Overcoming Rejection: How Psychotherapy Can Help You

Everyone has experienced rejection either in their public or private lives. Perhaps your best friend wants some alone time when you want them to go out. You feel put off and rejected.

However, sometimes rejection goes very deep and begins in early childhood.

This article will focus on rejection and how going to a therapist can change your life forever.

It Often Begins in Early Childhood

It is no secret that children rely entirely on their parents for protection and daily needs. What happens to children when their emotional and physical needs are not met? They grow up feeling cold, alone, and rejected by those they should have been able to count on for everything.

 

Parental rejection is the absence or withdrawal of love, warmth, and affection by parents who are self-absorbed and not interested in their children’s emotional or physical health. There are four different types of parenting styles leading to neglect and abandonment.

Hostile and aggressive. In a hostile parenting style, one parent tries to undermine their child’s relationship with the other parent. These parents often view their children as possessions and cannot or will not appreciate the child’s needs. Parenting aggressively can be physical or psychological, where the parent uses punishments, yelling, and other hostile parenting patterns.

Cold and Unaffectionate. This parenting style is called uninvolved parenting or being neglectful. These parents are viewed as cold, uncaring, and poor at differentiating their child’s needs and activities. A cold and unaffectionate parent may have a confusing relationship with their children and do not set healthy boundaries or sometimes do not discipline them.

Neglectful and indifferent. These parents are uninvolved, and their parenting style provides low to no parental support, control, and attention. These parents also do not focus on their children’s needs but ignore their children completely or encourage them to “toughen up.” This parenting style also involves not setting boundaries or appropriately disciplining their children.

Indistinguishable rejecting. With this parenting style, children believe their parents do not love them even if there is no history of overt neglect, unaffectionate, and aggressive. An approach to control and structure characterizes this parenting style. Rejecting parents do not demand much from their children, are unresponsive to them, and apply little control over them. These parents are often dismissive and neglectful.

Believing their parents reject them, many of these children suffer significantly, and the lack of appropriate care and love leaves the child physically and psychologically underdeveloped.

Childhood Trauma and the Fear of Rejection

Childhood trauma is like poison to a developing brain. Trauma repeatedly floods the child’s brain with hormones usually reserved to flee an enemy causing brain damage to some areas, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, to name a few.

The effects of rejection during childhood have both short-term and long-term effects on the child’s psychological adjustment. Below we will examine many of the effects children being neglected or abused experience.

• Social Adjustment. There has been found a correlation between peer rejection and parental rejection. Also, rejected children are more likely to have problems with social adjustment as teens. These children are said to have less empathy, helpfulness, and generosity.
• Researchers have found that across all countries and cultures, children who experience rejection develop the following personality traits:
• Lower self-esteem
• Anger
• Hostility
• Emotional instability
• Coldness
• Problems with behavior. Parental rejection is related to many behavioral issues in children, including delinquency, conduct disorder, and directing their feelings outward toward others and their social environment. These children, when grown, have problems with drug use, binge drinking, and forming close relationships.
• Children who experience parental rejection are more likely to suffer from student bullying and victimization. In contrast, some children who feel rejected and have parents who are indifferent and hostile often grow to be bullies.
• Academic performance. It is well known that children perform better in school if they have a positive outlook on school when their parents are actively involved in their education. Lack of parenting involvement negatively affects the performance of children and increases the child’s overall well-being.
• Mental health issues. Research has indicated a positive correlation between children’s mental health and parental acceptance. Because childhood rejection leads to feelings of low self-esteem, hopelessness, and helplessness. There is also a correlation between childhood rejection and self-injury. Chronic childhood rejection may lead to mental health challenges like complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

How Does Fear of Rejection Affect Our Adult Relationships?

Adult relationships are built on mutual understanding and building trust between two people. Survivors of childhood neglect and abuse have a horrendous time doing either. Survivors are afraid to open themselves to someone else because they fear being rejected as they were when they were growing up.

 

Survivors often withdraw from others rather than risk reaching out and holding back from expressing their feelings. They are ready to abandon others before they can abandon them. As a survivor, you fear the strong emotions that accompany loss. But because loss and grief are parts of life that cannot be avoided, you probably fear the worst, iterating in your mind that loss is always wrong.

The fear of rejection is often rooted in the belief that you are not good enough and that giving that person the power to make us feel our emotions is dangerous. There is an enormous fear that the other person may want to see our bodies or that they may feel superior to us. Both fears resound from early childhood experiences when your body was violated and showing emotion meant paying a horrible price.

How to Recognize if You Are Afraid of Rejection

Sometimes the last person to know you are living out the effects of rejection is you. It is easy to pretend you were utterly unscathed by what happened to you as a little child.

It is critical to see the rejection of the past so that we can find ways to help ourselves heal. We must accept that our childhood was far less than ideal and that we did not deserve nor did we do anything to cause the lack of love and attention we received.

Below are some signs that you experienced rejection trauma as a child. The list is not all-inclusive but is meant to guide you to research more yourself. If you recognize yourself, do not panic; you can and will heal if you want to and are willing to work.

• You think others are saying or thinking negative thoughts about you.
• You apologize all the time, even when no apology is necessary.
• You find it incredibly difficult to get close to people.
• You have little to no trust in anyone.
• You don’t know how to accept compliments.
• You are constantly questioning yourself.
• You are a people-pleaser.
• You are a chameleon.

 

One other tale-tale sign that you were rejected as a child is your state of mental and physical health. Emotionally, you may have received or will eventually receive a mental health diagnosis such as complex post-traumatic stress disorder or another psychiatric diagnosis.

Physically rejection and the trauma it causes make you more likely to be obese and, as a result, have other physical problems. That’s right; your heaviness was not your fault.

Psychotherapy Can Help with Childhood Rejection

Psychotherapy is a valuable tool in healing childhood rejection. The therapy experience for childhood rejection issues will not take a few weeks, but possibly months, and for those in need, years. However, it is one of the primary ways to overcome the deep-running emotions plaguing your adult life.

Therapists are trained to deal with the consequences of childhood rejection and any accompanying mental health issues you may have developed. Having a good therapist may help you explore potential reasons for your rejection and reassure you that you were not at fault.

Unfortunately, children, now adults, harbor internalized messages and the belief that there must have been something wrong with them. There was not. There was absolutely nothing wrong with you; your caregivers were at fault.

Therapy can help you replace negative thoughts with more positive ones, such as “You are loveable and easy to love.” In therapy, you can also work through behaviors that isolate you because of aggression or fear.

Ending Our Time Together

Rejection is challenging because it arouses so many feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Speaking about it in this piece was not meant to do so; it was written to help you see there is hope and therapy may be your best bet for healing.

There are many types of therapy out there, and it is up to you to find a therapist who will fulfill what you need in one of them.

I have been in talk therapy for years; it has saved my life and helped me heal tremendously. When I began therapy, I thought I was going insane because I kept having memories of abuse and rejection come out of the blue in the form of flashbacks.

I was horrified. What were these apparitions that kept me afraid and filled with dread? Once in therapy, I understood that the visions of past abuses were real and part of my history. After many years in therapy, I have found peace and have a life beyond what I would have had I not pursued therapy.

My hope for you is that you will find the help you need and heal.

“When you give yourself permission to communicate what matters to you in every situation, you will have peace despite rejection or disapproval. Putting a voice to your soul helps you to let go of the negative energy of fear and regret.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”
― Steve Maraboli