I understand you’re interested in a timeframe—how quickly you’ll get over rejection—but we’ll do something better in this blog post. I’ll provide suggestions to help speed up this process and reduce the time it takes to get over a rejection.
In short: The speed with which you recover from a breakup will depend on several different factors: your emotional and psychological state, what do you think the fact that you were rejected says about you, what have you lost, when did that rejection occur (maybe at the wrong time). Some of these factors are easier to overcome, and some are more difficult.
In my experience, my clients have been different when it comes to getting over someone.
Some of them recovered very quickly.
- I even had a case of a man who needed just one day to get over a woman who cheated on him. When I explained what happened, he no longer grieved for her but wanted to end all communication with her and break ties. And this isn’t a made-up story because we continued to talk for months later about other things. He did not need to mention her except incidentally: I sent her all her stuff, etc.
This was a fascinating case and an example of rapid recovery.
However, much more common are those when people recover for months or even years.
An extreme example of recovering from unrequited love would be The Great Gatsby, for instance. Still, many classics of world literature describe this suffering from rejection that people never overcome.
And even though such suffering seems like a thing of the past and romanticism, I have frequent cases of clients who persistently, long, and hard suffer for someone. Their reasons are different.
I’ve explained in several texts why people don’t let go of that suffering, and some of the valuable texts are these:
However, if you still want to recover from someone’s rejection, this is a good text for you because it involves understanding yourself, what you’re doing, and how to resolve it.
What is Your Emotional and Psychological State
The depth of someone’s suffering mostly depends on their emotional and psychological state, which includes what kind of person they are and how they perceive external stimuli.
If your ego is in good condition and your self-image is solid, you’ll suffer less because someone doesn’t want you. If your ego is damaged, you’ll suffer more when someone rejects you because that rejection hits a sensitive part of you. Practically, someone is directly telling you: You’re nothing special. I think you’re worthless. Just as _________ told you (maybe there’s no name, but you have your reasons why you have a poor opinion of yourself).
In this case, your solution lies in improving your ego state and self-image. This is obviously best done in psychotherapy, where the therapist should empower you, help you see yourself more realistically (in reality, you’re probably better than you think), and give you advice on working on the parts of yourself you don’t like.
When you see yourself better, your ego injury won’t be so deep because someone’s rejection won’t undermine your self-image. It won’t reach you.
What is the best way to gain self-confidence?
What Does Being Rejected by Someone Say About Me
If your ego is in a bad state and you have a poor self-image, you’ll probably think that someone rejected you because they see you’re bad. But you’ll think this because you think poorly of yourself, not because it’s true. With such a state of your inner world, you’ll think this anyway.
However, someone else’s rejection says nothing about you. It says something about that person and their affinities. People reject us because they want different things than what we offer, and what they want is usually incomprehensible because it’s mostly tied to their inner world and its needs.
The reason you think it says something about you is usually tied to your emotional and psychological state, as I mentioned, and this is best changed in psychotherapy.
- If it does say something about you, you can recognize it and work on things you can correct.
What Have You Lost
When someone rejects us, they impose themselves as someone better and more important than us (because they determine whether you’ll be in a relationship, thus making themselves more critical). It’s easy to create the impression that you’ve lost a valuable person because of this.
However, this is just a mistaken illusion that resulted from your assessment that this person is unique + the person has positioned themselves as more important than you.
It would be beneficial for you to think in this way and stop viewing the person through the lens of their uniqueness (since they probably aren’t).
- People are unique only if they share their uniqueness with us. If they don’t want to share their uniqueness with us, then they can’t be special to us because we can’t consume their uniqueness. Let’s say someone discovers an incredible new antibiotic and doesn’t want to share it with us. Will we say that they’re exceptional? Or does their selfishness slightly change things?
Another way to look at this issue (what have you lost?) is this: If someone has rejected you, they want different things than what you offer. The logic suggests that this person offers different things than you prefer.
Let’s say a woman loves fun, and a man strives for a career; she will always gravitate towards fun, and he will always want to focus on work. Is it fair to say that it’s okay for them to reject each other rather than wasting time on each other?
If you don’t match with the other person from the start or in fundamental aspects, you can’t say you’ve lost something. In fact, you’ve gained by not wasting time and energy on a person who doesn’t align with you. It frees up time for someone else and something similar to you and better for you.
Why We Are In Love With Someone – Psychological Explanation
What Would Your Life Be Like With the Person Who Rejected You
You’ve imagined coexistence with that person. When you assessed them as a good candidate for a romantic partner, you probably envisioned some nice things that could happen between you.
However, now is the time to sit down and think: What would your life be like with someone who doesn’t want to be with you?
You should ask yourself the following questions:
- If this person doesn’t want the things that I am offering, do we even need to be together?
- Can I change their mind? (You can’t, let’s be clear.)
- How happy would I be with someone who rejects who I am?
- What would coexistence with this person look like if I’m not what they want?
When you start thinking like this, you’ll see that life with the person who rejected you would be a life full of suffering.
So, what you’ve imagined with that person significantly differs from what would happen with such a person. And we don’t live in a world of imagination, but in real life.
Come on. Answer these questions directly to yourself (without fantasizing), and you’ll have clear answers about how your life would be with someone who doesn’t want you.
- And please, don’t go with it: But if they wanted me, it would be different. Yes, if they wanted you, which again falls into the realm of imagination. Let’s stick to reality.
- Also, don’t fantasize about being able to change that person’s mind. You can do it in different ways, but I warn you, it’s a long, arduous, and difficult process that I’m not sure is worth it.
If you want to read about how to change someone’s mind, these are the articles for you:
Is There Something Unpleasant Happening In Your Life?
I’m sorry if something else rough, unpleasant, or exhausting is happening in your life. I’m sorry if this is your permanent state. I’m even more sorry if you had hoped to find some bright spot in that person that would give you life enthusiasm and energy. And you were rejected. However, try to see things in such a way that these are separate instances.
For example, if there is a flood in my house and my car breaks down, it doesn’t mean I have bad luck. Things just happen, and by thinking, “Oh, my luck is terrible,” I won’t help myself.
I know it’s tough to go through life alone and not have any victories for a long time. I know it’s tough when defeat follows defeat. But your bad emotional state won’t fix things. In fact, pessimists (who often become so for justified reasons) don’t see reasons to move forward and try to solve their problems. Optimists have some plans and an optimistic view of the future.
So, if bad things happen to you simultaneously + with someone’s rejection, try to find some enthusiasm and optimism. Internal or external. Maybe some positive idea about the future or some internal reason why you’re facing life problems.
You need to move forward. Because, in the future and in your actions, lies the opportunity to change your condition, your thoughts, and your life.
But the essential thing is to separate those events so that you don’t allow yourself to sink into despair because many bad things are happening to you at once.
What Mechanisms Are You Using
The speed of recovery from someone’s rejection also depends on the mechanisms a person uses. People can use immature mechanisms: idealization of that person, fantasizing about them, repression, feeling sorry for oneself, etc. They can use psychotic mechanisms and imagine what’s really happening around them or even pathological ones.
None of these mechanisms will help you eliminate suffering; they’ll only distort reality for you, remove the problem from your consciousness, or comfort you.
The real solution lies in using mature mechanisms such as:
Turning the situation into humor, turning that experience into fuel to create something good (exercise, write a bestseller about that experience, etc.). Perhaps you opt for something else due to the maturity gained from that experience?
As I said in the “What would your life be like with that person” point, this experience can lead you to look at your life differently. Also, here, you can always opt for self-improvement, to become a figure who isn’t rejected, to work on accepting life circumstances as they are, and to work on patience.
One option is to focus more on connecting with other people.
What Kind of Support System Do You Have
The role of other people in our lives is, among other things, to nullify or alleviate the injustices that happen to us.
I know some of you are alone in the world and don’t have people close to you to whom you can turn. Of course, ideally, you would have at least one trusted person on your side. But if you don’t have anyone, I advise finding support groups for yourself. These groups can be made up of unknown people and people who have no connection to your problem (hobby groups), or people from work, family, etc.
Just the presence of people helps make a person feel better because they’re not alone in the world. That’s why you can see in movies that in support groups, other group members just stay silent and listen to the members sharing their problems. It’s not mandatory for other people to give you advice, but it’s enough for them to be around you.
They’ll make you laugh, divert your attention from your problem, and make you feel like you belong somewhere even though you’ve been rejected, etc.
Find some hobbies where there are people, go to support groups where you can talk, mingle with people, and make social contacts. This can help you immensely.
Don’t wallow in depression and despair and separate completely from people just because someone rejected you. It’s completely the wrong thing to do. You need to go to people so that you don’t go through this period completely alone, without anyone’s support and understanding. And who knows, maybe some good advice.
And Finally, Go To a Relationship Counselor
Go to someone who professionally deals with this topic and whom you can talk to about what happened to you. Find someone who will steer you back and hold you on the right track in this rough time.
Common sense and support, understanding your problem and comfort, and decent advice or techniques during such periods can drastically change things. Like for my client, who resolved his doubts about the girl who cheated on him with my advice in one day.
- No. I do not claim to be omnipotent or a wizard. My client was quick to solve his internal dilemmas and quickly applied my advice.
Even just listening can be enough for you and change things in a way: I’m not left to myself in this pain I’m going through.
There you go. I hope this article has been helpful to you and will speed up your recovery. I am sending hugs. Dee.
