Overcoming Feelings of Rejection

The closest thing to the heart is acceptance – finding a place on the earth the soul calls home.  And we will strive for our way there.  Our instincts are unrelenting.

Loneliness, disappointment, betrayal, chastening, anxiety, depression, grief (of sorts) and a myriad of other disorders of the soul are often the products of rejection.

Rejection is a feeling.  It’s innately and intensely personal.

Not far from rejection is the close cousin, resignation... this is an accepted variety of helpless hopelessness.  It’s a few down the road from rejection—sadly, it expects nothing less.  Resignation is a realistic sort of pessimism, but it works against us.

It’s painful even reading about these two.

Acknowledging and Moving On

We will all feel rejected.  Never do we really get completely over being rejected, no matter how ‘mature’ we get.  People are perhaps on the other end of these feelings of ours, but at the end of the day they’re still our feelings.

So, if we accept we’ll feel rejected it can help us understand that not always does this correlate with actual rejection—many times the person or situation we feel we’ve been rejected by is completely unaware of it.  Like unforgiveness, there’s little sense to retaining our feelings of rejection.

Resignation is even more insidious.  We hardly even notice that we’ll almost expect rejection in certain situations—particularly those we’ve been hurt in before.  Off goes the triggering event and we’re right back there, resigned to rejection, in a flash. It’s a form of self-protection, so the sting of rejection is numbed before it lances our hearts.

Acknowledgement is so powerful.  It’s genuinely the first step in truly moving on.

Flipping the Coin

Could it be that we reject others?  Could it be that the first time we feel ultimately empowered over our rejection is when we understand—and no less, see—others’ rejection, particularly as it occurs, when we reject people?  It’s a different angle isn’t it?

We’ll hardly ever contemplate how the other person feels at the hand of our rejection.  And suddenly when we do this we’re aberrantly empathetic.

Like we address any spiritual problem, we need to focus on other people and less on ourselves.  God has this way about life: the less we think of ourselves and our problems the less we’ll worry about them. It’s the larger perspective we’re to prefer.

The only disclaimer to the focus on others is our honesty with ourselves.  It is too easy to reject (deny) our (feelings of) rejection, never doing anything about them, pretending it never happened. (We can’t hide that it happened.)

Love Makes the World Go Around

Acceptance and rejection lead us inevitably to the cause of our undying need: love.

Love is what we all pine for and we need it every day, in all manner of forms; we’re never ‘cured’ of our need for love.

Given this knowledge, and how keenly rejection hurts us, the key question is, “Am I prepared to be another’s security by loving them in advance of them loving me?”

Somehow when we do this God’s love comes in and gives us surety beyond what any human love could give.  Rejection’s power is transformed. Rather than it being a source of hurt, it’s made palpably useful.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.