"I regret to inform you..."
Taking rejection in stride
Hi (No) Wonder-ers,
We as a society glorify risk-taking, especially for men.
There isn’t a thing wrong with this. At least there wouldn’t be if we did a better job of mentally preparing men for the ever-present possibility of rejection. Men who are emotionally unprepared to handle rejection constructively should not be “shooting their shot” in the first place. And before you point it out: of course people of all genders experience rejection. But it’s primarily men who get violently, sometimes murderously, angry about it. It’s the gist of every Dateline ever aired. It’s also a reason why many women would rather encounter a bear than a man alone in the woods.
Thus the inability to handle rejection in a calm, constructive manner amounts to a public health hazard. People, especially women, need to be able to say “no” without fearing violent retribution. And people, especially men, need to accept “no” with aplomb.
Consent matters. People have free will. No one is owed my attention any more than I am owed theirs. “No” is a complete sentence. (Just don’t ask me to diagram it!)
Understanding rejection, and why it stings, can help us address it. Back in the day when we were hunting woolly mammoths and whatnot, we faced ever-present existential threats from hunger, nature, and other apex predators. Being part of an in-group helped ensure our safety in the face of these existential threats; conversely, being ostracized from an in-group left us vulnerable to these existential threats. Hence the resultant sensory unpleasantness and the “fight, flight, or freeze” response to rejection, even though rejection no longer increases our odds of getting mauled by saber-tooth tigers. Our visceral, human response to rejection is a primitive one that has outlived the practical purpose it once served. This is all the more pronounced in anyone with a traumatic childhood abandonment experience, and/or rejection dysphoria. The knowledge that our body’s human rejection response is a primitive solution to a modern problem can help us mindfully sit with it – acknowledging it for what it is, without engaging or responding to it. If we don’t immediately respond to our body’s rejection response, this leaves room for our cognitive, rational selves to seek objective data points and incorporate those into more constructive thoughts and actions.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Or CBT… which I’m told can also stand for other things!) is an evidence-based psychosocial intervention focusing on the interplay between our emotions, thoughts, and actions. When patients notice adverse changes of emotion and thought, they take objective note of the event leading up to it and articulate their immediate automatic thought and its accompanying emotion. Then the patient identifies any cognitive distortions causing a discrepancy between the patient’s thought and the objective reality, thereby exacerbating the adverse thought and accompanying emotion. Patients are then challenged to use objective observations to formulate a more helpful alternative thought that causes a less weighty emotion, which in turn can help improve our actions. Thus, the essence of CBT is identifying cognitive distortions and addressing them to help our thoughts, feelings, and actions serve us better. After all, we don’t have to believe everything we think… especially if those thoughts are inaccurate and unhelpful.
Once we’ve explained the human physiology of the rejection response, that frees us up to collect objective data about our rejection experiences. These data, in turn, can inform our response to make it more helpful and relevant. Such observations might include:
-“I am not entitled to another person’s attention.”
-“This experience has taken nothing from me that was mine to begin with.”
-“This is one person’s decision based on limited information about me, so it can’t fully define my worth as a person or how the world’s 8 billion other people would have responded.”
-“The rejection probably had less to do with me than it did with her wanting to eat her $1.50 Costco hot dog in peace.”
All this said, an ounce of rejection prevention is a pound of rejection cure. A little bit of room-reading and savoir faire can go a long way in setting ourselves up for success, though this is admittedly much easier said than done espcially for people with neurodivergence. This, in turn, can help us build a favorable self-worth narrative. If your state, other people’s state, the situational context, or any combination of the three are unfavorable, any offer you make is much less likely to be given due consideration. Just ask that OR sales rep who gave me his high-pressure sales pitch while I was concentrating on the critical part of a surgery.
If we mindfully acknowledge the body’s rejection response for what it is, and use concrete observable data to refute our rejection-related cognitive distortions, this can help us get to that Holy Grail of Rejection: taking rejection just personally enough to use it as a self-improvement opportunity, but not so personally that it completely tanks our self-image.
Wishing you the best of luck on your future endeavors,
Merrit
Jeremy Nicholson M.S.W., Ph.D.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, Rejection Sensitive
Jyothsna S Bhat Psy.D.