Rejection and Feeling Left Behind
“We make experiences like this be about us.”
When we reached out to our community for questions to pass onto Mark Groves, there was an amazing amount of submissions related to rejection.
Most of us can recall a relational instance where we have experienced rejection. We all know that the after effects of feeling “left behind” can sit with us much longer than we are comfortable with, and no matter how you spin it, rejection hurts.
For this community member, her question was related to a loving relationship that had recently ended very unexpectedly for her. She asked, “He told me he loved me and saw us as long term. Two weeks later, he called me, broke up with me, and I haven’t heard from him since. Wtf? Should I reach out for an explanation? I am sad and feel like I need closure.”
Here is what Mark had to say,
I would assume that the closeness (not having any other information) of actually saying, “I love you,” when experiencing that next step, caused him to experience avoidance. To then want to get, “Oh my God, I’m too close. I’m falling for this person.” I’ve definitely been avoidant before where I was afraid of too much closeness. As soon as someone told me they liked me I became Usain Bolt and sprinted the other way. So, this is really about monitoring and asking ourselves questions like, “When I love people, they…” or, “When I let people love me, they…” Because what happens is when we pull back and reel back from love, from intimacy, from connection, we want to run for the hills as soon as someone wants to care for us, we know that there is something beyond the caring for that has a negative outcome we are trying to avoid and we haven’t looked at it yet. We haven’t gotten to know it. We haven’t explored that pain. We’ve been avoiding that pain. And so that at least sort of makes sense why he might do that. Now on the other side of this, already the fact that there hasn’t been a reaching out to get an explanation tells me that there’s a restriction of voice. This person doesn’t actually share their voice. They’re afraid that if I do this I might reconnect with this person. They might not give me an answer. But if you don’t do it, you’re rejecting yourself. So, you’re sitting in rejection but then continued rejection because you’re not sharing what you need. I would 100% recommend reaching out and asking for an explanation, “You told me you loved me two and a half weeks ago and then you broke up with me. These two things are not making sense. I need you to make them make sense. Can you tell me what happened that made it so you felt the need to run?”
“Your self-worth is not connected to someone else’s behaviour.”
And, it’s so natural for us when we haven’t really done the inner work (and I don’t mean that if you do this you haven’t done the inner work but this is just something to continue with) is that we make experiences like this be about us. We go like, “I obviously wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough for him to choose and to fight for me. He told me he loved me. Does that mean loving me means you have to run after? What did he see in me?” And that’s really the child mind that’s wanting to go back into wound. And that’s why as an adult now we can – that’s still going to happen because rejection is human, you know? It’s attachment. It’s painful. But it’s really important in these types of experiences to sit with that experience and to ask ourselves, “Is this really about me? Like, is this really about me?” If I’m just being objective. Ask your friends who tell you the truth. Those are the best people to have around you, “Did I really show up in a way that would justify this? Just tell me.” Because there’s an opportunity for you to learn – did you actually? And then there’s also an opportunity for you to start to cultivate that your self-worth is not connected to someone else’s behaviour. It’s really important that we start to see that when we experience rejection it’s only when that rejection matches a part of our own identity that we hold that we make it about us. And this is that really deliberate intentional work that’s hard. It’s hard to separate someone else’s behaviour from who we are. Man, that is like the continued effort of, you have to constantly be the witness of your experience while you’re in your experience.
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