If you’ve ever felt like a parent didn’t love you, or had a friend stop calling you, or a child stop speaking to you, or a partner unexpectedly told you it was over, then you will know the brutal pain of feeling rejected.

It is truly a devastating experience and yet why do some women cope better with it than others? 

Why do some bounce back yet others go into a ‘cave’ and hide out there forever, essentially letting the fear of being rejected again control their life?

Today I want to share some key truths about rejection and positive coping skills, so you can build resilience and continue to move forward in your life no matter what rejection you have experienced.

WHAT IS REJECTION? 

Rejection is about pushing somebody or something away. 

It’s about making a choice to say, “No, I don’t want that in my life”.

WHY DOES IT HURT SO MUCH?

Please understand that the excruciating hurt that you feel when rejection happens to you is normal.

Science has now proven that your brain registers rejection on the same pathways as any physical pain, like a broken leg or any kind of physical pain. 

That’s why being rejected physically hurts so much. 

So please don’t judge yourself harshly for feeling so bad about it. 

As human beings, we’re wired for connection and belonging. We crave that acceptance. We crave that because we know we need that on some level to survive. We can’t survive totally on our own.

However, if you don’t put it in perspective, the fear of rejection can actually dominate your life, take over your life, and keep you feeling very scared, lonely and isolated (even if you don’t realise it). 

And unfortunately, the women that I talk to tend to have had that experience in their life. 

They’ve been rejected by friends, they’ve been rejected by men, they’ve be rejected by their family, and they’ve reacted by retreating from the life. 

But that doesn’t solve anything in the long run.

Yes, feeling rejected is a really shitty place to be. 

But if it is left unmanaged and unaddressed, I know full well it can destroy your life. 

And for many people it does.

They experience a rejection in their life, and they hold onto that and they don’t move on from it, and they’re still holding onto it on their death bed. 

WHAT’S REQUIRED TO HANDLE REJECTION BETTER

How well you cope with rejection is directly proportionate to your self-esteem. 

With a healthy self-esteem, rejection still sucks, but you’re able to bounce back from that, you’re able to absorb that. 

You’re able to eventually put a positive spin on it and say, ‘You know what? This is not about me. This hurts in the moment, but I can see the bigger picture and I can see that it’s actually a good thing that I’m not getting this thing that I want or this person that I want, because it’s not meant for me”.

You must have a healthy self-esteem to be able to do that. 

And unfortunately, most women have a low self-esteem, which means they don’t value themselves. They don’t see themselves as good people, strong people, worthwhile people, lovable people. 

And therefore, when rejection comes, they can’t handle it. And what happens is their brain reacts to it as if there was a danger, a real danger, and they go into a fight, flight, or freeze mode, and they can stay there for a really, long time.

Their brain was trying to keep them safe at the time, but they can stay stuck there, reliving the rejection over and over in their mind.

If that’s been your experience in the past, that’s a sign that it’s time for you to do some deeper work and healing and to build your self-esteem. 

And you can do that. 

We’re all capable of changing the way our brains cope with life. 

I can tell you that because I remember suffering for 10 long years. 

A guy rejected me when I was 17. I was madly in love with him, he was the love of my life.

I had created this whole fantasy around him, but he decided to move overseas, and he didn’t invite me. 

So, I replayed that moment of rejection over and over in my mind 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 freaking years!

I did that because I didn’t know any better. 

I took that moment of rejection and I rejected myself 50 million trillion times over and over and over.

That is a form of self-abuse. 

My message today is you’ve got to take control of how you react to rejection. 

It’s totally up to you whether you allow rejection to cut your heart into a million pieces and die, or you learn to create a way to cope with it where you can bounce it back a little bit, let it slide off you. 

You can do this. I know you can. 

It’s an absolute miserable hell to live with a fear of rejection.

You are always sneaking around looking, looking, looking for evidence, ‘Is that person going to reject me?’

That is not living.  It’s just existing.

THE TRUTH ABOUT REJECTION

Truth One

Here’s the truth that it took me a long, long, long time to accept because I didn’t want to. 

Rejection is a normal part of life. 

It’s just the way it is. You’re going to be rejected at some point or many points in your life. 

Whether it’s from friends, family, men, work, colleagues, or not getting the promotion you wanted.

If you’re in business like me, it’s not getting the clients that you want. 

I’ve got to accept that I can talk to 100 people and get 99 ‘No’s’ and only get one ‘Yes’. 

I’ve had to toughen up and understand that rejection is not personal. 

It is just life. 

And if I didn’t get my big girl panties on and learn how to deal with it and just let it flow off me, I’d be a bloody stark raving mess, right? 

Sadly, I think a big reason why a lot of women don’t achieve what they want personally and professionally, is because they let this big bloody fear of being rejected control them and hold them back.

But when you accept that rejection (and the pain it brings) is a part of life you can learn to deal with it and cope with it in healthy ways and even TRANSCEND it!

Truth Two

Rejection doesn’t mean that you’re no good. 

It doesn’t mean that at all, unless you decide it means that. 

And again, that’s your choice. 

If someone “rejects you” you have a choice to decide to make it all about you or not.

If you choose to believe, ‘I’m a bad person, I’ve got nothing to offer, I’m so unattractive’, please know you are doing that to yourself.

Truth Three

You must give up the ‘need to know why’.

So many people get caught in this cycle of saying, “I need to have closure. I need to understand why he doesn’t want to be with me anymore, why my family member doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, why my friend doesn’t want to spend time with me. I need to understand why!”

No, you don’t. 

That is an obsessive form of control that just keeps you in a destructive self-abusive loop. 

It’s a hard one to break but break it you must (and you might even need help to do that).

You see, underneath the ‘need for closure’ is often a fantasy that ‘If I can just get close again, if I can just understand again, if I can just get that closure, maybe I’ll win them back”

I know about these mind-games because I’ve done it so many times in my life!

But this next truth is what finally changed my thinking.

Truth Four

Now this is a big deal.

Other people have choice about who they spend time with and who they don’t, just like you do. 

Not respecting other people’s choices is not respecting their boundaries.

So, even if it doesn’t suit you, it’s not what you wanted, it’s not what you expected, it wasn’t your dream, that doesn’t give you a right to then trash that person and run them down for the rest of your life because they chose not to be with you the way you wanted them to. 

No, they made a choice for themselves about what was right for them. 

And you have the same choice for yourself about who you have in your life.

You see, when you start to learn about boundaries and set them for yourself, then you start to notice all the ways that you’ve disrespected other people’s boundaries and choices (which can be a humbling experience).

So, you must ask yourself, “Am I respecting someone else’s choice or am I wanting to control them and make them like me or take me back?”

If you want to control them it’s usually because you can’t handle the pain of rejection because it sucks and hurts too much. 

So, you want them back so you can soothe your pain and you can feel better about yourself again. 

But that’s just using other people for your own self-esteem. 

Healthy self-esteem doesn’t come from outside of us, it comes from inside. 

STRATEGIES TO HANDLE REJECTION BETTER

Now it’s time to develop new, more healthy ways of handling rejection.

I personally think this is one of the most important skills for anyone in life to learn. 

Rejection is everywhere. It’s not going to go away.

Strategy One

Take responsibility for the meaning that you placed upon being rejected. 

At 11 minutes 39 seconds of the video above I explain a powerful strategy called ‘The 5 Finger Fluster Buster’ (I highly recommend watching it).

What it says is there’s five steps involved in explaining why or how you react to things in life. 

The first step is an event happens.

So say, for example, you went on a date with a man and he didn’t ask you for a second date. That’s the fact. That’s it.

The second step is the meaning that you make up about that. 

Now, you can mean that to say, “Oh well, that wasn’t meant to be. Move on”. 

Or you can mean that to say, “Oh my God, there’s something wrong with me. I’m hideous and horrendous and no one will ever love me ever again.”

You create that meaning due to the way your own brain is wired from all the past experiences that you’ve had. 

All that conditioning from your childhood, your traumas, everything that you’ve learned through society give you a unique way to seeing everything. 

And if your lens is fearful or angry or anxious, then you’ll lay a fearful, angry or anxious meaning over the top of every event.

The third step is that once you create meaning then your thinking will follow.

If you’ve made a negative meaning, you will think a whole lot of negative thoughts.

The fourth step is negative thinking creates negative emotions.

The fifth step is that negative emotions turn into negative behaviour.

And when people feel really rejected and are triggered into a fight, flight, or freeze mode, they’ll likely do really nasty, horrible things, lash out at the person who rejected them, or lash out at themselves.

So you’ve got to understand that step two, the meaning that you create on anything at all that happens in life, that’s up to you. 

That’s fully in your hands. 

You get to decide whether you’re going to continue to create suffering for yourself, or whether you’re going to find the positive upside to the situation.

I know this sounds crazy when your mind has been wired a certain way. When you are convinced that that person did you wrong, it’s hard to see how you have any control over your pain.

Yes, they said no to being with you, but your reaction to their choice is what’s causing you pain. 

Strategy Two

So, to start to make a positive shift I encourage you to eliminate all the words you use regularly to describe yourself and your experience, like “rejected” and “abandoned” and “betrayed” and “used”. 

They’re all victim words. 

And if you keep saying them you just keep reinforcing your belief that you are powerless, you’re a victim, you’re nothing, you’re nobody. 

That is of absolutely no benefit to you whatsoever. 

So, what I invite you to do is come back to just looking at the facts and take emotion out of it.

Back to that dating example. 

“I went on a date with one man. He didn’t call me. We’re not going on a second date.”

That’s it. They are the facts. 

You don’t need to make more of it than it is.

I had a friend who dated 150 men before she found her husband. Now, she obviously had a high self-esteem. And every time she went on that one date and the guy didn’t call her back, she just said, ‘Ok, moving on, moving on. There’s plenty more fish in the sea”.

She was prepared to be rejected 150 times to find that one special guy. 150 times. 

That takes resilience and that takes strength and that takes healthy self-esteem. 

And that’s who we have to become if we want to make positive changes in our lives and relationships.

Don’t just sit back, afraid of what might happen if you reach out, afraid of being rejected again.

Do something different.

Strategy Three

If you have a very strong reaction to being rejected and deep hurt, and you’re still carrying it around and you’re afraid of putting yourself out there personally, professionally, making new friends, or anything like that, that is a sign that you likely have deep, psychological and emotional wounds that need addressing. 

There are gaping wounds inside you that need healing (even if you don’t know what they are). 

And those wounds generally come from your childhood, or from traumatic things in your adulthood, or dysfunctional relationships. 

If they have not been addressed and fully healed and grieved and let go of, they’re going to block you from being able to move forward to create the relationships and connections you desire and deserve.

The bottom line is if you want to change your experience of life, you’re going to have to go deeper and look within yourself to heal for good. 

And you have the power to do that. You absolutely have the power to do that. 

It’s about making that choice for yourself and saying, “I don’t want to continue in my suffering and struggle one day longer. I’m the only one who can change it. I choose freedom (even if I don’t know HOW that can happen yet).”

And when you are doing the deeper work, you must learn how to soothe your own pain in a healthy way. 

Because even when you have healthy self-esteem, you’re still going to take a knock every now and then. 

And it’s up to you to learn to just be with your pain, be okay with it, and know how to take care of it.

That requires your willingness to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

As human beings, we want to avoid pain, don’t we? 

We just want to turn to the pleasure all the time. 

So, we have a little bit of pain and we say, ‘Give me some cake, give me some alcohol, give me something to numb it out.’ 

But that doesn’t heal the pain.

It doesn’t take it away.

It just pushes it down, pushes it down, pushes it down.

And it sits there for the next time that you’re rejected, and it feels even more painful because it’s piled on top of all the other unresolved times you were rejected. 

So, it’s really important to get to that place where you can just be with uncomfortable feelings, soothe yourself, be kind to yourself, let it pass through you and get professional help to deal with underlying, unresolved traumas.

Strategy Four

Don’t try to handle all this stuff on your own. You don’t need to handle it on your own. 

There are people out there who care and understand. You want to find someone who’s willing to listen to what you’re going through, but not feel sorry for you. 

You don’t want anyone who’s feeling sorry for you and reinforces the negative meaning you have given it by saying, ‘Yes, you poor thing. That’s so terrible. He was an asshole”.

They just reinforce that victim thinking you have that has kept you stuck. 

No, you just want someone who has empathy and says, “Yeah, I hear you’re in pain right now. I’m just going to be here for you. I’m not going to try and fix you. I’m not going to try and make it better. I’m not going to participate in the drama of it all. I’m just going to be here for you”.

Strategy Five

If you’ve already been getting help from others, but it’s not enough, it’s important to recognize that your struggle may be because you haven’t been able to clear the issue at the deepest, deepest level. 

Women tend to do a lot of reading and understanding and get the conscious awareness of why they feel the way they feel. 

Then they might go to therapy, say, and they might deal with their childhood and learn to connect with their emotions. 

But then they still don’t feel free or happy. 

They still don’t feel confident or empowered. 

And that’s because there’s another level of healing to go.

The science of epigenetics has proven that we inherit on the pain of our ancestors in our DNA.

So, let’s take the issue of ‘Fear of rejection’. 

Every woman who works with me carries a deep fear of rejection. 

And it’s not just their fear of rejection, it’s their mother’s fear of rejection and her mother’s fear of rejection and her mother’s fear of rejection, all the way back, basically to the dawn of time. 

That’s why it feels so heavy and so painful. 

So, I specialize in helping women to let go of that chronic, deep-rooted issue at its very core, so it loses its charge and is no larger a scary issue in your life.

Suddenly you can think clearly and make much better decisions for yourself and create the life and connections with others you really want.

You also raise your self-esteem naturally, and no longer feel held back by issues such as fear, shame, anger, guilt and hurt.

That transformation happens in just 3-4 sessions over a month and the results are lasting and can be guaranteed.

What it requires from you is a powerful, conscious DECISION that you’re not going to live life ruled by fear anymore, and that you’re going to make that shift to truth and love, put yourself first, love yourself and relax into your natural power.

MOVING FORWARD NOW

If you’re tired of feeling like you are going around in circles with your issues, and are ready for a rapid, personal transformation I invite you to book a Free 20 Minute Discovery Session with me HERE now. 

My Creatrix® Breakthrough program is not for everybody, and I’ll let you know whether I feel like I’m the best person to help you right now. 

Even if you’re thinking, “Oh, this sounds too good to be true” OR “This won’t work for me.” OR “Am I ready?”, I really encourage you to chat with me. 

Get the facts. Decide with the facts, not with emotion and fears and your old belief system. 

I’m on a mission to set a thousand women’s hearts and minds free in my lifetime. 

And I’d really love you to be one of them.

BOOK A DISCOVERY SESSION WITH ME HERE NOW

Love,

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