“Our sorrows and wounds are only healed, when we touch them with compassion and it is the softest people who are the strongest, so on we go…”
Human beings have a fundamental need to connect with others. Societal belonging and support are a critical part of our happiness and well-being and is a necessary aspect for our continuous physical health. Rejection causes emotional pain, damages our mood and our self-esteem. It also has the potential to bring out feelings of anger and aggression as it destabilizes our need to belong. The desire for social connection is among the most basic of human motivations and is so strong, that it crosses all people in all cultures with an innate need to form and maintain interpersonal relationships.
When asking the question: Why does rejection hurt so much? The answer quite simply is: Because our brains are wired to respond that way.
A study in the University of Columbia – funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Drug Abuse – by University of Michigan’s Social Psychologist, Ethan Kross together with his colleague Marc Berman and Columbia University’s Walter Mischel and Edward Smith, affiliates of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, determined that physical pain and intense feelings of social rejection hurt in the same way.
For the study, the researchers recruited 40 people and asked them to recall a recent unwanted romantic break-up that they had experienced in the last six months. Each participant completed two tasks in the study. One task related to their feelings of rejection and the other to the sensations of physical pain. While performing the tasks, the participants were undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).
The results of the study found that powerfully inducing feelings of societal rejection activated regions of the brain that are involved in physical pain sensations, something that is rarely activated in neuroimaging studies of emotion. They concluded that the findings were consistent with the idea that the experience of social rejection represented a distinct emotional experience that is uniquely associated with physical pain.
So why are our brains wired this way? Evolutionary psychologists believe it all started when hunter gatherers lived in tribes. Since they could not survive alone, being separated from their pack or trying to go their own way was basically a death sentence. As a result, they developed some sort of early warning system that alerted them when they were in danger of being “kicked off the island” by their tribesmen. That was rejection. In turn this encouraged them to change their behaviour and remain on the island.
Trauma Bonds & Childhood Rejection
Rejection trauma in childhood leads to low self-esteem and self-doubt which creates difficulties in adult relationships if not properly understood. Young children don’t have the perspective or the maturity to understand that rejection has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the adult.
Parental rejection is the absence or a significant withdrawal of warmth, care, nurturing, love and affection by parents to a young child. It can be experienced by four main types of parenting styles:
- Cold and unaffectionate
- Hostile and aggressive
- Indifferent and neglecting
- Physical distance and the absence of closeness
Parental Rejection Can Take The Form Of Physical Or Emotional Rejection, Including:
- A lack of parental warmth and caregiving
- Scolding, belittling, cursing, shaming, sarcasm, mocking or disparaging
- Hitting, beating and throwing things on a regular basis
- Making the child feel unloved, inadequate or unwanted either through actions or words
- Favouring one child over another
The perception of being rejected by parents is significantly painful and has the potential to impact a child’s psychological and social development. There is no single major reason for parents to reject their children, but there are risk factors and when present, are more likely to result in parental or maternal rejection, these include:
- Parents with less education
- Low family socioeconomic status
- Fathers tend to be more rejecting than mothers
- Male adolescents are more likely to be rejected than female adolescents
Ian Fraser Brockington, a British psychiatrist, who founded the Section on Women’s Mental Health, in the World Psychiatric Association, published a paper on the importance of perinatal psychiatry research and practice in recent times.
The paper recognized mother-infant relationship disorders as specific conditions to be diagnosed by psychiatrists and general practitioners alike. Brockington stated that there is no single entity as to the reasons for disorders and that it is quite often a group of overlapping clinical states, with various morbid elements within the relationship between mother and infant. These include:
- A distressing lack of maternal feeling
- Irritability
- Hostility and aggressive impulses
- Pathological ideas and outright rejection
The disorders were quite common in mothers who were referred for psychiatric help and were present in roughly 22% of post-partum referrals and 29% of mothers diagnosed with post-natal depression. It was also concluded that there were three different manifestations of bonding disorders including:
- Mild disorders which included a delay, ambivalence or loss in maternal response
- Pathological anger, mild, moderate or even severe
- Rejection, either threatened or established
The first presentation of a bonding disorder is when a mother experiences delay or loss of a maternal emotional response, she may express disappointment about her feelings towards her infant. She may even consider that the baby is not hers.
The second presentation is when a mother experiences pathological anger towards the infant, she may have a feeling of anger, which is controlled with difficulty, or she may have an impulse to harm the child in some way.
The third presentation of a bonding disorder is the outright rejection of the infant, where a mother can express strong negative feelings of dislike about the child, including hatred and regret that the child was born.
The effects of rejection experienced during childhood can have both short-term and long-term impacts on the psychological adjustment of children and the findings are consistent across cultures, ethnicity, gender and geographical locations. The trauma experienced by the children has the potential for them to develop the following personality dispositions including:
- Low self-esteem and a sense of not feeling good enough
- Negative self-adequacy
- Anger, hostility and aggression
- Emotional instability
- Emotional unresponsiveness
- People pleasing
- Trust issues
- Negative view of the world
- Dependence or a form of defensive independence
Perceived parental rejection is also related to a range of childhood behavioural issues including conduct disorders and delinquency. Adolescent children may even engage in drug use, binge drinking and will eventually have trouble forming close bonds in adult relationships. The scars for a child living for so many years feeling unloved can impact nearly every area of their life, lasting all the way up into adulthood. If a child has not felt secure or confident that they were loved unconditionally it can lead to a constant fear of abandonment in adult relationships.
A disorganised/disoriented attachment style, which would stem from a fearful relationship where there could be maternal rejection, would often be the result of a childhood trauma. The child would have lived a chaotic unpredictable lifestyle, where the mother/primary caregiver would have failed to give the child the security necessary, resulting in distress, fearfulness and the lack of ability to trust others. Connection in adult romantic relationships would be difficult because they would have a desire for closeness while at the same time push their loved ones away, creating tumultuous, dramatic and insecure relationships where their adult partner, unable to live with the uncertainty of a chaotic relationship would end up rejecting the now adult child, again.
How To Heal From Childhood Rejection
- Acknowledge the rejection. Try not to minimise the rejection you endured
- Build relationships with people you find admirable, caring and trustworthy. Through them you can accept what happened so you can learn to let it go
- Learn to chart your emotions, it will help you recognise your trigger points
- Stop the self-criticism
- Restore your self-worth by recognising your good qualities
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with a therapist can help you process your emotions
“Sometimes we are just not the right fit for a particular person, or a particular job, recognising that helps us move on quicker”
So How Do We Separate Romantic Rejection From Our Self-Worth?
Romantic rejection is one of the most painful types of rejection because it cuts to the very core of who we are and how attractive we see ourselves. Low self-esteem and previous traumas can prolong the pain of romantic rejection and inhibit our ability to view ourselves in a more positive light.
The majority of people can work their way through the unhappiness of a romantic rejection with the support of family and friends, but when there is childhood trauma the ability to recover from rejection can become complicated. Sometimes, unfortunately, the greatest damage that rejection can cause is created by ourselves as the rejection naturally enforces us to turn inwards and become self-critical.
When a person starts dating, the idea is to find people that you get on with. The reality is you can’t get on with everyone and dating is a selection process that allows you to learn all about who you are, your likes and dislikes and within that equation, it is without doubt, there are going to be some people you just don’t click with, or people who find they don’t click with you.
It is helpful to focus on the fact that when the relationship ends, it is not you who is being rejected, but something in the relationship that is not working for the other person. The rejection is not personal, it is often a reflective of needs that are not being met with a mutual dynamic. When someone we want doesn’t want us, it is only natural to start questioning ourselves. The reality is though that the rejection was less about who you are and your worth as a human being and more about them and the fact that you were not the right fit for what they wanted.
Living true to yourself and always remaining in your authenticity as a human being will allow you to meet the person who is right for you.
Turning the rejection into reflection can help you focus on any lessons you can learn from this experience and working on your self-esteem is the best way forward.
Negative thoughts can be very convincing and lead you down a spiral path very quickly. Challenge your negative thoughts straight away. Every time you think of or say something negative about yourself, replace the thought by reminding yourself of how much you have accomplished, how well you did in a particular situation and how much you have succeeded in life. That way you will be replacing self-criticism with self-compassion. Don’t allow the rejection to define who you are.
“Rejection is part of the journey towards success, so don’t be insulted when it happens, get excited that it is taking you closer to where you are meant to be”