The pain of rejection is universal, and healing from rejection is a goal most humans can share and relate to.
We’re going to cover how rejection wounds originate, avoidant attachment patterns, and how to heal primary wounds of rejection.
You may also discover that while deeply painful, you can learn from the rejection and connect more to yourself.
Healing From Rejection- Impact of Childhood
Attachment science (AKA attachment theory) teaches us that sometimes, we have to go back to early infancy when considering the ways developmentally significant events relate to adult functioning. Healing from rejection often starts by understanding these early experiences.
Consider a child or baby who is fully reliant on their caregiver for food, shelter, water, protection. Feeling rejected by this caregiver—perhaps by the caregiver not being engaged or responsive to the baby’s cries for what they need—is inherently traumatizing: it means the inability to secure the necessities to be safe and alive in the world. It means death.
In this situation, the child learned that the following actions were not effective in getting their needs basic met:
- Communication of their needs
- Reaching out to their caregiver
- Expression of emotion
Not only were those methods ineffective, they were actually potentially actively detrimental to the child, as they left the child exposed vulnerably in their needs.
A child with these experience sitting in their unconscious could enter adulthood thinking…
- Expressing emotions and needs left me feeling in pain with my needs unmet
- Expressing emotions and needs is not useful or safe
- I cannot trust others
Rejection in Early Childhood
Soon enough, a child will further socialize through school and early peer relationships.
From an evolutionary perspective, we know that there was a time when rejection from the in-group corresponded to isolation, lack of resources, and death. The body, in its remarkable attempt to keep us safe, remembers this threat of death. And when rejection is perceived, the similar sensation of doom ensues.
These early events become ingrained in the mind and central to the narratives one holds about safety in the world and encode the programming of the nervous system.
As an adult, someone is still impacted by the hurt of those early rejections (and perhaps operating reactively from those wounds).
Why do these patterns form?
The threat of rejection is so scary, that even for the best of us, our survival strategy kicks in when we sense it. It is essentially human for attachment strategies (AKA attachment styles) to activate. These are the things we do to keep ourselves safe and alive—even when we don’t realize we’re doing it.
This might mean pushing others out for the preservation of ourselves. For instance, if someone senses they are getting pushed out of the in-group, they may actively try and push someone else out instead to protect their own chance to survive—and who can blame them?
When we are unconsciously letting the attachment system steer the wheel, we live in a place of uninformed reactivity, constantly reigniting one another’s deepest threats to survival and putting our learned strategies to the test.
A colloquial example of this dynamic that comes to mind is the idea of “leaving before you are left.” If you are leaving a relationship not because there is intention in where you are going, but to avoid the pain of future imagined rejection, you are reacting from this attachment wound, and in the process, perhaps triggering the threat of rejection in the partner you are leaving.
Rejection Strategies in Adulthood
Attachment therapists often associate those who tend to fear rejection as those who display an avoidant attachment style. For these individuals, the sense of feeling left out can feel (and evolutionarily, can represent) death.
Understandably, this leaves individuals to rely on attachment strategies to deal with that threat.
An avoidant attachment style is often associated with minimizing emotions, needs, and dependence on others. More specific strategies in adulthood may include:
- A tendency to dissociate
- Over-intellectualizing (obsessively focusing on facts and logic)
- Humor
- Protective anger
- Eating disorder
- Substance use
- Numbing or bypassing needs
These strategies help deal with the pain and fear by moving the individual away from those emotions.
If a child perceived that their caregiver was not accessible, engaged with, or responsive to them, the child may have learned that they are safer if they do not have needs.
So, if they can deactivate their threat-detection system altogether, they will feel like they are more safe in the world than if they are to face the reality that the care they need might not be reachable.
This teaches children to protect themselves through containing their emotions and their needs, which is the way they have learned to care for themselves when they move into adulthood.
Avoidant attachment in adulthood
The strategies above can work really well to allow avoidant attached individuals a sense of security… in the short-term.
Over time, people experience costs:
- Lack of experiencing the true self
- No healthy dependence on others
- Lack of experience of pleasant emotions
- Lack of depth in relationships
- Physical manifestation of unexpressed emotions and symptoms
The implementation and function of these behaviors is usually unconscious.
There is a deeper meaning for why people may be implementing these behaviors, but work is required to bring into consciousness what historic attachment wound to which they are reacting.
The lack of this work is how we can find ourselves in ongoing, perpetuating cycles of ineffective coping.
Related: Fear of Being Perceived- Where It Stems From And How To Overcome
Reminder: what we see is not the whole story
It’s important to remember that even though we see a strong facade on the outside that we might associate with a lack of caring, the fact that the strategy is online actually indicates a deep level of being affected.
If you love a person who expresses an avoidant attachment style, it may be natural to assume they do not care and feel discouraged when you see them withdraw.
But this could not be further from the truth; their use of the strategy (i.e., activation of the attachment system) shows that they care deeply. They just have learned to minimize that care, just like they learned to suppress every other emotion.
Healing From Rejection
Being a full-experiencing human means touching parts of ourselves and our experiences that can be unpleasant. We all have sensitivities to different stimuli that impact us due to experiences in our early development.
Here are some of the keys to healing from rejection and the resulting pain.
Learn to Pause
The first step in any healing journey, healing from rejection included, is to pause. Catch yourself when you notice your emotional reaction does not match the intensity of the situation in front of you.
Breathe, feel into your body, and trust that you are safe enough to sit with any temporary discomfort. See if you can label what you are feeling and identify what you may be responding to.
Acknowledge all your body is trying to do to keep you safe, and also know that you do not have to move forward in reactivity.
Choose to respond from an informed, intentional place. In this way, we can learn to reparent ourselves, or teach ourselves how to find calm and safety in the face of attachment distress.
Self reflection
Once you have created space, you can start so reflect and put the pieces of your experiences together.
Get curious, be with your emotions, observe your triggers, and learn your attachment style. Little by little, as you learn your style and your tendencies, your body will be more open to releasing them.
Befriend Your Protective Strategy
After rejection, another set of parts often rushes in depending on your attachment style— the ones that say, “I don’t care,” “I’ll never let anyone in again,” or “I should have known better.”
These protective parts of us mean well. They work hard to shield you from future pain, even if their methods keep you distant or guarded. Instead of fighting them, try appreciating what they’re doing for you.
You can say to yourself, “I get why you’re here. You’re trying to keep me safe.” When protectors feel seen and understood, they can loosen their grip. Over time, befriending these protective parts helps you rebuild trust, both in your own ability to take risks in relationships and in others to not hurt you.
Attend Therapy
Through relationship with trusted others, we have the capacity to heal some of these wounds. These trusted others could be emotionally-focused therapists, partners, or other important figures in our lives who we feel deeply connected to.
In therapy, we call these “corrective experiences,” which are conversations we have that assure us that others are accessible to us and engaged with us, and that it is safe to express our deep unmet needs.
These experiences can rewire our brains from the historical detection of threat to an experience of felt safety, calming emotions and healing pain along the way.
Join our Mailing List
Periodic updates on mental health + relationships, delivered to your inbox ↓
Comments +