Rejection feels terrible, but only until you understand it the way I will explain. Learn how to manage social judgment, heal your ego, and build self-confidence to overcome fear of rejection.

In short: three instances are most important in order to overcome the fear of rejection:

• to think carefully and then reject the fear of social condemnation;
• to influence our ego, which is a very long process;
• and to put things in perspective.

If we succeed in this, we will overcome the fear of rejection and open up new, even better opportunities for ourselves than these original ones that, maybe, were not destined to succeed.

How the Fear of Rejection Arises

Your ego, the entity within you that serves to maintain a positive self-image, is weak for some reason.

This happens when, as children:

• We are not loved, praised, or supported enough, so we don’t think we’re good.
• We are overly criticized or rejected, so we think we’re wrong.
• We have a flaw everyone knows, and our focus is on it.
• We grow up disadvantaged compared to others (financially or in other ways).
• We are overly loved, making rejection unfamiliar and frightening.
• None of the above, but a single event in life, has been emotionally painful.

The essence is that the ego, which, as I mentioned, serves to maintain a positive self-image, is not in good shape, so we fear injuring it further.

It’s like having an open wound and being afraid to touch it—especially with something that could hurt and worsen that wound.

• Now I imagine someone wanting to heal you with herbs that might make things worse.

Basically, because the ego is in poor condition, we must avoid anything that might hurt it, which is the possibility of someone telling us we aren’t good enough.

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Fear of Rejection and Daily Life?

However, rejection is an integral part of life. Not because you deserve to be rejected (sometimes you do) but because every single person you will ever meet has shortcomings that you may not know about and will, therefore, reject you somehow.

• If we talk about work, your future employer might intend to hire someone from their family.

• If we talk about love, your crush might be in love with someone from their elementary school.

• If we talk about friends, they might be lazy that day and decline to hang out with you.

• If we talk about family, maybe your mother has different plans with her money and will refuse to give it to you.

As you can see, the reasons why you might be rejected are numerous, in the millions, and they don’t have to be known to you. Usually, they are unknown.

However, they can happen to you and be very painful. They can even push you far back, making you feel worse than you believed about yourself, altering your emotional or psychological state, and causing you to withdraw completely from the world, etc.

Because of this, you might give up pursuing opportunities to avoid rejection.

Our brains are smart enough to anticipate potential scenarios and dangers, so if you’ve experienced too many or several very painful rejections, your brain will quickly adopt the idea that doing this might end badly, preventing you from moving toward certain things.

To stop you, it will obviously send you feelings of fear, discomfort, contempt, anger, etc.

And if you have these emotions toward an opportunity, you won’t move toward it, which makes sense.

Thus, opportunities in your life will slip away.

Why does rejection hurt so bad?

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I know that one of the hardest things in being rejected is actualy societal judgment.

We are social beings and have always depended on social approval. If society accepts us, we will have people available, which means we will be safe.

However, if people reject or judge us, it triggers our greatest fear, which is that we will be left alone and rejected.

So, when people reject us, it becomes terrifying at this level: others will see that I’m worthless and won’t want me around anymore.

Therefore, when we fear rejection, to maintain a positive self-image, we completely swing to the opposite extreme and start claiming that we don’t even want that partner, that job, those friendships, belonging to those people, etc.

This can, of course, go to the extreme of wanting nothing at all.

In this way, the fear of rejection becomes:

• A comfort zone: “If I don’t approach people, they won’t reject me. I will be safe.”
• An identity: “I don’t do things or approach people. That’s who I am.”
• An excuse for ourselves: “I won’t do that; it won’t end well anyway.”
• Very comfortable because it protects us from injury.

And here’s the question: why wouldn’t someone hold onto the fear of rejection forever?

Well, obviously, because it can halt your life. Even though we benefit from this fear because it leads to much less injury, we suffer greatly by not pursuing our opportunities.

But let’s choose the worst and most difficult rejection option, which is romantic rejection, because it also affects our emotional world.

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The Perfect Person Will Reject You!

Let’s say that you handle most aspects of your life well. For example, you tolerate rejection from friends or people at work because you are confident in those areas.

But now, let’s assume you’re left with the romantic aspect. And you’re very afraid of being rejected romantically by someone you like.

This is because you’ve labeled this person as special. We don’t often label people as special to us (even those who fall in love easily don’t often). And if they do, they get disappointed quickly—idealization and devaluation.

For someone to become especially interesting to us, they must possess characteristics that match our:

• Physical preferences,
• Psychological world,
• Emotional world,
• And finally, our unconscious and subconscious.

The essence is that it’s tough to like someone on all these levels, so when someone does appeal to us, they are indeed a particular person for us. And then this rare, so particular person rejects us.

So, we chose perhaps the hardest and worst rejection option.

Being Rejected By Someone You Love

How to Overcome Fear of Rejection

1. You need to heal your ego

At the beginning of this text, I mentioned that rejection is most challenging for people with a damaged ego. So, this is where the work needs to be done by healing everything that has hurt it.

This is done by revisiting everything you’ve ever heard and every doubt you’ve ever had about yourself. It takes time and persistence. It’s like pulling glass splinters out of a wound.

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2. You need to be okay with someone else’s rejection

Understanding that other people’s rejection frequently has nothing to do with us but their preferences. It will help you achieve this.

These preferences are usually completely unknown to us (often even to the person themselves because they are stored in the unconscious and subconscious).

3. You need to be okay with social judgment

This is done by reviewing how much you depend on other people. How much your happiness truly depends on others.

For instance, if someone rejects you and someone else starts thinking less of you because of it, it can only hurt if you dwell on it.

Of course, then your mind can imagine harrowing things like a group of people sitting around talking about you.

But the truths are these:

People talking about you now are doing it for entertainment, not to form an opinion about you. People form opinions about you based on their personal experiences with you.

If you’re kind to someone, they will think positively of you no matter what you do. If you’re not, they will think negatively of you no matter what you do. They will simply seek confirmation for their opinion. So, if you overthink that people don’t like you, fix it by understanding that you should dismiss those who want a bad opinion of you and help those who want a good opinion of you.

• My client was cheated on by his fiancée and humiliated in front of his large circle of friends. When she wanted to come back, and we talked about it, he concluded: “If I reconcile with her since I love her and believe she’s the perfect woman for me, I have a chance to be happy. And if I focus on what my friends think, I will never give myself a chance to be happy. So, I have only one choice in life.”

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There is a third option that covers both social judgment and the general fear of rejection:

4. You need to find your “So what?”

And not superficially, but go all the way with it. And you’ll see that there is a “So what?” at the end with every rejection, uncomfortable feeling, or social judgment.

• So what if people gossiped about you? How does that change your life?

• So what if you didn’t get that job? You’ll get another one.

• So what if someone doesn’t want you? How does that ultimately change your life?

If you think about it, you’ll see that in the end (if you’re honest with yourself), you can live perfectly well without what you desire so much.

If you think this way, you’ll see many options you haven’t considered, lots of twists, time, and opportunities.

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5. Those perfect people and perfect jobs don’t exist.

So we don’t have to be scared if we don’t win them.

They align well with our conscious, unconscious, and subconscious desires but are far from perfect. Once we get them, we’ll see many flaws in them. Yes, with some, we’d enjoy ourselves, and some would bring significant benefits, but they still have many flaws.

And even if we don’t get them, there are at least a few others that would bring us similar or even greater satisfaction.

My friend wanted to get into a university in another city and tried the entrance exam three times without success. Then, to avoid wasting more time, she enrolled in something else.

When she finally gave up on her first intention, she realized that she really didn’t want to leave her family and go to another city, that her first choice would provide her with a very lonely job, and she is an extrovert, that her first choice is paid less in practice, etc.

The first choice she was so fixated on was just a product of her imagination—it sounded prestigious and fun.

Today, she works in her field and is the happiest person in the world.

The point is that sometimes we obsess over a job, a person, or an opportunity and can’t see that they are draining all our energy.

Because of them, we can’t see other perspectives, and chasing something like that can make us miserable. But by choosing something else, we might become truly happy.

The essence is that often, we can’t see the forest for the trees.

Why Am I Holding Onto Someone Who Doesn’t Want Me?

Finally:

6. What’s the worst thing that will happen if you get rejected?

Your ego will be hurt, and… that’s it.

Yes, the ego is a big part of us, and it’s necessary and reasonable that it doesn’t get hurt. But it’s only a part of us. It’s within us. No one will ever know it’s broken. And to make it hurt less, you need to work on it.

If you put rejection in the perspective of your entire life, you’ll see it’s just 1% of your life, and 99% hasn’t changed. Maybe your life hasn’t advanced or improved, but it hasn’t changed.

So, avoiding rejection doesn’t make much sense—nothing will change if it’s just about ego injury. And if you stop trying, you’ll never get a chance to improve.

Don’t miss out on opportunities in life just because of hurt feelings. Get over the fear of rejection and grab those hundreds of opportunities in front of you.

I hope you find this text interesting and useful. I hug you. Dee