Existential Psychology

Put Rejection In Perspective

By  | 

Whether the relationship is professional, romantic, or friendly being tossed aside hurts. But most people let rejection hurt them more than it has to because they don’t work through what it really means to them at the unconscious existential level or how this meaning is influenced by a cognitive distortion.

At the unconscious existential level the rejector takes on the role of a judge, the role of a god, in the mind of the rejectee. Suddenly a flawed, subjectively biased individual is endowed with symbolic power undertones, power undertones that transform that subjectively biased opinion into something that feels objectively valid.

‘You don’t think I’m good enough’ unconsciously shifts to ‘I’m not good enough’ and it’s this unconscious shift that must be brought into conscious awareness and challenged. Just because someone makes a judgment doesn’t mean this judgment is objectively true. In objective reality this person remains flawed, opinionated, subjectively biased.

Therefore the key to dealing with the psychological and emotional pain of rejection in a healthy way is to put rejection in perspective, to realize that it’s one person’s opinion not a judgment from on high based upon unalterable objective fact. Being on the receiving end of rejection brings with it the temptation to place the symbolic role of objective judge onto whoever is doing the rejecting but when this psychological process is brought into conscious awareness it can be interrupted.

Related posts:

  1. Important Problems The worst thing you can do is minimize the importance of your partner’s life problems. The objective fact is that both of you filter reality through your own subjective lenses, there’s no way around that, but you can recognize this fact in order to keep yourself from projecting your subjective perception onto objective reality, seeing […]...
  2. Deciding You Do Not Care About Something If you are in the process of deciding you do not care about something, you need to think long and hard about whether these are your authentic feelings or rather an unconscious psychological solution due to your real desires being frustrated for long enough that attaining your goal seems unlikely. As an example of what […]...
  3. Rejection Sensitivity People at risk for becoming depressed worry more about what others think about them than the general population. They are highly tuned in to body language, facial expressions, cadence of words, and often read between the lines of conversations, inferring hidden meanings. This propensity to be empathic can be channeled in healthy ways but people […]...
  4. Dealing With Rejection From a behavioral point of view when someone rejects you what they are actually rejecting is a constellation of behaviors. Conversely when they accept you what they are accepting is a constellation of behaviors. One of the reasons rejection hurts is because most of us don’t view it that way. Whether someone has known us […]...
  5. Lying To Your Therapist You’ll hear a lot of people brag to friends about lying to their therapists, about fooling their therapists into believing this or that false narrative. On the surface withholding or distorting information is all about power. From this type of client’s point of view there’s a game of cat and mouse going on. But who’s […]...
  6. Embarrassment Help All of us face those awkward encounters once in a while where we stick our feet in our mouths, do something stupid that catches others’ attention, are publicly called out for our incompetence, or perform a task poorly in front of others. These situations can produce embarrassment or even shame, not fun emotions to deal […]...
  7. Put Setbacks In Perspective Changing customary patterns of behavior is hard. We feel that pull, almost like being inexorably drawn towards a powerful magnet, to fall back into old ways of being and relating despite our best efforts. To find ultimate success it’s not just about expecting setbacks but also about putting them in perspective when they occur. The […]...
  8. Do Not Let One Bad Data Point Ruin The New Narrative Whatever we place under the microscope gets larger. Or at least it seems to get larger; in actuality it remains the exact same size it always was. What this has to do with narrative therapy is that when people are in the process of constructing and living out new, more desirable, more productive life narratives […]...
  9. Loneliness Loneliness is one of the most painful emotional states. We are social creatures yet we are aware, at least on an unconscious level, that an unbridgeable chasm will always exist. No matter how close our relationships become we are individual sentient organisms with our own bodies, thoughts, and feelings, incapable of inhabiting the bodies, thoughts, […]...
  10. Victim Role People who feel like they are constantly being victimized by those around them are in a tough spot. In the first place, they usually were legitimately victimized in a previous relationship where there was a power imbalance. We define victimization as a situation where fundamental human rights are trampled upon and there is little or […]...
  11. Body Of Evidence Most people agree that the first Matrix movie was awesome, the second was okay, and the third was a piece of garbage. Where things get interesting psychologically is that for many, the first movie is retroactively ruined or at least diminished in value because of the failures of the subsequent two. After looking at the […]...
  12. Irrational Authority Where rational authority is open to questioning and criticism from its followers irrational authority brooks no such dissent. Irrational authority sets up obedience as the highest virtue and disobedience as an unforgivable sin. It uses all the psychological tools in the belt to reinforce the idea that any questioning, criticism, and especially disobedience are off […]...
  13. Small Changes For Some Are Big Changes For Others It’s narcissism, plain and simple, that makes people place a lower or higher estimation on the difficulty of a behavioral change than it actually is for the person enacting that change. What we mean by narcissism is judging something as objective truth although it’s really your own subjective perspective, an idea best summed up in […]...
  14. Close-Minded What’s the main psychological benefit derived from being close-minded? Certainty. If you immediately discount any and all inputs that differ from your particular way of seeing the world you retain a powerful buffer against existential anxiety. Sure, your particular way of seeing the world will be hopelessly biased, your one-sided arguments will frustrate those with […]...
  15. Ostracism It’s better to express your authentic thoughts and feelings and be excluded than to minimize these thoughts and feelings and be accepted. But the fear of social ostracism hangs over a lot of what we do and many unconsciously prefer being included to being themselves. Ostracism really does hurt. The brain apparently interprets rejection just […]...
  16. When People Exit Your Life Have you ever stopped to think about why it hurts so much when, for whatever reason, people you care about and have grown accustomed to exit your life? From the existential point of view what’s going on is symbolic death and it acts as an unconscious reminder of the inevitability of physical death, of your […]...
  17. Guilt Over Transgressions I had a conversation with a psychology student who wanted to know how I approach conversations with clients who are struggling with a guilty conscience. They have committed some transgression that is significant and can’t stop obsessing over it. This is a difficult question, especially since guilt has very strong religious undertones and the concept […]...
  18. Depression And Negative Self-Appraisals Negative self-appraisals are a common feature of depression. Most people who are depressed report feelings of guilt, worthlessness, low self esteem, and deficient abilities and intelligence. The question is whether the depression causes these beliefs or these beliefs cause the depression. It’s the classic paradox of what came first between the chicken and the egg. The […]...
  19. Tempering Expectations What happens to a lot of people is that they enter into a new endeavor full of energy, basically bursting at the seams, barely able to contain their excitement. They see endless horizons and opportunity, not at all worried about the challenges they will face. You could compare these people to shooting stars. They burn […]...
  20. Infatuation And Disillusionment In Romantic Relationships Infatuation, which usually occurs at the very beginning of romantic relationships, and disillusionment, which often takes its place as time goes by, might seem like polar opposites but from the cognitive behavioral point of view they’re quite similar in that objectivity gives way to bias, positive bias in the case of infatuation and negative bias […]...
Related Items