Your Value is Not Determined by the People Who Don’t Want You.
No matter who you are, no matter how successful you become, no matter how large your house, how expensive your car or how much of a difference you have made in the world, there’s one thing you can always guarantee.
Someone, somewhere is going to reject what you have to offer. Maybe it’s your profession, maybe it’s your faith or maybe it’s who you are as a person
And sometimes, it’s hard not to take rejection personally.
Most of us come into this world with a deep desire for connection. As one of our six human needs, it’s a powerful motivator, but it also can be an incredible detriment to our health and our happiness if we are not watchful guardians of our behaviors.
Our deep need for connection (and I use the word ‘need’ rather than ‘want’ very specifically) can be a source of incredible peace and satisfaction when it is met, and an incredibly painful, almost debilitating, wound when it is not.
So how do we learn to take rejection less personally?
In my work healing people, there’s two ways that we work on healing this problem. And if you think you’re alone in this, please understand that this is one of the most common things that I deal with when talking to people.
One of the ways is a mindset shift that will reverberate through all of your relationships, and the other is to deepen your relationship with yourself.
I know that sounds simple, and an oversimplification, but it’s really not.
To explain the mindset shift, I’ll share with you a recent interaction with someone. She had mentioned that due to the circumstances of her birth, she felt unwanted and discarded. In my experience, those are often the emotions that follow an awareness that you are adopted.
I shared with her the simple mindset shift that can make such a difference in your world, not just if you are adopted, but if you are facing some kind of rejection in any area of your life.
That you were unwanted and discarded is not a statement on your value, it is a reflection on somebody else's weakness and values.
Because for some reason, when somebody rejects us, we automatically take their opinion as gospel truth, rather than realizing that they have their own issues, demons problems that they bring into their assessment of you.
It took me a long time to realize that my father’s emotional distance from me was not a reflection on my value, nor even reflection on his judgment, but rather the reality that he was carrying his own demons and being chased day after day after day.
So the next time somebody rejects you in some way, instead of immediately taking that as a judgment of who you are, but look at it as a symptom of where they are at.
Because we all carry demons until we do the work to drive them out.
Tomorrow I’ll talk more about the other way in which I help people deal with rejection, which is to create a deeper relationship with themselves.
I hope to see you here.
Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings