlovable. When you let the result dictate your sense of self you unconsciously seek evidence that proves your belief. Every situation becomes an opportunity to find more proof that you are hopeless in relationships. This is nothing more than cognitive bias at work. Instead of looking at the facts, we search for confirmation of our limiting beliefs."
I also, for something completely unrelated, was doing research on neural pathways and rewiring our brains and neuroplasticity and things like that and this reminds me of what's come up a lot in the research that I've been doing is this idea that, when we want to shift a neural pathway, essentially there's a competitive nature to our wiring. So what that means is it's not just about stopping a particular inner story or narrative. It's also about creating a new neural pathway as well. About putting in also that practice of self validation at the same time, in addition to trying to limit the self critique that's going on.
Jase: Yes. In the audio book, The Worthy Project, which I just listened to recently, she talked about this inner critic that you have, that we all have, right? That inner voice that's telling us we're not enough or we're not living up to what we should be. She talks about this idea of having boundaries with that inner voice and I was like, wow, I love that idea of--
Again, it's a boundary totally inside yourself, something that you get to enforce yourself, but it's when that voice comes up and says those things, even if you agree with what that voice is saying to know, "Wait, hold on. That's that inner critic voice. I'm gonna put up this boundary and say, no, hold on. That's not the talk that we're going to have right now, internal voice," and instead to replace it-- again, the same idea of replacing it with some other pathway is take a moment to tell yourself, "one true thing." Some examples that she gave in this case was tell yourself one true thing of like, I want to be loved or I care a lot about people or something like that.
Try to find something that is true. That you're like, yes, this is actually a true thing to tell yourself that not just buying into those stories about what you should or shouldn't do as a good example. Rather than the opposite of like, "No, I'm great. Everyone should love me and that person's an idiot." It's just saying, no, no, no. Just go for like, what's a true more neutral, just true thing. I care about people or I want to be loved or, or my relationships are important to me or just something like that that's true for you.
Dedeker: Yes. I like the idea of it. Just finding the one little thing, right? It makes it so much simpler because especially when you're in throws of all the emotions that a rejection can come up, it can be really hard to try to think about all the positive things, all the validating things, all the things that I should be grateful for and just finding that one little bit of low-hanging fruit for yourself.
Next, drop the resentment. Some of these negative coping strategies that we talked about earlier involve belittling the other person, putting down the person who rejected you. Either doing that publicly or to your friends or just privately to yourself. Part of that can come from feeling entitled to somebody else's time, to somebody else's acceptance, to somebody else's affection or for their feelings. After we've begun processing our own feelings of hurt, we can also recognize that we didn't necessarily lose something that was ours, because maybe we didn't own their time, own their feelings in the first place.
They just made a different decision for themselves based on a zillion different factors, only a fraction of which we can actually know. Again, our culture has this really bad habit of treating certain feelings like love or really strong NRE as being this magical thing. It's something that's meant to be or its fate and those beliefs can be dangerous for our own self worth when we don't get those things.
When we think that we are about to get those things and then it gets "taken away", it can lead us to be ungrateful for the things that we do receive. It can lead us to do hurtful things to the people that we actually care about. Another part of this process is, I think, really examining, were there things I felt like I owned that were then taken away from me? Were there things that I felt like I was entitled to that then this person blocked me from receiving? And coming to terms with that and finding ways to let that go.
Emily: That's a real fricking truth right there because regardless of whether or not you've been in a relationship with someone for 10 years or 10 days, you don't own them or their time. Even if you are married to them or whatever, financially entwined, you don't own them. So I think that's a really interesting reframing of ideas around feeling as though, oh, well, I'm entitled to this or I'm entitled to that person and how dare they decide to leave me.
Jase: I think this always really resonates with me of that idea of thinking about like fate or that something's meant to be. That's something that's led me to hurt myself a lot and to hurt other people by believing that stuff. It's fed to us constantly from the time that we're very young, these ideas that it's magical and it's meant to be, because then if it doesn't work, you're like justified in either fighting for it when it shouldn't be fought for or really beating yourself up of like, I ruined it, this was my one chance.
We just got to stop telling people those things and stop treating it that way. This was when I always feel like I mentioned this all the time because it's just, that's when I really took me a very long time to get over that way of thinking.
Emily: Another one is, see rejection for what it is, another fucking opportunity for growth.
Dedeker: Love that.
Emily: Yes. After we've taken all this time to respect our feelings, we've worked to remove the inner critic cycle, we're not putting meaning into things that don't deserve it, we can ask ourselves these questions, what opportunities does this open up? They're always like-- what is it? When God closes a door, a window opens or something like that?
I don't know. I'm not religious.
Anyways, or what other positive places could I be putting my energy into right now? I love that, that's great. What could be considered good about this? Maybe if you do tell yourself like, wow, maybe there were a couple of red flags there, shit. Perhaps this is a good thing for me that this didn't work out. So even if you're only able to halfheartedly identify some potential positives and you don't really believe them, that's okay.
It's still important to identify them so that you're helping to feed the parts of your mind that are coping and moving in a positive direction, because yes, again, even small relationships, even constellations or things that end quickly, they still are opportunities for growth because every moment is an opportunity for growth. I love that, that's a really good one.
Jase: Yes. I love that idea. That's like, even if you can only half-ass answers to these questions, that's still a step in the right direction. Sometimes that's all it takes to start turning that around for yourself.
The last of our five things to do for coping with rejection is just to take care of yourself. I know we started with that, of taking care of yourself in processing the feelings and not perpetuating those stories, but lastly, it's just take care of yourself, kind of bigger picture too. Practice whatever self-care works best for you. Spend time with people who care about you. Work on developing other areas of your life.
Explore your hobbies or your interests or start working on finding some hobbies or interests if you let that fall to the wayside during this relationship. Read a book, treat your to stuff you don't-- Maybe go for walks that you haven't gone on in a long time. Right? Look for those things. What are some things I can be doing that I do get joy out of that maybe I haven't been doing to take care of myself either while coping with this rejection or while I was in that relationship? Or just that I haven't been doing in my life in general, whatever it is. Look for some of those things and take care of yourself, treat yourself.
Emily: Exactly.
Jase: All right, this has been great. I feel like this is stuff I wish I could travel back in time and tell myself many times in the past and hopefully I'm able to take into the future. Thank you so much for joining us. For our bonus, for patrons, we're going to dive into a little bit more about how to support a partner or a friend who is dealing with rejection. Looking at some of these from the side of the supporter rather than just the person going through it yourself. We hope you join us for that.